A close encounter

Into Wyoming once again and to the small town of Sheridan. It possibly is better looking now that a layer of snow has been laid overnight upon this Western town. The brick fronted buildings have an air of the cowboy about them and the bronze sculptures dotted around not only attest to this but also to various things related to Wyoming life. The main sculpture being the onlooking life-size cowboy standing admiring the main street.


Flakes of snow continue to fall as the icy wind goes through us, it's time to get in the warm car and move on.
It's a slushy ride on the freeway as the unexpected snow has caught out the snow ploughs. After a while it begins to clear up until the snow all but disappears a couple of hours down the road.

The next port of call is a national monument named Devil's Tower. It's shown on the Wyoming state plates so we've seen it in a smaller version for some time.
It's basically a square-ish rock that sticks up from the surrounding flat ground seemingly out of nowhere. Up close it's even odder. Geologists say that the earth around the rock was up to a mile higher than it is today and the result we now see is a once buried lava chamber. The rock looks like it's pushing up into the air and isn't what I expected at all.
It's also one of the only places on earth that has this type of rock formation. The rock has cracked into hexagonal columns, some can be seen on the floor near us, as water has seeped through the cracks. It's no wonder Steven Spielberg chose this rock as part of the location for the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We take a walk around the base of the rock seeing it in different lights and angles, the sun is shining but the path in places is still covered in thick slippery ice.
On the edge if this park are thousands of prairie dogs. These look a bit like a rat that stand on their back feet. They live in dug passageways and always seem to be on the look out for something. It's amazing how none of them seem to run out onto the adjacent road but they don't.
We drive on from the bucking bronco and odd rock state of Wyoming to a state I knew absolutely zero about, South Dakota. Not before passing yet more oddly familiar named towns along the way.