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You get in your car in St Lake City, Utah, and start driving north towards Jackson Hole, Wyoming more than 200 miles away. You don’t know what to expect. You don’t know what you will see. You have never taken this trip in your life.
You look at your map to see you are driving into what appears to be nothingness. No towns, not even tiny ones. To your left is Idaho but nothing you recognize there either.
A genuine adventure into the unknown.
Passing the Welcome to Wyoming sign you notice the speed limit signs say 80. This is rare; you’re used to 70, 65, and 55 signs. The 80 tells you this is a long highway with few drivers.
You notice there are only a few cars and a lot fewer people anywhere. But there are mountains and more mountains, an endless onslaught, some 100 feet then 200 and higher, olive green in color along with tan and sandy colors and some an orangish pink clay. Some form curves at the top. Others looked like they were the handiwork of sculptures with bulbous and carved-out jagged shapes.
Everywhere you look they are there: left, right, far off over the horizon mountains for hundreds of miles. You didn’t think a place like this existed. You wonder who lives there. The answer is no one. There are no signs for an Exxon, a Dunkin Donuts, or hotels.
You see what looks like outdoor grid facilities with smoke billowing northward out of steel pipes. Those you learn are coal manufacturing facilities. Wyoming is a major producer of coal used to power electrical facilities across America. You notice five fences some 200 feet long strew some 100 feet from the highway and find out those are to block the snow from whipping across the ground and covering the highway making it unusable.
You are driving on a road that is susceptible to massive snow storms and feel glad it’s not snow season. Even in these more convenient times, there is a slight uneasiness being out there on this most unusual and utterly desolate highway ruled by the Mountain Kings. You come to an intersection where there is nothing, then accelerate to a new road filled with nothing. You see you have 72 miles of this new nothing, and start to wish for something familiar like a car or a house. You think for a second maybe you’ll run out of gas and then what? Will anyone find you? Has anyone been on this road before? Have you driven into Mount Oblivion?
You then see a mountain unlike all the others because it has five colors as if someone painted them: olive, rust, sandy white, and more nuanced Crayola shades.
You think you’ve seen it all. Then the highway slopes downward and curves like a snake and you’re surrounded by even bigger mountains with more of a forest green tint. Off in the distance ahead, you notice more mountains topped with white snow. How close those seem yet so far away. Where are you going, you ask yourself? What have we here?
Jackson Hole, Wyoming with the Grand Teton Mountain in the background. You have made it back to people – not a lot but some — after hours having felt in some other world. You never in your life have made this journey. You could have decades ago but never did until today.
You don’t know what you expected but it wasn’t coal mining, snow fences, and an unpopulated and unrelenting cavalcade of mountains. A trip like no other; a place like no other. You are forever changed. The world and life are more awesome.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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