I had planned on going to the University of Wyoming Geological Museum on Day 3; I had not planned the parking aspect of it. As I approached the street address for the museum, all the parking was permit-only. And the signs I encountered did not mention any exception for summer (or weekends, or anything else. To make matters worse, there was construction going on all around the area where I was looking for parking. So, I went back to the hotel, had a refreshing nap, then got on the web to try to get some idea of where to park on the University of Wyoming campus. After several minutes poring over construction maps and the like, I still wasn’t sure where I should park. Besides that, I really felt like I’d rather go back to Vedauwoo and plop down the five bucks to check out what I had skipped on Day 1.

And so I drove the thirty minutes from Laramie to the Turtle Rock Trail head within the Vedauwoo recreation area. And it was upon my arrival that I realized I had left my camera at the hotel. I seriously considered making the one-hour roundtrip to go back for the camera, but reluctantly decided to just use the built-in camera on my low-end phone. About half the pictures came out blurry. The better half is below:

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I didn’t look at any maps before I left. I figured I would do what I have done so often before: just follow the trail and see where it leads. There were many, many forks along the trail, but I only saw one that had any signage – and that was early on. But I feared not, and continued going what I assumed to be west. For a while, I was able to follow the base of the rock formations on my right. Then I reached the end of the formation, and the trail curved away to the left, into a dense aspen forest, from which I couldn’t always see the rock formations. Yet I kept going, believing that if I turned right at each fork, I could easily find my way back. Eventually, the trail I was following petered out on a peninsula in a large beaver pond. This seemed as good a time as any to head back to the car, fully believing I would have no trouble, since I knew not to take any right turns until I got back to the main rock formation. But I did allow myself to make some detours to get around mud and dense vegetation. After quite some time had passed with nothing looking familiar, I finally spotted a sign. Sadly, the sign gave no directions. It just warned me that defacing or removing historical remnants is illegal. Y’see, I had unexpectedly stumbled across the remains of a log cabin. I grabbed a few pics with the phone:

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Discovering the old log cabin was pretty cool, but it was also troubling. I hadn’t seen the warning sign or the cabin on the way in, which meant I was not going back the way I had come. However, I pressed on for probably another quarter mile; at that point I realized the sun had been in front of me for quite some time. It was now 4:00 PM. I had been travelling farther and farther west – AWAY from the car – when I thought I was going east. So, what now? Now that I was paying attention to the direction of the sun, the most obvious thing to do was to reverse direction – to keep the sun at my back and thus be going east. But this would just lead me back to the middle of the beaver pond, where I only had the option of reversing direction. Which would bring me right the Hell back here!

By now, my Parkinson’s Disease (PD) was becoming a problem. I was entering an “off period”. Fatigue and anxiety headed their ugly rears. On top of it all, I was almost out of water. I really didn’t want to keep stumbling through the woods trying to find the route through the maze. But were there any other options? As I stood quietly, I realized there was indeed another option. I could hear the traffic on Interstate 80. All I needed to do was follow that sound to the frontage road next to the interstate, then just walk along the frontage road back to Vedauwoo. But getting to that frontage road was easier said than done.

As I made my way toward the highway sound, I emerged from the forest into a cattle pasture. A small herd of about a dozen cows were standing stupidly around 15 yards from me. They just stared at me for a while, then suddenly ran away. They stopped when they were about 50 yards away, then resumed staring at me. I continued towards the traffic noises and soon a very well-built barbed wire fence blocked my path. I looked south – the fence continued down into the woods. I looked north – another high-quality fence spurred to the east from the north-south fence, so that continuing towards the interstate would stick me in a corner. But it looked like there might be a gate, so I headed up the hill towards the junction of the fences. At this point the cows were back and were slowly approaching me. After a minute of this, they suddenly turned tail and ran away again. They kept repeating this cycle of slowly approaching then suddenly fleeing, for the entire time I was in their pasture. Given my experience with cattle (would you like to see my resume?), I know this is pretty standard behavior, but it provided some much-needed comic relief at the time.

Unhappily for me, when I got to the fence junction, I discovered there was no gate. At this point, I noticed a disused gravel road on the other side of the north-south fence. Despite its seeming to have been abandoned for quite awhile, I realized that it had to have been connected to another road at some time in the past. So, I needed to get past that fence and walk that road. When I was a young’n, I climbed over or went through barbed wire fences hundreds of times. Looking at this fence, I saw that the young me would have just bent over at the waist and carefully squeezed between two of the barbed wires. But my PD has left me with a poor sense of balance. Add to that the uneven terrain on either side of the fence, and I just couldn’t make myself try to go through it. What about climbing over the fence? Again, there was the balance issue, but there was also PD fatigue, which had me feeling like I didn’t have the strength to lift a 200-pound Cedric over a fence. At this point, I used the last of my water to take my next regularly scheduled dose of Levodopa. I then noticed an extra fence post at the junction of the two fences – and I figured holding onto posts with both hands would provide enough stability to make it over. And thus, I VERY slowly and carefully climbed over the fence, safely arriving on the other side. Yay, me!

I followed the abandoned road to its end, at a rancher’s very long driveway, which I followed to the frontage road. With the interstate directly in front of me, I still wasn’t entirely sure which way to go, because nothing looked familiar. Eventually, I noticed a sign advising interstate travelers that the Vedauwoo exit was ahead. This raised the question, how damn far west did I go? I was on the right road going the right direction, but would I be able to make it all the way back with no water and PD fatigue? Luckily, the aforementioned regularly scheduled dose of Levodopa kicked in along the way, furiously stabbing the Hell out of the fatigue. Soon, I was jumping around like a mountain goat on meth. OK, not really. But I felt much better, and I made it back to my rental car with no further problems, though it seemed to take forever.

So now here I sit, with Google Earth at my disposal. I have identified the points where I emerged from the forest, where I climbed over the fence, and where I had parked. The walk back to the car from the point of emergence was 3.8 miles. The straight-line distance from the car to the emergence point is 1.6 miles, but I didn’t do anything close to a straight line to get there – I’d guess that I walked a bare minimum of 3.2 miles on the trails before emerging into the pasture. This means that I walked at least seven miles, which is probably my longest hike in over a decade. And all of this was at an elevation of over 8,000 feet above sea level. Well, I’m impressed! What impressive feats will Day 4 bring? Well, none. But I went to another cool place. Stay tuned!