A Time to Remember

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.