"We need the tonic of wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, un-surveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander." Walden by Henry David Thoreau

From that amazing abandoned church, in that solitary ghost town, we pedaled our bikes over 200 yards of dirt road until we hit Route 287 southbound toward Rawlins.

"You got to love these headwinds," David said.

"Yeah, like a severe case of hemorrhoids," I said.

Not too much to see on that road south toward Muddy Gap.  Just prairie, antelope and abandoned ranches.  We pushed through rough country.  

Those headwinds made the journey more of a grind than a pleasure.  But when you're out there in the middle of nowhere, it's not like you enjoy many choices.  It's a bust your butt day in the saddle. 

Off to our right, the Bridger-Teton National Forest featured 6,000-foot mountain peaks.  But beyond that, only abandoned ranches, wrecked cars and trailer homes dotted the land. 

That's one thing that continually irritates me that humans set their dwellings upon the land, and then, when they vacate them, they let them rot for another million years before they degrade back into the soil.

 "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." Foreword, A Sand County Almanac.

"Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free." Foreword, A Sand County Almanac.

When you're out there in the middle of Wyoming, you're really 'out there' in the middle of the world. It could be South America or Asia or Siberia.  Riding a bicycle through the natural world renders perspective not touched upon by the car or train traveler, and even less, by those flying in airplanes.  There's nothing intimate about the planet while traveling through the air.  There's not much intimacy in a car, either.  And worse, driving around in a land yacht!  I find it terribly unfortunate for those people who drive monster motorhomes, burning up incredible amounts of energy, only to insulate themselves from Nature for their indolent comfort.  Damnedest irony I've ever witnessed!  All for what?  Comfort!  What does it get them?  Pot bellies, heart attacks and a few pictures taken from their comfy captain's chairs high above the ground.

That kind of artificial comfort I can do without.  We are animals that need to sweat, that need to push our muscles, that need to expand our minds by pressing into the wind, by hiking up that mountain, by swimming that river, by extending ourselves into the wilderness under our own power.

Jack London said it best, "He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars."  ? Jack London, The Call of the Wild

We reached Muddy Gap with a long coast down a hill.  We stopped at the gas station for a water fill-up before taking a right turn toward Rawlins. 

Not far down the road, we stopped in Fort Washakie where the Indian maiden Sacagawea with her child, guided Lewis & Clark toward the Pacific, and in fact, saved the entire "Corps of Discovery" from certain death at the hands of her Indian chief brother, who wanted to kill them.  History records many such 'lucky' events or 'unlucky' events that turned on a single day or person or happening along life's journey.  Think of Custer's Last Stand.  Bad day for him and a good day for the Indians.  But in the end, a bad day for all Native Americans.

You hear about it in different mythologies such as your "Achilles Heel" where Achilles died because his heel wasn't dipped into the water to protect him because his mother held him by his heel that stayed out of the water.  His enemy shot him in the heel, thus killing him.  It's now an idiom for all of us in this age to use for our failings.

We continued across reasonably flat prairie until a long climb into Rawlins found us grinding our way toward the sky.  Once at the top, we pedaled along jagged mesas until a long hill took us into that old cowboy town.  The buildings marked back to the 1880's.  In many ways, I miss what we used to enjoy as to architecture.  Today's skyscrapers bore me to death, and they represent our sterile cities vacant of anything having to do with Nature.

John Muir talked about those cities being inane to humanity's natural needs.   He said, "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity."

"Well sir," said David. "I'm ready for a motel, hot bath and a cold beer."

"Right behind you," I said, as we coasted into Rawlins.

"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. 

"This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight." 
? Jack London, The Call of the Wild

David and Frosty's Excellent Adventure: Bicycling the Continental Divide, Summer 2019