7-10-2018 Laramie, WY

 Before we leave Rawlins, a couple of things.  First:  You know those 7-feet tall orange poles that they put up along the highways so that the snowplows know where the road is?  And also on the fire hydrants so the firemen can find them in the snow drifts?  Well, they have those on the fences in the Rawlins KOA campground indicating to us that Rawlins might not be the place to go camping in the dead of Winter.  Just sayin.’  Second:  To correct my errata, it was Annie Bruce who poisoned her dad in 1908.  Third:  There are snow fences and more snow fences in Wyoming for hundreds of miles.  I assume this is primarily to keep the snow drifts off the roads.  If you are considering relocating to Wyoming, you may want to take a measure of how many snow fences you’ve driven past.  Fourth:  Wyoming is where the deer and the cantaloupe play.  We’ve seen them all, I’m pretty sure.  The pronghorn (antelope) are twin turbos, the second fastest animal on Planet Earth.  (I don’t know how they know this.  Speed traps with radar guns?  How do they clock fish?)

It was a very short trip to Laramie (98 miles).  Sometimes it’s nice to have a lazy, pleasant, painless drive.  Once settled in, we decided to cruise about town to get a lay of the land.  In old historic downtown Laramie, we found the Elks Lodge so stopped in for a brew.  The bartender, Dannie, invited us to come to the lodge on Saturday morning.  They will be serving a hot breakfast of burritos along with bloody marys and the Elks will have front row seats on 3^rd Street for the Jubilee Days Parade.  Perfect!

Lindy at the Ames Monument 

Rob at the Ames Monument - Oliver Oakes
sculpture near the top

The highest point on the route of the original transcontinental railroad tracks, at an elevation of 8,274 feet, is reached just outside of Laramie and is demarcated by the Ames Monument.  It took 2 years, 1880-1882, to build this monument and the small town of Sherman, ¼ mile away, sprung up and was populated mostly by railroad workers.  The Dale Creek trestle was very high and extremely wobbly in the unforgiving Wyoming winds and trains were slowed to 4 mph to cross the trestle to preclude empty box cars from being blown off into the ravine below.  It was finally decided to reroute the tracks to a safer point 3 miles away and when that happened, Sherman was abandoned and became a ghost town.  Each block of the monument weighs 20 tons and was quarried and pulled on skids to the site of the monument, whose walls at the base are 10 feet thick.  The financiers and major overseers of the transcontinental railroad project were brothers Oakes and Oliver Ames, appointed to the job by Abe Lincoln.  The brothers’ sculptures are featured near the top of the pyramid.  The sculptor was Augustus Saint-Gaudens who famously sculpted the two-sided $20 gold eagle coin which was in circulation until 1933 and is now worth more than $2,000.

Lindy and Abe

Rob and Honest Abe The Dreamer

A few miles back toward Laramie, a bust of Abe Lincoln on a pedestal towers more than 40 feet above the I-80 freeway.  It was Abe who had a burning desire to complete a transcontinental highway (in addition to the railroad) 3,000 miles from New York to San Francisco.  In 1959, the monument was placed originally at the highest point on the Lincoln Highway but when the highway was eventually superseded by the I-80, it was moved to its current location at the highest point on the I-80 at an elevation of 8,640 feet.  The 12 ½ ft. tall 7,000 lb. bust was sculpted by Laramie’s famous Robert Russin, cast in bronze in Mexico City where the climate is fairly stable and transported to Wyoming by rail.  When the paved concrete highway project was activated, Henry Bourne Joy, the President of Lincoln Highway Association and also President of the Packard Car Company, campaigned and succeeded in having the road named the Lincoln Highway.  It was eventually renamed the I-30.  The Lincoln Highway has every bit as much notoriety as Route 66 and the two suffered a similar demise when the interstate freeway systems, initiated by Ike, were completed.

These posts were installed by the
Boy Scouts at every mile along 3,000 miles of
the Lincoln Transcontinental Highway

Just a typical view while driving along in Wyoming