An Expletive Hurricane

Six states down, three more to go!
This is 23 miles of road
The small silver spec in the distance is a tractor trailer
You have to catch the cowfish with steel fly line and you have to be very careful when taking them off the line, as they can get you with their horns...
It was impossible for me to show the scale of this...

(you have to tilt your head to see this one, by the way)

Wyoming welcomes you. Cool, thanks Wyoming. What a welcome too. Little did we know, southern Wyoming is like a hurricane...a god-awful, exhausting, demoralizing wind-machine that will leave you cursing the heavens all day until your throat is parched and your voice is nearly gone. The harder the hurricane-like winds blew the more expletives I blew right back, as if I could counter the wind by cursing it. It nearly broke us all. There were a few points in the first two days that I just wanted to throw my bike in a ditch, making sure it was irreparably damaged, and hitch a ride to town. Oh yeah, not to mention...Wyoming is completely empty. There's nothing in the part we've been riding through for 4o to 50 miles at a time. When we do finally come to a town...I use the word town very very loosely here...its usually a closed gas station or a closed cafe of some sort. There are a few houses scattered about, very few. Wyoming was awful from Rawlins to Lander. But for some reason, after Lander, everything got a lot more beautiful, and much much calmer with respect to the wind. We went through the Wind River Indian Reservation, which we were told by some Eastbounders from California that it would be dirty and very much like a ghetto. Not at all the truth. There's more ghetto places in the suburbs of Durham than in the town through which we passed. I don't have a clue what those kids were talking about, but they're in for a major shock when they see eastern Kentucky. Fortunately, we escaped the wind around Wind River all day. If the wind did blow, it was pushing us forward instead of ramming us like a freight train like it had been the last two days. Its a good thing too, because we were all pretty exhausted after jousting with the wind all day for two solid days. The scenery got much nicer too. There were some pretty incredible geologic structures. However, we have yet to see anything as incredible as what we will see in a few days until we leave Yellowstone. We're planning on spending a day or two around Jackson and the Grand Tetons, and then Yellowstone!! This is one of the biggest parts of the trip for all of us, and we're getting really really excited about it. I think we're going to see the Tetons in the distance tomorrow from the top of Togwotee Pass. I can't wait...