catching up a bit --wild horse range

I'm not even going to try to get things right in a time line right now.. If Randal wants to.. more power to him lol.. I am doing well remembering how the trip yesterday went!
With that being said... I will attempt to catch you up on a few things we've had going on out here.

There is certainly nothing lacking in the things to do or places to explore dept of Wyoming, and really in our immediate area. After begging a lil Randal finally took me out to the Pryor Mountain Horse Range. IT wasn't that he didn't want to go, but unbeknownst to me, there are roads that are not exactly maintained in Wyoming, so it is always good to know what the conditions of the roads are out here. Part of the horse range is on a road that is suggested to only be driven on by 4 wheel drive vehicles with tough sidewalls.. who would have guessed!!

We finally discovered that there was a road that we could take, so our adventure began. The pryors are a bit of a smaller range, but still mountains.. not to be confused with things a few other states try to pawn off as mountains lol. The wild horse range is in part of the big horn resevior (sp?) For anyone thinking of visiting, it's 5 dollars, unless you have a interagency pass which gets you into any federal land. We drove down all the roads, and discovered a HUGE ..and I do mean HUGE lake! I think its about 70 acres long and really deep. It has just about any fish you could imagine...definetely drool worthy to fishermen! There was also a really nice view, pretty scenery.
We ended up going on a mile long hike a lil farther down the road. IT was the stateline trail.. the border of Montana and Wyoming meet there. It was a desert like trail that warned of rattlesnakes.. which we really didn't need to worry about too much since it wasn't really warm enough out yet. Sierra enjoyed riding on our shoulders for the trail and often tried to get us to giddy-up lol. I didn't take the entire trail, I probably stopped about a quarter mile shy of the end because the landscape wasn't exactly friendly for carrying Sierra. The view was really pretty, overlooking a canyon. Randal went the distance and took a pic of the end of the trail. I missed a lil scenery, but not enough to justify the risk it would have entailed since we didn't have our back pack yet.
From there we went down another turn off.. and were just in complete awe.. There was a huge canyon that just seemed to pop out of no where. We watched a golden eagle soar below. The river was a beautiful shade of green. Had I not saw a wild horse, I wouldn't have felt cheated.
We kept driving, and finally found a single horse. It was much too far away to get a photo of. After a little more driving, we finally found a small herd of about 7 horses. We noticed 2 pregnant mares and made a note to come back a little later in spring to see the foals. We snapped a few pics, although nothing was really close enough to get a great picture. It was great just watching them though.
We kept going and due to needing a pit stop found an old cabin. I briefly peeked at it from a short distance. We decided we'd check it out on another trip.
The road turned to dirt shortly after the cabin turn off, so we turned around since we definetely don't have a 4 wheel drive vehicle. The horses were a bit closer on the way back, and we snapped a few more pics. Still nothing to really write home about.
We stopped at the visitor center on teh way back, and met a presumably lonely ranger who was very talkative. He was very imformative..to teh point of telling a HUGE story when a simple 1 sentence answer would have done the job lol. It was alright though. We got a couple books including a really yummy recipe book. One our our books was free simply for spending more than 25 dollars. It is very imformative about the big horn rec area.

We've been back to the horse range several times now. Both foals are now born, and we've saw as many as about 10 or 11 horses now. It's still just a small herd compared to the 200 or so that roam the pryors. Occassionally they cooperate and get fairly close, but most of the time they don't. We have always saw horses, even if they aren't close enough to do much.
We took another trail to an old ranch site/ town. It was kinda interesting. The down side was when we got home I found a tick on Sierra. Luckily it hadn't attached itself yet.