Saturday, April 30, 2011 - Sinclair WY
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Camped, Dugway Ramp Recreation Area, Sinclair WY, April 30, 2011
Snow
It snowed last night in Meeker CO and it's been a gray day with snow squalls off and on all day. Like yesterday, today took me much farther than I had hoped. I was on the lookout for a place to boondock all day and didn't see anything promising until I got here. This will do nicely for the night. It's not hugely picturesque but there is a river right outside my door. We like that.
North Platte River
Rand McNally tells me that's the North Platte River out there. That gives me an idea. I've been planning to follow the North Platte and Platte rivers across southern Nebraska on my way east. Why not start here and follow it as it makes its way up through Casper and around the bend to the east?
Birds
There are birds here. And a cliff with nests on it. I think I'll stay tomorrow, see what's here, get a few pictures, then head out Monday.
Night camp
Site 5 - Dugway Ramp Recreation Area, Sinclair WY
- Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - no service
- Locate Dugway Ramp Recreation Area on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
A Voyage and a Harbor
The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.