Medicine Wheel, Big Horn Mts, WY

Early this morning, I drove through the northern Big Horn Mountains.

                               

My main destination was the Medicine Wheel; there are others in the US, but this one is the biggest & best known. Eighty-one Native American tribes consider it to be a sacred place, & tribal members come here for ceremonies. The short hike up was rugged but beautiful.


The site has been fenced off except for those with permits to conduct ceremonies there. The ceremonies are marked by tying fabric moments on the fence. The wheel is a bit hard to make out in the photo, but it's composed of rocks laid out in the shape of a wheel & spokes. I got carried away taking photos of many of the mementoes, so I'll add a bonus post with those pics along with a few of flowers & animals.


The smoke from the Canadian wildflowers was settling on the floor of the Big Horn Basin. There are many interesting rock formations here.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

boat tour to wildlife & glaciers

Image
I can now die a happy woman! The boat trip was fantastic in every way. (Major Marine 8.5 hour tour on Orca Song from Seward to the Northwestern Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park) We saw SO MUCH wildlife, including several rare sightings & behaviors.  Here is the first of 3 sea otters we saw.  This is the sea cave & rocks where we got very close to see sea stars & jelly fish - many, many of each.  A dozen Dall's porpoises swam & played near our boat for a while. They swam so fast that they were hard to photograph, but we saw each one many times. This group of Stellar's sea lions is typical of what one sees in Alaska, that is no babies, just a group of adults hauled up on shore.   Though humpback whales are often seen in this area, they are mostly seen alone or perhaps a mom & baby. Not only did we see a whole pod, we saw them engage in what is called bubble net feeding. Many pods around the world do not engage in this type of feeding. There are...
Read more

Alaska!

Image
Top-of-the-World Highway This road runs from Dawson City in the Yukon into Alaska. The 110-mile drive today was a dirt road with the exception of a 9-mile long paved stretch in the middle - seems odd to have a short paved stretch in the middle of a long dirt highway.  arrived in Alaska! I've wanted to come to Alaska since I was 14. My day trip to Skagway last week was to a small corner of Alaska, but that corner isn't connected to this main part of the state, so this feels like my official arrival.                                         Chicken, Alaska Apparently, the original residents here wanted to name the town after a chicken-like bird called a ptarmigan. However, they couldn't agree on how to spell that, so they compromised on "Chicken". It became a small town when the Pedro Dredge (now a National Historic Site) was set up here to dig for gold. Besides a few crazy tourists who...
Read more

The ALCAN & Cassiar

Image
Most of today's drive was on the section of the ALCAN east of Whitehorse, which I'd driven on the way out, so no scenery pics.  There are still some gas pumps in Canada that don't take credit cards. It amazes me that you pump first & then go in to pay.  The Stewart-Cassiar Highway is even more desolate than the ALCAN, so everyone turning south onto the Cassiar stops at the same gas station to fill up. While pumping gas there, a heavy duty truck camper pulled up next to me. Even more than the rig, the map on the side caught my eye. This guy has been on the road for 15 years & been to all of the places on this map - amazing! I got so distracted by the map that I forgot to take a pic of the rig. He bought the truck in Australia with another camper on it. That camper fell apart in South America, so he took the truck to the Netherlands where they built him a custom expedition-style rig. He's now back "home" in northwestern Canada for a while. A short distan...
Read more