Wind River Canyon

Some of the gorgeous scenery in Wind River Canyon...

Wyoming’s newest Scenic Byway, the Wind River Canyon, has 34 miles of unspoiled scenic views, geologic field exploration opportunities, abundant wild life, float trips, canyon fishing, boat launching facilities and state park public camping. For hundreds of years, Native Americans, explorers, and pioneers used this scenic canyon as a corridor to travel between central and northwest Wyoming.

We started at the southern entrance in the town of Shoshoni where the Byway goes north through Wind River Canyon boasting spectacular high rock walls with more than 2,500 feet of vertical relief from the Wind River to the mountain ridgetops. Some of the oldest rock formations in the world, dating back to the Precambrian period, (more that 2.9 billion years ago) are visible right from the highway with their black and pink cliffs spectacularly protruding.

As you continue north through the Wind River Indian Reservation, you may spot some of the many wildlife species that inhabit the area such as mule deer, bighorn sheep, elk, marmots and minks. In 1995, 43 big horn sheep were “transplanted” along the canyon rim after being transported in horse trailers from Dubois, WY. The sheep were then loaded onto flatcars by Burlington-Northern Railroad, traveled 7 miles on the railroad tracks and released in the canyon. Today the estimated number of bighorn sheep is over 100. A road sign said that 80% of the bighorn sheep in Wyoming reside in this canyon. But, we didn't see any today.

The Wind River flows north through the canyon and then becomes the Bighorn River named by explorers for the big horn sheep. The site where the name changes is known as the Wedding of the Waters. Joe and I stopped there to check it out and decided we are going to have to plan and save for a float down the river. Maybe we'll do it for our anniversary next year.

Landowners along the Wind River Canyon Scenic Byway include private landowners, (I'd love to have a weekend cabin here), the tribes on the Wind River Indian Reservation, the State of Wyoming (Boysen State Park, Hot Springs State Park and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department boat launch area at Wedding of the Waters), the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The Wind River Canyon Scenic Byway ends just north of Thermopolis, home of the world’s largest mineral hot springs in Hot Springs State Park. We are going to explore Thermopolis another weekend...just not enough time to do everything in one day.

Asmus Boysen, the man for whom Boysen Reservoir, Boysen peak, and Boysen State Park were named was born in Copenhagen, Denmark around 1868. As a youngster, he worked his passage to America where he settled in Illinois.

While on a mining exploration trip to Wyoming around the turn of the century Boysen and his party visited the Wind River Canyon. Boysen visioned a dam that could furnish electrical power to the surrounding mines. The water could be used for irrigation. On July 1, 1899 he secured a grazing lease for 78,000 acres from the Shoshone and Arapaho Indians.

On March 3, 1905 he exchanged his lease to clear title of 640 acres at the mouth of the Wind River Canyon where he built his dam in 1908. It was estimated it would cost $160,000 to build. It ended up costing $2,000,000. It was unique in that the 710 K W power plant operated until 1925 when the floods filled up the turbines with silt and when the reservoir threatened to flood the railroad, part of the dam was removed. The rest of the dam was removed in 1948. Part of the original dam can be seen on the cliff wall adjacent to the tunnels at the north end of the Lower Wind River Canyon.

On the drive through the canyon, we were surprised when we had to go through not one tunnel, but three in a row! Never have I done that before.

This is an entrance through another tunnel for the trains. It looks real stable, doesn't it? NOT! Look at the timbers holding it together. The second picture shows where the train tunnel is on the left hand side.As we were driving through the canyon, we saw these teepees along the river bank out in the middle of nowhere. (Either Eastern Shoshone or Northern Arapahoe who share the reservation. We are planning on visiting the reservation later on).More great and unusual scenery...and look how old this area is.

This was on a pullout on the canyon road. I thought it might be an actual grave until I checked him out on the internet. Read on...

THERMOPOLIS, Wyoming, September 14, 1950 – The Rev. Dr. William Barrow Pugh of Philadelphia, an official of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, was killed this afternoon in a truck-automobile collision.

Dr. Pugh was a passenger in a car driven by the Rev. Joseph Lininger of Cheyenne. The State Highway Patrol said the car collided with a trailer truck ten miles south of here on United States Highway 20. The truck was going north and car south, headed for Cheyenne. Earlier today Dr. Pugh had been a speaker at a meeting of the Wyoming Synod of the church at Powell.

Last year, Dr. Pugh traveled some 8,000 miles by plane, visiting European Presbyterian churches.
Arrangements for a shipment of the body to Philadelphia have not been competed. Dr Pugh, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of American since 1938, was a leader in both his own church and in world field of religion.

For his services to the Government in World War II Dr. Pugh received the Medal of Merit of the War Department in 1947. The award was presented to him by the Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson at the Pentagon Building in Washington. The citation noted that as chairman on Army and Navy Chaplains Dr Pugh had “exerted tremendous influence upon the leaders of thirty Protestant dominations.”

In the fall and summer of 1943 he toured the war theaters in Europe, Africa and South America as a representative of all non-Roman Catholic and non-Jewish churches of this country. As in a similar journey made in 1945, Dr Pugh addressed troops, counseled chaplains and endeavored to help military commands to strengthen the soldiers’ morale.

In addition to his chairmanship of the general commission in the last war, he served the National Council of the Service Man’s Christian League. In the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. he was secretary of the Committee on Army and Navy Chaplains and of the Committee n Camp and Church Activities.

Dr. Pugh served as chaplain of the Twenty-Eighth Division in France from 1918 to 1919 and took part in the Oise-Aisne, Meuse-Argonne and Ypres-Lys battles. For more than 20 years he was chaplain of the 111th Infantry, Pennsylvania National Guard.