Wyoming's Fossil and Buttes at Fossil Butte National Monument.

Bear Lake is situated in a bowl formed by the mountains that ring it, so the only way to leave is going up-hill. Our highway had increasingly tall walls on both sides, as evidenced from this picture taken through a very bug-splattered windshield.

Through that same buggy windshield Denisa takes a picture as we cross the state line into Wyoming.

We're making another roadside stop at another national monument while we're moving down the highway. This is a picture of the butte where most of the good stuff was found at Fossil Butte National Monument.

The visitor center houses a large collection of fossils that were found in the buttes in this area that was once under water. Some of the fossils are quite large, like this complete crocodile that is twice as tall as Mark.

It's amazing to see the detail of the fossils that were perfectly encased in the sandstone layers of the butte. Conditions were perfect to petrify skeletons like this snake before they disintegrated.

They have interesting specimens of all types. In the fossil below, the bigger fish died from choking on a too-big fish he was trying to eat. This unusual fossil captured both of the fish in their deadly pose.

Most of the fossils are under glass and are too fragile to handle. But they have several out in the open, and they encouraged us to touch and feel the detailed bone structure of this fish fossil.

We found that the fossils aren't this pristine when they are first found. All this detail of each tiny bone was hidden in the layers of sandstone when they came into the museum. Using a microscope and tiny tools, this ranger is removing the excess sandstone to uncover the complete fossil. A screen mounted on the wall on the right allowed us to watch his microscopic progress of uncovering the fossil he was working on.

While animals with bones are the easiest to find and preserve, these buttes also house fossils of delicate insects like a dragon fly.

Since Denisa is always taking pictures of wildflowers, it seems she should also take pictures of wildflower fossils at this stop.

It's amazing that these plant fossils can even be as big as this three-foot palm leaf, or as small as the other leaves displayed in this case.

After spending time at the visitor center, we unhitched the car from the motor home and took the scenic drive that took us deeper into the national monument. We soon found a herd of prong horns resting on the hill.

But we really wanted to see a moose. We have searched for a moose all summer, and we were thrilled when a ranger told us that they have a good-sized group that live here in the park. So we took off on foot, hiking through the hills on this blue-sky day.

Mark was doing some serious off-trailing, as we searched through the aspen groves along creeks where moose like to hide in the middle of the day.

We had walked for miles, when Mark spotted movement in an opening between the aspen trees. We could see her quite clearly with our eyes, but she is only a dark dot in the center of the picture.

We'll zoom in a little to prove that dot is the back end of a moose, before she disappeared once again into the trees. It wasn't a great sighting, but at least we can now say we've seen a moose this year.

We also saw evidence that these hills are home to something that can clean everything off a deer skeleton and just leave the bare drum sticks. We were glad not to run into that specimen on our hike today.

After spending most of the day at Fossil Butte National Monument, we were back on the highway for the rest of our drive. As we got close to Green River, Wyoming, the buttes got taller and made a pretty picture against the blue sky. That big rock wall makes the 18-wheeler driving by look mighty small.

This was a scenic drive along the highway through the southwest corner of Wyoming, where we've enjoyed another day of wandering God's wonders through the fossils and buttes in Fossil Butte National Monument.