Thursday

"Back to school" is just around the corner! Where did the summer go? Time flies when you are having fun! Here's some of my summer's highlights!
Theo came to visit!
We floated the Missouri River for 4 days (42 miles)!
Ed came up and floated with us for Father's Day
My daily project!
We met up with my BFF Ellen and her hubby Derek and camped at Woodbine!
Needlework for Theo and Teyla


Going to the beautiful wedding in the Big Horns!

More scraping!
Sister Rubye came for a week!
Seeing Aunt Goldie, sister Jolene and Mellissa and her family :o)
Doing up veggies given to me from my neighbor's garden!

Watching my kitties sleep!


Baking!

Ultimate family reunion!
There was lots of rafting I didn't get pictures of (maybe Santa will bring me a waterproof camera!) and enjoying my family. It was a great summer and I'm grateful to all that shared it with me!

Today

I get to spend 90 minutes at the dentist office enduring that gawd awful drilling and gettinga root canal!

Still scrapingggggggggggggggggggggggggggg..........

I'm On The...Top of the World Lookin'...

Our goal this weekend was to go camping...get away, go someplace different and not focus on water, but on land. So we headed southwest to a Forest Service road that lead to the Pryor Mountains. Here's a sign explaining the history . I thought it was pretty interesting!
We drove and drove on an gravely road for quite some time. The view looked a lot like this and the clouds were promising some interesting weather!
We had already been driving at least 10 miles on this gravel road before we came up to this sign...
(for you country folk, have you ever seen a "loose gravel" sign on a dirt road before? lol)
We drove through the Bowlers Flats, here's a cool old homestead (and a zillion cows).
We drove through a few mils on the Crow Indian Reservation. Here's what their roads look like (they needed some loose gravel!). The view was becoming more and more interesting!
We started through the Emerald Forest. That's what I call any road with scenery only pine trees and not much beyond that. Driving became slow, about 3 miles per hour as the road up the mountain became very rocky and when you're truck is loaded to the gills, ya gotta go slow to keep the tires from going flat! The trees went away and we got to the top of Dry Head Vista and look at the view coming up!
Here are the controversial wild horses. (There are TOO many of them and in this particular area, there are certain unique species of grass and other plants that are in danger from the horses.)
Anyway, they were cool to see, but not as cool as where we found our camping spot! We could see EVERYWHERE!
But it was pretty dang cold and windy up on top and believe it or not, it was snowing! Yes! White stuff in August! Here's how we kept warm while setting up the camper!
Snow squall coming in...
It got down to 31 degrees F, and when I got out of the camper Sunday morning, I could see my breath! But my breath was taken as I looked out over the land with the beautiful blue sky. Notice the landscape, rocks and grasses with a few flowers.
Still a few clouds. It's odd being as high or higher than some of them!
Looking east, you can vaguely see a gray spot, that is Yellowtail Reservoir.
More land...


(Do ya think he's close enough to the edge?)
My watch told me the elevation...8652ft above sea level and you could sure feel it! If you've ever been at this elevation, you understand how cool it is, if not, then you should!

Some of the flowers were just starting to open! I've never seen these before. In REAL life, they are very dark, and the buds were almost black, I still need to look up what they are.

Living at this elevation is tough, just look at how this poor tree has been affected by it! (and you can clearly see why we went 3mph! Those sharp rocks could easily puncture tires if you go very fast, so we stuck 'er in four wheel drive and crept along.
The mountains are full of caves and caverns. Some are warm, some are not. We stopped off at Ice Cave picnic area where the Forest Service developed a trail down to it.


My camera flash wasn't bright enough to get a good pic deep into the cave, but here is the entrance. Water drips in it and it forms an ice floor. You cans see ice stalagmites and can here the echo of the drip drip dripping. (It looks like water, but it is ice.)
Driving on, getting lower in elevation, the terrain is filled with sagebrush and the red you see is Indian Paintbrush, Wyoming's state flower.
And things become more lush. We want to go and camp on the top of THAT rim next time!
The drive home was peaceful. I love the red-rock rims. Makes us yearn for the desert!
And finally, back to the highway, civilizations. Autumn is coming, we saw a few leaves starting to turn and below you see the farmer in the dust cloud swathing his field of wheat.
Next weekend, I think we'll go back up to the Beartooth Range (where we took my sister, Rubye, and do some serious hiking and camping! School starts in a week. The house is mostly scraped. Time to start thinking about making pumpkin pie and planning for the holidays!