I’ve died and gone to Ucross

Today the deeply funny Karen Russell and I set out to find the tepee rings we’ve been hearing about ever since we got to Ucross. Not the sportiest of girls, we set out in pink and green when really hunting season dictates florescent orange fashion. We had no map, not enough film and only one bottle of water between us, but we’d both got work done this morning and it was such a beautiful afternoon that we figured even if we didn’t find the tepee rings we’d still come out ahead.

Wyoming is not you’re your typical Vermont rolling green hill and fall foliage pretty. It’s not Rocky Mountain majestic either. “It’s ugly sister beautiful,” Karen Russell TM. The hills around Ucross are washed out wind worn treeless protuberances so adamantly whatever it is that they are that who could argue with them? Today’s brilliant blue skies contained just enough cloud in just the right places to make the sun turn the hills on and off at whim. Grey-green, yellow-beige, red tinges, black shadows, and then back to bright again. It helped that we didn’t know where we were going. We really had to look around. Could be this road? I think we missed it. Maybe it’s that one? Does that look like a dome house to you? Left here? Is this a road? I see what you mean. Don’t go toward the granite pile, that’s all I know. That’s gravel, not granite. Oh.

One thing I should mention is that all this time we’re yakking our heads off we were 4100 feet above sea level and heading further and further up hill. Putting the foot in foothills, if you know what I mean. We didn’t follow the directions we’d been given so much as let ourselves be lead along by the view. Through an assiduous process of stopping to catch our breath a lot and taking lots of photos, somehow we found the tepee rings. Are these tepee rings? I don’t know. They look pretty primordial. These are totally rings. How could they not be? If I had a tepee I’d put it right here.

We sat down cross-legged, not in deer dung, and watched deer crossing the Clear Creek far below. Patches of sunlight came and went over eerily flat patches of far off ranch lands punctuated by inexplicably regularly spaced pitch-black cattle. It’s a good thing there’re more cows than people in Wyoming – if those were people standing around in the fields down there it would be pretty weird.

On the way back down to the ranch we recognized a deer print sunk deep in the truck path mud and boy did we get excited. We tracked something! By four fifteen the hills behind us were cold, the hills in front of us were gold, and the almost-harvest-moon hung low and lace-white in the steel-blue sky.
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