The Wheels on the Bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. : Greybull, Wyoming & the surrounding areas

Greybull Train Switchyard

Lots of clanging and banging. Funny how they only seems to go through at night.

Red Gulch National Back Country Byway

We definitely have entered Pronghorn country

Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite

How it all began. In 1997, a Greybull native with four friends were ending a day exploring and noticed the ripple marks, they stopped and spotted a dinosaur track. They brought the site to the attention of the BLM. Because of their efforts this tremendous site is now being studied and protected.

The tracks are about 167 million years old. Scientists figured this out by dating a volcanic ash layer just above the track bearing surface.

This is the area they call the "Ballroom". Dance steps frozen in time. About 125 track lines and more than 1,100 individual tracks have been identified in this area. The tracks range in size from 3 1/2 inches to 8 inches. Based on the size and position of the tracks, the traveling speed of the dinosaurs can be calculated at around 4 m.p.h.

Where were they going? They may have been scavenging along the beach for food. One hypothesis suggests the track-makers were actually walking into the water.

Rock cairns, or “Sheepherder monuments”

Piles of rocks built by sheepherders in the late 1800's and early 1900's. They served the dual purpose of landmark and pastime for bored sheepherders.

The first thing I said when I saw these was "someone sure had a lot of time on their hands".

Medicine Lodge is home to a 700 foot long sandstone cliff that contains hundreds of Native American petroglyphs and pictographs. Some date to as old as 2,000 years ago. This site has long been known for its petroglyphs and pictographs, but not until 1969 did the full archaeological wealth of the site come to light. In that year, began a series of digs that uncovered a human habitation site that had been continuously occupied for more than 10,000 years.

Homesteaded in 1881 by Byron F. Wickwire, Medicine Lodge was originally a working cattle

ranch. In a get rich quick scheme, Wickwire attempted to drive 80 horses to Klondike gold fields in Canada and sell them to the miners. He arrived with only 1 horse alive. Wickwire was absent for nearly two years and when he finally got home to his ranch in 1898, he discovered his wife had given him up for dead and sold the ranch.

A converted barn serves as the visitors center.

Private Game Bird Farm open to the public

Over looking the large Game Bird Farm

Devil’s Kitchen

Five miles east of Greybull. The colorful eerie rock formations exposed in Devil’s Kitchen are part of the Cloverly Formation, a 125 to 11-million year-old sequences of colorful sediments containing important dinosaur remains.

Shell Falls

Located on Shell Creek, about halfway down Shell Canyon. The falls are 120 feet in height.

The water of Shell Falls, dropping at a rate of 3,600 gallons per second.

Copman's Tomb

From this area you can see outcrops of the Cambrian flathead sandstone, about 550 million years old, resting on 2.9 billion year old Precambrian rocks—some of the oldest rocks on earth.

Beef Trail

Look on the hillside for the thin line of the "Beef Trail", a livestock drive trail. This has been used for many years by domestic cattle and sheep traveling from their winter range in Shell Valley to the summer pastures high in the Bighorn National Forest.

Shell Reservoir

Adelaide Lake

Lower Shell School House

The one-room schoolhouse was built in 1903, and was one of the first buildings in the area that did not use log construction. It was constructed by unknown masons on land donated. Local homesteaders assisted in the construction and quarried rock from the surrounding hills. The school is set in a wild landscape of greasewood overlooking the Shell Creek Valley. The one story building measures approximately 24 feet by 46 feet and a ceiling height is 11.67 feet. The school functioned as a church and as a community meeting place. It was used as a school until the 1950's.

Must get windy up here

Is he sticking his tongue out at us?

Someone call 911

we have a missing cowboy

The structure before you is known as a “splash dam”, part of an old transportation system for the movement of logs and railroad ties from the forest to sawmills in the valley. The process began by dragging or rolling logs into the river bed while water was being stored behind the dam. When conditions were right, the gate was opened and the logs were “flushed” down to small ponds near the flume entrance. The flume, a raised wooden V-shaped structure, then carried the ties, with the help of water, to processing facilities near Dayton, Wyoming. Ties moving down the flume were reported to reach speeds of nearly 80 miles per hour. Parts of the flume were built as early as 1892 by the Starbird and Hall Logging Company. Construction of the “splash dam” occurred around 1905.

Making our way to the back side of the splash dam

Chimney Rock is quite the landmark. This Chugwater sandstone formation

has been a focal point for numerous paintings and photographs over the years.

1916 Historic Hotel Greybull

Dinner in the Speakeasy

Natural Trap Cave

The natural feature — essentially a large hole on ground level leading to a bell-shaped cave — has collected creatures since the ice age in a tragic scene playing over and over. Creatures, going about their normal day-to-day business, fall through the hole and either die on impact at the bottom of the 85-foot drop or survive the fall and starve to death in the void.

The cave, which stays at a crisp 40 degrees on even the hottest summer days, has provided scientists with a well-preserved timeline reaching back into the Pleistocene Epoch of prehistoric life in northwest Wyoming. Large, unfortunate mammals such as mammoth, stilt-legged and cavelline horses, camel, short-faced bears (which weigh more than a ton), bison, cheetahs, American lions, wolves, coyotes, wolverines, weasels and foxes have all met their demise in the cave.

**Interior cave pictures courtesy of the internet.**

Welcome to Montana

Devils Canyon

Looking west

Looking east

Looking north

Looking south

We decided to stay for lunch

and put our feet up

Wild horses still roam freely in the Pryor Mountains outside of Lovell, Wyoming. This herd of horses are special because of their Colonial Spanish American heritage. The horses' history, conformation, and genetics show that they are descended from the horses brought to the New World by the Spanish Conquistadors. This tough little horse, has been present in this rugged mountain area for nearly 200 years.

We stopped by the visitors center and got loaded up on pages and pages of detailed information including names, sex, color, markings, birth year, mother and father.

Pryor Mountain Wild Horse Range comprises of more than 38,000 acres. I thought we would be extremely luck if we could correctly identify any of them, but was willing to give it a try.

We drove over 15 miles and never saw a single horse 😕

The Pryor Mountains contain the 350 million year old Madison Limestone which contains high amounts of calcite, making it ideal for forming caves.

Water drips out of fractures on the cave walls and ceiling, collecting on the cave floor to form ice speleothems. The cave temperatures depend mainly on altitude. The Big Ice Cave is 7,530 feet above sea level and stays approximately 32 degrees year round. Also, the thick limestone is an excellent insulator and keeps cave temperatures generally very constant. This allows ice to stay frozen throughout the year.