It's another travel day, as we head out of Lander, Wyoming (at 5,358 feet in elevation) deeper into the Windy River Mountains. We're traveling 106 miles, and that will take us on a two-hour journey past red rock cliffs,
and lots of sage brush. We think it is interesting that the pasture in the picture below is one solid sea of sage brush, while the wide bar ditch is filled with tall green prairie grass. For the cattle fenced into that pasture, it is really true that the grass is always greener on the other side of that fence.
As we headed up in elevation, we started getting some great mountain views.
We are heading to Falls Campground, another of those lovely Forest Service campgrounds high in the mountains. But this one is unusual, in that it has electrical hookups in the A-loop sites. It's also a first-come-first-served place, and we were holding our breath as we entered, hoping to find an opening. We actually found several that would fit us in the A-loop, including one of the rare 50-amp sites.
So we are glad to be camping at over 8,000 feet in elevation with electricity, so we don't have to worry about running our generator and keeping our aging house batteries charged. What a great place to be! This is definitely the up-side to Falls Campground.
Walking out of our shaded camp site into the clearing behind us, we have a great view of the interesting shapes of the peaks in the Wind River Mountains.
Before we rave about it too much, is there anything wrong with this great campground? With all these "up-falls," are there any "down-falls"? Well, even with our cell phone booster, we have no cell phone service here. So to make phone calls, send texts, or do any trip planning or blogging, we must leave the motor home and head up the mountain. One option is this little rise off the highway that the camp host calls "telephone hill."
Another option is seven miles away at Togwotee Pass. At 9,659 feet in elevation, it has some great views but also some great mosquitoes unless the wind is really blowing. While Denisa was blogging, Mark was climbing the steep hill to the ridge for even better views.
The Continental Divide Trail also crosses the pass, so we again found this trail that we have seen many times before in our mountain hiking.
Mark took a picture of Denisa and the pickup, down in the parking lot where warning signs are posted. We noticed other large portable lighted signs along this stretch of highway, warning of bear activity along this road. It seems that Bear #863 ("Felicia") and her two cubs have been spending time along Highway 26. That has caused traffic jams and accidents on this major highway artery. Rangers warn that when people exit their vehicles to get a better look, the mother bear may charge or attack. So just within the last few days, they have had to start hazing protocols to discourage the bears from coming to the highway. Hazing includes non-injurious methods like loud noise devices or paintballs to scare the bears away. Since we live on this road, we're a little sad that Felicia and her cubs are hiding out in the woods now.
But our favorite spot to get a phone signal is at Windy River Lake. With its mountain vistas, it really is a pleasant place to do some computer work.
The wildflowers are also in bloom here, and the lupines appear to be at their peak right now.
One evening we took a walk as far as we could get around the lake. While the trees closest to Denisa are green, we are finding that well over half of the evergreen trees in the Shoshone National Forest are dead.
The Falls Campground is in Shoshone National Forest, and this area is criss-crossed with gravel forest service roads. Now that Mark has a 4-wheel-drive pickup, he is going up logging roads and seeing the piles of logs ready to be loaded. Denisa was just glad that we didn't meet any of those logging trucks on the narrow winding roads.
He also drove the road that connects Brooks Lake with Windy River Lake. The sign didn't seem all that inviting to his passenger.
It's hard to take a picture of a car-sized pot hole on a dirt road, but that is what we were dealing with on this 4-mile stretch of road.
If you meet anyone coming the other direction, we're really not sure what would happen. It's a single lane, and the mountain goes straight up and straight down on either side. So there's no place to pull over. It looks like one vehicle would have to back up. This road didn't seem all that inviting to Mark's passenger. So perhaps Denisa would say that having all these narrow rutted dirt roads in close proximity is a down-fall of Falls Campground.
We want to make it clear that Falls Campground was accurately named. We took the hike that starts near our camp site, and leads to an overlook over the falls. That's a nice thing about our stay here--easy access to a pleasant hike.
The down-fall would be when some over-zealous hikers try to make it into a longer loop hike. We even found some blue-diamond trail markers on the trees to follow on this hike.
The downfall would be when we discovered that those are the marking for a snowmobile trail. Snowmobiles obviously don't worry about marshy meadows filled with hungry mosquitoes, or downed trees that will be covered with snow in the winter. It was a very uncomfortable hike by the time we made this loop back to the campground.
One "down-fall" to our campground is the 26-mile drive to get to the nearest grocery store. We are literally in the middle of nowhere. The "up-fall" is that we've seen more wildlife here than any other campground. We had a group of elk on the road just a quarter mile away. We had this young deer buck right in the campground when we came home one evening.
Another evening, we saw ears sticking out of the tall brush next to the campground.
When we got a better look, we realized that there was another little pair of ears sticking out beside mom.
The mother moose led that baby into shorter brush, and we got our first look at him . . .
and then the sibling. We have two little moose living by our campground!
What fun to have so many moose sightings right by our campground!
We've been watching from the pickup, but when they disappeared in the tree line right by our campground, Denisa got out to see if she could get a better picture.
No babies in sight, but she got this picture of the mother--no zoom needed.
We'd been watching from the pickup because the mosquitoes are thick here--another down-fall of Falls Campground. Denisa risked multiple mosquito bites to get that last picture. So even if Falls Campground has a few down-falls, they are far out-weighed by the up-falls of this beautifully cool place to be in the middle of summer. With a 50-amp electric connection, we signed up for two days, then renewed for another two days, and then another . . . We definitely like it here at Falls Campground!
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