August 21st - Eclipse Day
(Day 5 Rawlins to Riverton, WY.)
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| (c) Google |
Walmart Supercenters are supposed to be 24 hour affairs, but I guess Riverton's didn’t get the memo. It opened around 7 am and I wandered in to get a Subway coffee, which took a little over an hour as they hadn’t really staffed for the occasion and there were two (2) people in front of me. The person nearest me was incandescent with rage over the slowness of the procedure. I mentioned I only wanted a coffee, ha ha and she snapped, “Some of us have to eat!” which I thought was a bit rich given that she was in a Walmart which probably housed five thousand pounds of food and she was unlikely to starve. The guy slowly making her sandwich asked me what I wanted. (As they do, to keep a production line running.) I ordered only a coffee as promised, which the guy slowly prepared for me before he finished her sandwich. Cue apoplexy on the lady in front of me. She left before he’d finished preparing her sandwich, so I guess she didn’t need to eat that badly.
By the time I got back to the RV and the row of tents, STB was squinting through his monocular and bemoaning the light haze that was over Riverton. There were a few clouds, and just a little dust, but it wasn’t good enough so we left our (not very hard won) place at the Walmart and set off down the 26/20 towards Casper, a road that pretty much followed the path of totality.
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| Raspberry DeLight farms |
Beside the main road was a sort of lane, asphalted and well-kept. If this had been a city we’d have called it a bike lane, but I have no idea what its purpose is in the countryside. We stopped outside Raspberry deLight Farms on the lane that paralleled the road and set up our little observation post. We set out two folding chairs, two monoculars, snackerels, snackeroonies, choccies, sandwiches, those Indian treats made out of sev, Cheesy Wotsits, this morning’s Subway coffee, horrible bottled “iced” coffee, Diet Coke, Eclipse glasses, sunglasses, glasses and sunscreen.
The beginning of the eclipse took an hour or more. During this time, through a filter, you can see the sun beginning to undertake the moon, so a crescent is sliced out of its yellow glow. The dark crescent grows larger over time. For most of this time, this makes little difference on the ground. It may be a little cooler; but that may be your imagination. The light of the sky seems a little dimmer, maybe more blue, but again that could be your imagination. It’s quite easy to see how pre-scientific communities missed the earlier signs and would become horribly aware just as the sky goes dark blue, the stars begin to shine, the birds shut up in confusion and it becomes noticeably cold. Then, pretty quickly, the sun disappears. It’s exactly as if someone had bought a stick-on black dot from the aforementioned dollar store and stuck it over the sun. It’s gone, apart from the few lights, Baily’s Beads, showing through the valleys on the moon, a last diamond-ring flash, and then you can only see the corona, a blazing halo around the total blackness. That only lasts a couple of minutes, and then there’s another diamond-ring flash and the sun begins to haul itself from behind the moon. One thing the websites telling you what to expect don’t seem to mention is that as the sun disappears, everybody cheers as though it had scored a touchdown. The whole process is so eerie and unreal that I’m guessing a cheer hasn’t been the normal reaction to a total eclipse through the millennia.
In the event, I was so caught up watching the sun disappear through the solar filters that I watched the pitch black nothing for a good few seconds until STB nudged me to look at it with bare eyes. It was spectacular.
As the various websites had promised, my very first thought afterwards was to go book a trip to catch the next total solar eclipse, which will be April 8th, 2024.
Everyone and their dogs packed up, and so did we, and headed off down the road, not back to Riverton, but onwards to Casper on the 20/26. This road is also designated as the Sand Creek Massacre Trail, another delightful name from history, marking the murder of Cheyenne and Arapaho civilians by the US Volunteer Cavalry. We passed another trail marker, that for the Bridger Road/Waltman Crossing. The same rest stop explained the importance of sage. And boy had we seen a lot of sage, so it’s nice that someone explained it to us.
We were almost on the road to the farm, last in a line of several other vehicles that were parked on the ‘lane’ going up the road towards Riverton. Across the farm road, on the continuation of the lane, a German family in an RV were also setting up. We saw a lot of Germans on this trip. Who knew Wyoming was so famous in Germany?
A dog ran past.
The owner ran past. “He went that way,” I said pointing into the farmland.
“I wish one of you had fucking stopped him instead of sitting there,” he said, then turned back and went to his vehicle.
A few minutes later, someone else came past. “Have you seen a dog?”
“Yes, he went into the farmland.”
“I thought so. I’m trying to find him before it gets dark. Poor thing. And the owner’s upset.”
“He is. I think he blamed us. It was going pretty fast, though.”
“He went down the whole line of people and blamed everybody. It’s his dog. I have mine tied up. He should have tied his up.”
At that moment a car came out of the farm with a dog panting out of its window, stopped and disgorged the dog on to the lane, right next to his fretting owner. Everyone cheered, except the owner, who seemed to be in a bit of a mood.
It turns out it’s not possible to photograph an eclipse with a cellphone camera, and since I’d forgotten to learn how to use the DSLR (and it refused to take such an oddly lit picture on auto), I don’t have any good pictures of the eclipse. But that’s not a problem as hundreds of professionals took great pictures and I had enjoyed the opportunity to look at it rather than fiddle with cameras.
A dog ran past.
The owner ran past. “He went that way,” I said pointing into the farmland.
“I wish one of you had fucking stopped him instead of sitting there,” he said, then turned back and went to his vehicle.
A few minutes later, someone else came past. “Have you seen a dog?”
“Yes, he went into the farmland.”
“I thought so. I’m trying to find him before it gets dark. Poor thing. And the owner’s upset.”
“He is. I think he blamed us. It was going pretty fast, though.”
“He went down the whole line of people and blamed everybody. It’s his dog. I have mine tied up. He should have tied his up.”
At that moment a car came out of the farm with a dog panting out of its window, stopped and disgorged the dog on to the lane, right next to his fretting owner. Everyone cheered, except the owner, who seemed to be in a bit of a mood.
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| view from the road near Raspberry DeLight farms |
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| view from the road near Raspberry DeLight farms |
It turns out it’s not possible to photograph an eclipse with a cellphone camera, and since I’d forgotten to learn how to use the DSLR (and it refused to take such an oddly lit picture on auto), I don’t have any good pictures of the eclipse. But that’s not a problem as hundreds of professionals took great pictures and I had enjoyed the opportunity to look at it rather than fiddle with cameras.
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| Early in the eclipse |
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| Cellphones are not really optimized for eclipses |
The beginning of the eclipse took an hour or more. During this time, through a filter, you can see the sun beginning to undertake the moon, so a crescent is sliced out of its yellow glow. The dark crescent grows larger over time. For most of this time, this makes little difference on the ground. It may be a little cooler; but that may be your imagination. The light of the sky seems a little dimmer, maybe more blue, but again that could be your imagination. It’s quite easy to see how pre-scientific communities missed the earlier signs and would become horribly aware just as the sky goes dark blue, the stars begin to shine, the birds shut up in confusion and it becomes noticeably cold. Then, pretty quickly, the sun disappears. It’s exactly as if someone had bought a stick-on black dot from the aforementioned dollar store and stuck it over the sun. It’s gone, apart from the few lights, Baily’s Beads, showing through the valleys on the moon, a last diamond-ring flash, and then you can only see the corona, a blazing halo around the total blackness. That only lasts a couple of minutes, and then there’s another diamond-ring flash and the sun begins to haul itself from behind the moon. One thing the websites telling you what to expect don’t seem to mention is that as the sun disappears, everybody cheers as though it had scored a touchdown. The whole process is so eerie and unreal that I’m guessing a cheer hasn’t been the normal reaction to a total eclipse through the millennia.
In the event, I was so caught up watching the sun disappear through the solar filters that I watched the pitch black nothing for a good few seconds until STB nudged me to look at it with bare eyes. It was spectacular.
As the various websites had promised, my very first thought afterwards was to go book a trip to catch the next total solar eclipse, which will be April 8th, 2024.
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| Vehicles around us for the eclipse |
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| Sand Creek Massacre Trail |
Everyone and their dogs packed up, and so did we, and headed off down the road, not back to Riverton, but onwards to Casper on the 20/26. This road is also designated as the Sand Creek Massacre Trail, another delightful name from history, marking the murder of Cheyenne and Arapaho civilians by the US Volunteer Cavalry. We passed another trail marker, that for the Bridger Road/Waltman Crossing. The same rest stop explained the importance of sage. And boy had we seen a lot of sage, so it’s nice that someone explained it to us.
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| Bridger Crossing |
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| Importance of Sage |
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| Pathfinder Ranch |
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| Devil's Gate |
Pic: Devil’s Gate. The gate is the gap in the mountain visible directly in front of the road. It’s a gorge of the Sweetwater River that, like Split Rock, formed a landmark for the Oregon and Mormon Trails.
We ate in Casper, at Chopstix Asian Bistro, which despite an unpromising modern name offered a very nice mostly-authentic Chinese cuisine. I might have naively assumed that away from the city a Chinese restaurant would be a festival of maraschino cherries, pineapple, sugar and pupu platters, but this was really good. Far above the California median “Asian” restaurant, anyway.
Casper itself I found a little underwhelming, with its dead-flat surroundings of gas storage facilities and extraction machine rentals for petroleum, gas and goodness knows what, all in gigantic sheds.
We ate in Casper, at Chopstix Asian Bistro, which despite an unpromising modern name offered a very nice mostly-authentic Chinese cuisine. I might have naively assumed that away from the city a Chinese restaurant would be a festival of maraschino cherries, pineapple, sugar and pupu platters, but this was really good. Far above the California median “Asian” restaurant, anyway.
Casper itself I found a little underwhelming, with its dead-flat surroundings of gas storage facilities and extraction machine rentals for petroleum, gas and goodness knows what, all in gigantic sheds.
And its road names like Poison Spider Road.
My phone was of no use for this part of the journey, as even the GPS had given up. I know that we took the 220/287 through Alcova and Muddy Gap (putting us back near Sweetwater again). We crossed the Continental Divide for around the fifth time on this leg of the journey. We got caught in our first traffic jam as the 287 from the Riverton side joined our road. At first we turned back, then thought about it a bit, got on the road and got through the jam in half an hour or so. Only a couple of miles (and one more Continental Divide crossing) later, we hit another jam. This time we decided the road was gridlocked all the way from Bairol to Rawlins.
This was exactly why we’d brought an RV. We pulled off the road into an asphalted field access…not road, exactly as the gate had been wired shut, but a 30-yard piece of metaled surface. (The terms and conditions of our RV rental rendered grass driving streng verboten, presumably even with the rear differential lock thingy engaged.) One lady was already parked up in her RV at the top and we chatted a while. Seeing us both there, a number of other cars and RVs pulled off into the area and went about the business of settling in. The police arrived shortly afterwards, but it seemed to be because we marked the tail end of the traffic jam and they wanted to stay somewhere with their lights flashing to slow down oncoming traffic, rather than any major need to move us on…anyway, where would we go? The police moved away as the tail of the traffic moved away.
Eventually, it got dark and STB called me outside to look at the Milky Way. With no lights for literally hundreds of miles around, it was glowing like something out of a movie. It almost looks alive.
I got up early enough at 6:30 but all our Companions of the Road had already departed. The traffic jam was gone.
My phone was of no use for this part of the journey, as even the GPS had given up. I know that we took the 220/287 through Alcova and Muddy Gap (putting us back near Sweetwater again). We crossed the Continental Divide for around the fifth time on this leg of the journey. We got caught in our first traffic jam as the 287 from the Riverton side joined our road. At first we turned back, then thought about it a bit, got on the road and got through the jam in half an hour or so. Only a couple of miles (and one more Continental Divide crossing) later, we hit another jam. This time we decided the road was gridlocked all the way from Bairol to Rawlins.
This was exactly why we’d brought an RV. We pulled off the road into an asphalted field access…not road, exactly as the gate had been wired shut, but a 30-yard piece of metaled surface. (The terms and conditions of our RV rental rendered grass driving streng verboten, presumably even with the rear differential lock thingy engaged.) One lady was already parked up in her RV at the top and we chatted a while. Seeing us both there, a number of other cars and RVs pulled off into the area and went about the business of settling in. The police arrived shortly afterwards, but it seemed to be because we marked the tail end of the traffic jam and they wanted to stay somewhere with their lights flashing to slow down oncoming traffic, rather than any major need to move us on…anyway, where would we go? The police moved away as the tail of the traffic moved away.
Eventually, it got dark and STB called me outside to look at the Milky Way. With no lights for literally hundreds of miles around, it was glowing like something out of a movie. It almost looks alive.
I got up early enough at 6:30 but all our Companions of the Road had already departed. The traffic jam was gone.
2 comments:
Love the middle of the road pics. Which was more spectacular, the eclipse or the Milky Way? And I'd have never guessed that sage was feminine.
KD signed in from work again.
The Milky Way was spectacular, but you can drive to open country and see it most nights, so the eclipse wins by virtue of its rarity.
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