Voyage of the Returned Peace Corps: Through the Madness of Nebraska

Quality warning: All photos taken from a moving vehicle. 

I am leaving Wyoming and moving home to Georgia.  Not a moment too soon as internet service to the apartment ran out and I discovered that a neighbor possesses a wireless network charmingly named gRapeVan.  So away!  And Onward!  Through Wyoming, which may have been nice back in the Mesozoic when it was tropical and underwater.  But from the present, 2 views of Mount Elk, not as inspiring as Hokusai.    

Also, some piles of rock that just sit on the landscape in the part of the state that's on the right side of mountains to foster green-ness.

Into Nebraska.  According to the people I text on a regular basis, no one in the states really has a good grasp of where Nebraska is, or any of the states more or less in the middle for that matter.  Because we're Americans.  Americans only learn geography from war, and we have yet to invade Nebraska, though we probably should.  Because all the sameness, sameness, sameness, monotonous.  With quaint farmhouses hiding spider-obsessed cultists behind quaint curtains, guarded by cows.  

Here probably lurk Cthulhu cultists.  

I am clinging to my reason by a thread, but I can feel the spiders, crawling behind my eyelids.  Ia, Cthulhu!  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

In Which I Go Outside

This is becoming an ever more rare event, because outside is often nowhere one wants to be.  Particularly because in the Wild West (TM), the state will conveniently tell you how likely you are to die in a fire, which right now, not so much, because it's getting to be hypothermia weather.  Why do people live here? 

Nonetheless, we drove to Utah (because in America, you can just get in a car and drive places) to see the Flaming Gorge part of the Green River.  But first, and after many signs cautioning us to 'ware the falling rocks (what is this?  Legend of Zelda?) we arrived at Sheep Creek, a scenic place with very scenic scenery close to the gorge.

I like trees.

The scenic Sheep Creek, with red berries.  

My camera, disobligingly, declined to focus on the foreground. 

Sheep Bay!  Rather spectacular, really.  

Overlooking Sheep Bay, there were helpful boards explaining the view, adorned with a totally effective means of protest.  I am convinced that the proposed course of action is completely doable.  Except not. 

On to the Flaming Gorge to see the Green River!  Significantly less pixelated than my previous experience would suggest.

Maybe pixelation is a weather thing and this was a high resolution day.

Nonetheless, with preconceptions shattered, we forged on.  Past weird twisted and dead trees.

Past shrubs with bloody leaves!

Past ooky green gunk that dries onto rocks and invites carrion crawlers to attack.  My sister and her oh-so-swanky Longbow of Speed and +2 arrows scorns carrion crawlers.

The technical term for this is "ooky stuff"

Past more rocks, and rocks with lizards, and rocks with caves, and rocks with waterfalls, and rocks with orange lichen.  

That was when we decided we'd had about enough outdoor adventure for the day and returned to our climate controlled metal shell and drove back home to Wyoming through a spectacular sunset.

The sun turns the rocks red.  

Only there is shadow under this red rock. 

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock.)

I will accept snow if it is on high mountains

Today, I am back inside.  I intend to stay here for awhile.  

My Mountains

These are the mountains that I grew up with:

These are the Appalachians.  Their kami are good kami.¹

These are the White Mountains, mere plateaus next to the Rocky Mountains farther west, but still big enough to loom over the valley:

Their kami are fierce kami.

Winter came this morning:

but melted away by afternoon.

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1 kami is usually translated as "god," but can mean anything from improbably anthropomorphic superbeings to the vaguest of genius loci.