The Guernsey Tracks

They're sweet these days, as long as they stay in their banks. When and if they flood, they're a pain. Most do flood come spring, unless they're damned up somewhere and disciplined into behaving. Outside of a now-and-then outpouring, they're a darling feature of our landscapes, home to ducks and geese, and life for deer and coons and a whole gallery of wildlife living nearby. But, that's it.

Their placid nature makes it easy to forget that rivers--like this one, the Laramie in southeast Wyoming--were once upon a time our interstate highways. If you were traveling a great distance, say, across the country, you never left a river valley because the livestock, not to mention the wife and kids, couldn't go without what rivers had in abundance, water.

Today, come summer, some residents of Guernsey, Wyoming, get out old tubes and ride the Laramie, I'm guessing, although right now you'd suffer. In the fall, maybe kids shoot ducks out here--or try. Snowmobiles likely find the Laramie a fun winter highway. Cattlemen may well grab what they can of the Laramie for center-point irrigation, but mostly, like this old bridge--constructed in 1875-- the Laramie's real life is, as they say, pretty much o'er.

Forty years before the bridge, hundreds of thousands of emigrants left their tracks here literally, on the Oregon Trail. The Guernsey Tracks are like none other, trust me. They predate the Civil War. They're worn into the soft sandstone because those hundreds of thousands of people knew well that you couldn't be haphazard about time or place if you were going to make it all the way west. You needed to stay near water on a trail that would keep you from the most horrendous climbs through the Rockies. If you were going to Oregon or Utah or California, you stayed with the rivers and made tracks where others already had.

These tracks are there own kind of funnel. Everyone had pass to this way, what seemed to the Lakota an almost endless train of Conestoga wagons and Mormon handcarts, more white people than they'd ever seen or even imagined, extremely concerning. Taking a path anywhere north or south would have been a heckuva gamble. My guess is that everyone remembered this place; yet today, this place remembers everyone.

There are other spots where wheel ruts still tell the story, but if you're anywhere near Guernsey, Wyoming, you really should pass by. After all, 175 years ago--no foolin'--hundreds of thousands did.



As you can tell, in stone, 175 years later.