Ten Sleeps

Some of the most mystical places we go to we don’t even realize we’re there until the magic has already set in deep…… I found Ten Sleep when researching climbing areas across the country while prepping for our trip.  Ten Sleep caught my eye because of well, just the shear massive amount of climbing with summer temperatures averaging in mid 70s as well as the fantastic description from an old Climbing Magazine:

“Hippies and hunters and cowboys and climbers—these strange bedfellows mingle in relative harmony in north-central Wyoming’s Ten Sleep, ‘a little western town with a big western heart.’”

After tearing across the northern Wyoming desert and pushing our weighted Mazda up into yet another Rocky Mountain range, none of us really knew where we were going to end up.  We did know that the patience tank was on empty.

After selling ones house and hopping into a mini van with your entire family, which includes a moody teenager, a babbling 20 month old and squid learning to squirm, with the intention of traveling in that small vehicle for 10 months, a person experiences many  emotions in rapid succession over the first month.  The dominant emotion to this point had been a giddy sort of excitement.  Also there was the effervescent feeling of endless possibility.  There is the thought of “finally….Finally…we did it.”  And then there was POOP, GRRR, AAAA, HELP, but always the opportunity to become more adept at being together returns and with nothing but time on our hands we are reminded that patience is the easiest way.

So it was here in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains that we found ourselves after hiking up and over the Tetons, driving late, getting up early, learning about dinosaurs and then driving more.  We were all in a knot that was getting tighter when we realized we were literally following a massive rainbow.  As the knot seemed to tighten more we did not know to what extent the rainbow was effecting us until we turned onto this Forest Road off of the main road pulling us towards the end of the Rainbow.  To the right there stood a moose happily eating. We drove further, our minds loosened, we pushed up hill to the edge of this magical meadow.  We parked, got out and there we were bathing in this giant pot of gold.  Each of us filtering out of the car became contentedly and quietly absorbed by our new home for hours…our was it days?  I think it was a total of 6 days that we spent there before peeling ourselves away.

We slept, read, walked, climbed, wrote, ate, climbed some more and slept some more.  Finally we remembered we were on this big adventure and we were not yet ready to disappear into the great wide open.  Not yet… onward…