My
blog title this week not only has to do with memories made on our trip, but
memories of times past. On Dean's 70th birthday he decided to add Fishing the Sweetwater River to his Bucket List, so the boys and I decided to help him fulfill that wish. Memories of living at Crooks Gap led Dean to add camping at that spot and finding Balanced Rocks as addenda to the trip. So this past Sunday afternoon we headed out with Evanston, WY as our first night's stay.
Jeff
was our driver and he opted to take the Weber Canyon route to Evanston—so beautiful.
I had forgotten how awesome and unique Devil’s Slide is. Sorry I didn’t get a
picture of it. We arrived in Evanston about 8:30 PM and had our first RV Park
experience. The park, itself, was nice. The little trailer hitched to our
bumper was not that great. However, we were novices at this method of travel
and we knew we needed to check out the way the appliances worked—or didn’t.
The
refrigerator didn’t. The 2-burner gas stove didn’t, at least the automatic
igniter didn’t. The Diehl men are intrepid and fearless, so despite warnings
not to use a match to light the gas burners, they did so, with the fire
extinguisher at the ready (we didn’t get the chance to see if it worked, thank
you Lord). Since we were at a regular campground, we had electricity and city water so we filled up there—and filled
and filled and overflowed—making a mud hole by the next morning. Remember we
are novice campers!
Then
it was time to prepare for bed. The back end of the trailer became a tent
supposedly a queen size mattress (that would be for a real SMALL queen). I had
though the “boys” could sleep together on that so only brought adequate bedding
for two beds—theirs and ours. One son is 6 feet tall and neither of them are
small. Fortunately,??? the table can be lowered and the seat and back cushions
made into a bed. The only problem is that the cushions that fit on the lowered
table top were at least inch lower than the cushion on both ends. I had stuck
in an inflatable sleeping mat thinking that one of the boys might choose to
sleep outside at some point. The mat was the right height to make up the
difference between the cushion heights.
So we had adequate bed surfaces, but not enough covers and nights in the
desert, even in town, can get pretty chilly. Each night we got wiser about ways to stay warm.
The
next morning, we were grateful to start our morning with coffee, even if it was
instant. However, we discovered that getting seated around the table was a real
trick. It had to be scooted from side to side in order to get in and sit. That
meant the least active person needed to sit on the inside. The word “rotate”
soon became a byword as the passageway between appliances in our “galley
kitchen” area was about two feet. If you have ever watched the British comedy, “Keeping
Up Appearances” and saw the show where Richard and Hyacinth have moved into
this castle tuned condo, renting the top floor apartment with no room to turn
around in the kitchen, that would correspond to our situation.
We
changed our route since we got the news that Dean’s sister and her husband were
planning to meet us Monday night at Crrok's Gap. In order to rendezvous there,
we would need to go through Rawlins rather than the more mountainous route Jeff
had initially planned.
We
were able to visit Helen Jones, a family/church friend in Rawlins who had
taught in Bairoil, an oil camp where the Diehls and Jones had lived in the 50's
and 60’s and was part of the Baptist
church that 3 generations of Diehls had attended during various sojourns in
Rawlins. It was a short visit but full
of great memories recalled by Dean and well as our boys since “Mrs. Jones” was
a favorite Sunday School teacher of theirs.
We
arrived in Jeffrey City about 5:30 PM and toured its three streets hoping for a
gas station and cell coverage. No luck on either count. Dean got his picture
taken in front of Home on the Range, the place where he and his 3 sisters were
pictured on the same fence back in 1953 when Home on the Range and Charley’s
Bar were the only buildings in the area (Jeffrey City did not exist as such
until the uranium mines came on the scene.) The uranium boom has busted and oil
isn’t nearly the producer it once was, so Jeffrey City is now a modern ghost
town with a “new” high school building that saw very little use and a
population that has shrunk from 5,000 to about 50. A sad, but realistic picture
of what can happen in a boom and bust situation.
Dean
spied the road out of town that led to Crook’s Gap, the Sinclair Oil camp where his family moved to from Marcelline, MO.
He knew the general area where the houses had once been, but it took a while to
finally decide where the Diehl house had been located. We found a fairly flat place to park our
trailer, but after shoveling several cow pies and batting at flies, Brian
decided we needed to find a better spot. We did so, unhitched the trailer,
leveled it and actually got the refrigerator to work—yippee!!
With
no cell coverage, we had no idea where Jo and TC were (with the pot of
spaghetti TC said they were bringing) and it was 7 PM and we were hungry. Chef
Jeff cooked the frozen chicken breasts we had brought which were now thoroughly
thawed along with a potato, onion and carrots. He had brought lemons and spices
for seasoning so we had gourmet chow for supper during our first “real” night
of camping.
Jo
and TC came rolling in over the sagebrush (more like thumping and bumping, as
they were in Jo’s little red VW) about 9 PM. They had eaten in Riverton so the
spaghetti had to wait for another day. They were going to be tent camping which
was a true sportsmanly challenge to put up as a wind storm had blown in. Crrok’s
Gap is exactly that—a valley between some mountainous hills, so there was
nothing much to break the wind flow. Fortunately, the storm blew itself on to Nebraska or
Colorado.
The
windstorm brought MUCH cooler evening temperatures and the Diehls mostly froze.
Dean couldn’t plug in his sleep machine because we didn’t rent a generator, so
he ended up sleeping sitting up wrapped up in his sweat shirt. To add insult to
injury, we had purchased an air mattress in Evanston in hopes of making our
sleeping pad more bearable. As has been my experience with ALL air mattresses on
camping trips—it went flat! (Ask me about our trek to the bottom of Grand
Canyon six years ago).
The next morning we e
couldn’t plug in the coffeepot but we could light the gas burners (incorrectly)
so we had coffee and bacon and eggs—again thanks to Jeff. Jo and the boys went
out sleuthing and came back with some lavender colored glass fragments and a
little plastic figure –we figured Dean and his friends might have played
cowboys and Indians with it. However, Dean said he was 11 when they moved to Crooks
and he only remembers playing with cars.
One
of the natural wonders of the Crooks Gap landscape is called Balanced Rocks, so
Dean set off leading the VW in search of these rocks. After a while, he started
saying, “I don’t remember it taking this long to get there from where we used
to live.” That was worrisome as was the fact that the road/track was really
poor traveling, especially for a little VW. We stopped once after a
particularly bumpy spot, but Jo soldiered on. We stopped again when she quit
moving. She had made it over a sagebrush clump but hidden in the brush was a
rock. The rock punched a hole in the VW’s oil pan.
In
the meantime, Dean explored the hill we were on a little further and discovered
the Balanced Rocks must have become unbalanced because there weren’t any
balancing on that hill.
Stay tuned for next week's installment to see if Dean ever found Balanced Rocks OR was able to dip his fishing line into the Sweetwater River.
