The drive from Casper to Thermopolis takes two hours, the first eighty minutes of which are pretty boring. The final forty minutes through the Wind River Canyon are about as beautiful as any drive I’ve ever taken. Once you get to Shoshoni you turn north and drive along a lake which turns into the Bighorn River. Then you enter a canyon of multicolored rocks and flowers with the road right up against the river. The ride back south was even more beautiful. I could spend all day driving back and forth through that canyon in a convertible and never get tired of it.
Like Casper, Thermopolis is also a funny little place. The population is about 3,500 but it has a world-class dinosaur museum (the Wyoming Dinosaur Center or WDC), an amphitheater and the world's largest natural mineral hot springs. There's a tannery called Merlin's Hide Out. They sell all sorts of cool stuff like this:
Thermopolis also has one pretty cool restaurant with a brewery. But it also has this building with some uncool masonry (I hope it was built before the 1930s) and a Ron Paul sign.
Despite its libertarian streak, Thermopolis felt much younger, newer, and hopeful than Casper. I saw no cowboy hats or big belt buckles (although I did see a guy in boots with spurs and he was wearing them genuinely with no irony, unlike TR during his stint in the West Village). Most people were decked out in well-worn technical outdoor gear but with the swagger of a bow hunter, not a granola. The only time I smelled weed on the whole trip was by the men’s room at the One Eyed Buffalo (the site of my only real meal in Thermopolis—they make a hell of a prime rib). If Thermopolis was a singer it would be Sturgill Simpson.
At some point we had lunch. zson’s diet consists essentially of pizza, mac and cheese, and chicken tenders/nuggets so we had a fair number of meals at McDonald’s because (a) Wyoming pizza probably is not right and (b) there aren’t a ton of dining options in towns of 3,500 people. Thermopolis has a McDonald’s but more importantly it’s right next door to Ava’s Silver and Rock Shop. Much like Marls circa 1994, the shop’s outwardly dumpy appearance hides some amazing stuff inside. The owners (Eddie and Ava) are a husband and wife team of grumpy elderly geologists. Eddie discovered the Avaceratops (he named it after Ava) and he’s happy to tell the story. He’s also happy to tell you how the people running the Wyoming Dinosaur Center don’t know what they’re doing (apparently he and Ava helped get the dig sites started and were dismissed from their post sometime thereafter—Eddie is passionately pissed about this and Ava interrupted him at one point to merely say “It’s a sore point” and then got back to cleaning fossils). And man, do they have fossils. Cheap fossils! You can buy fossil fish for $10 to $20 and they’re beautifully perfect and decently big. They also have Spinosaurus teeth, shark teeth (for a dollar each), all sorts of plants (fifty cents a pop) and fish, bones from various sauropods, and an amazing lower jaw from a Mososaur. My biggest regret from the trip is not going back to their store on the way out of town to buy a fossil or two.
Then we checked into our hotel and learned that the air conditioning in our room was broken. I can say with great authority that there's nothing sadder than a Lasko box fan in your window on a 90 degree day. It was like freshman year in Monroe all over again. So we went over to Star Plunge where we swam in the hot springs, and this happened:
We played Bananagrams for a bit and had dinner, then we went back to Star Plunge to swim in the hot spring until it closed at 9 pm (once you pay you can leave and come back anytime that day). Then we slept a sweaty sleep.
Stay tuned for further installments later this week.
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