Kaycee, Wyoming is much like Ten Sleep.
Small. (About 300 in population, but with many outlying ranches, like Ten Sleep)
One K-12 school. (though theirs is brand new and Ten Sleep School is old)
Elevation. (4600′ or so)
Mainly a ranching community. (more impact from oil and gas and coal in Kaycee)
Many families from here have relatives over there… or is it the other way around??
They had Chris LeDoux… (I’m so jealous) (I had many of his albums/cds though!)
Ten Sleep has Jalan Crossland (and I’m proud, Jalan, really! I have all of your cds!)
But mostly…
uhhh…
mostly…
Kaycee is the geological mirror of Ten Sleep on the east side of the Big Horn Mountains.
You get there by going down The Slip.
Now “Back in the Day” (as my children say…)
There was no way you’d take a car down The Slip.
It was slow travel in a high clearance pickup!
But times have changed…
and my Durango just flew on this “highway”…
It looks like our mountain…
rocks…
grass…
Scenic artsy-fartsy trees’n’rocks…
Look at this road! Wow… it’s purdy!
And then you see it through the trees…
Just the tiniest glimpse…
but it’s there…
It’s RED DIRT.
Chugwaters.
Though over here the wall it creates is longer than ours…
maybe…
it seems like it…
I didn’t measure it.
There it is.
The Slip Road going over the Red Wall.
Ever heard of the Hole-in-the-Wall?
As in Butch and Sundance???
Geez, folks, where ya been?
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, two low lifes made infamous in the movies, did hang out here, though Big Nose George was probably more famous in his day…
A “hole” used to mean valley…
Like Jackson Hole, Wyoming…
So the Hole in the Wall was just that…
a valley by the Red Wall.
Sure, many of the entrances were narrow holes or trails…
easily defended by a single person…
but it’s not quite the reality…
The actual “Hole-in-the-Wall” area is south of here a few miles…
Looking north.
Looking south.
Whatever the legends…
Whatever the stories…
I like Kaycee.
It’s almost like home.
Unfortunately…
it isn’t…
and I had to drive back home into the sunset…
up The Slip…
and down into my own Red Dirt.
Have you heard?
