As a part of our SMU experience, we were challenged to be adventurous this summer. I absolutely LOVE adventure, but that doesn't necessarily mean I've done everything and I don't have fears :-) Recently, my husband, Brandon, and I took our fourth trip out West to Wyoming (we love it there!). We spent most of our time exploring in the Big Horn Mountains with our 4-wheeler. We were able to see some excellent sights; driving upwards of 70 miles a day!
One of our day trips took us to the ghost town of Kirwin - A very neat place! This town was once a busy gold and copper mining town, home of close to 300 people in the late 1800's and early 1900's. We knew that in order to get to Kirwin, we would have to do some water crossings - I am not much of a water person - so this had me a little...nervous. With the winter that we all had around the nation, we knew that Wyoming had a lot of snow, meaning also that they had a lot of snow melt for the spring and summer. This did not help to make me more at ease about having to take our 4-wheeler through rushing river crossings!
We gave it our all and trudged through the river crossings - and made it across without being carried downriver! It was actually quite exhilerating going through each crossing and I found myself having a lot of fun - it had pushed my fear for the water aside so I could thoroughly enjoy the experience :-)
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| Kirwin, Wyoming |
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| Although not the area of the river we crossed (this is much lower) this was only accessible on foot and there was a bridge to cross :-) |
Another adventurous experience that also had me feeling the nerves a bit was riding on top of 10-15 feet of snow at about 10,000 feet in the Big Horn Mountains! Despite the sunny days, the snow was sticking around and was quite hard so it was holding us up - I was a little skeptical at first, but once I made my way around a few times, I was having a blast!
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| That's me! Taking the 4-wheeler out on the snow :-) |
Our trips always lead us on some great adventures - I feel that I am constantly testing my "adventure skills" wherever we go! One of our final adventures - more like totally nervewrecking moments that Brandon and I took part in, was exploring the Tongue River Cave near Dayton, Wyoming. We had read about this public access cave in one of our Wyoming hiking guides and thought it would be fun to check it out, so we packed up a lunch and donned our headlamps and the camera, of course, for another exciting adventure.
The hike to the cave is a quick 3/4 mile, with a quick elevation gain, so it was pretty steep. Once at the entrance of the cave, it was very hard to ignore (as we were warned about in the book) the spray paint graffiti on the rocks, both in and outside of the cave. We explored approximately one mile into (and who knows how far down) the cave! The pitch blackness was very intense - after all we are usually led through caves with a tour guide and multiple lights! There was quite a bit of extremely fine dust and eventually water, which made for some slippery walking. Simply put, I was terrified as we began to explore the cave, but once we made it back to the entrance, I was so glad we had done it and we are looking forward to going back and explore it some more!
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| Here I am in the cave - we used the flash on the camera and it really lit up the space; but don't let that fool you, it was completely pitch black in here without the lights! Notice, the spray paint... |
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| Here is Brandon, and although it's a little blurry, I wanted to show more of the darkness of the cave - I had my headlamp shining on him as I took this photo :-) |
Needless to say, we had a wonderful time once again in Wyoming! We are already planning out our next trip West to see what other adventures we can plan for next summer!
