Wyoming in Autumn
Medicine Bow Mountains, WY
Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote that “In Wyoming people talk as though winter were ‘out there’ even now, lurking not in time but in space, being prepared somewhere in a shop or factory, awaiting only final assembly and shipment to the proper address.” When I went through Wyoming in September of 2022, winter felt like a kaiju, Godzilla marching southward to blanket Tokyo in frigid atomic breath.
When I told locals I was passing through for a little September camping before heading way down south, where snow is as rare as hen’s teeth, I was told that I’d picked a good time to get the hell out of Wyoming before winter arrived. At the gas pumps, I spotted a local camping rig and convinced the owners to let me follow them deep into the Medicine Bow Range toward the good camping areas. The aspens were in their full golden splendor, the air was cool, not yet cold. I found a decent camping spot and, after setting up, took a walk into the forest. Some bear sign, but nothing recent. Lots of quiet. Winter hadn’t gotten here just yet.
It rained that night, so I continued my journey. I wound south through high, golden Leadville, then kept on down into New Mexico before dusk, slept near an extinct volcano cone, then took the long slog through west Texas into southern Arkansas, where nostalgia lay as deep as the coming snow would in Wyoming. The Ouachita Mountains were where my children and I had spent much time camping and adventuring. Those old two-lane blacktops remembered more than I was ready for.
