The Snowy Range

8/19/09
The next morning I packed up and drove back up the Scenic Byway and got the next to the last spot at Sugarloaf Campground, a front row seat for the spectacular Snowy Range. I ate another breakfast while fighting off emboldened chipmunks, took a very slow stroll around one of the lakes, then retired to my tent for tea and a nap. The nap felt really good and so did the sun beating on my back as I sat outside afterwards. It felt curative, even if it probably wasn't.

The campground was on a little wooded knoll in the midst of an expansive meadow nearly 11,000‘ high. Wavy and rolling, with many lakes and countless tarns, scattered park-like trees and krumholtz, plus lots and lots of talus and boulders. Directly in front of me rose the Snowy Range, not all that high, - the relief was maybe 1000-1500’ - but the steep-faced walls rose straight out of the ground. The peaks were not pinnacled but they weren't rounded either, they were somewhat swervy. It was not like any kind of mountain range I’d seen before. The closest analogy I could see would be the granite domes of Yosemite, though the Snowies are not as smooth or rounded or exfoliated.

They’re shinier though. Like the walls of Yosemite Valley, the Snowies are comprised primarily of granite, over 2.5 billion-year-old granite in fact. But this granite is surfaced by 2 billion-year old quartzite and schist, and it is the “sugary-white” quartzites that reflect sunlight and give the Snowies their glow. While some of the travel guides try to keep it simple by claiming the Snowy Range is named after the deep snow it holds well into summer, and indeed large snow fields and snow chutes were holding fast in mid-August, the shimmering rock is the more compelling explanation. Large white clouds heavily punctuated the bright blue sky, and the wind continually shuffled the aerial arrangement and responding landscape light. Just a classic, classic alpine scene, worth the drive from Seattle just for a picnic.

I had been laid up now for 5 nights in a row, two in the Laramie Motel 6, one in a motel in Rawlins, and two in the cabin in Riverside. It was August 18. I had to be at work on October 16. I was down to my last two months.

I didn't eat lunch as I had no appetite, but I realized I was feeling worse from weakness. I went most of the day without my cold medicine and only when I finally took it did I start to feel better. The wind started picking up and the sky had gone gray. I read a couple more Annie Proulx stories, one featuring a flirtatious but vengeful tractor. Walter Kirn called Close Range “folksy stoicism”. Folksy my ass. This is demented stuff.

Finally on Wednesday I convinced myself that I was well enough to take on Medicine Bow Peak, 12,013’. It isn't a very tough hike - the ascent from my campground to the peak was less than two miles, gaining about 1300’ - not much more than an uphill stroll even for someone with consumption. The day was cloudier than the dazzling day before, greatly reducing the amazing light play on the rocks. A few brief sun breaks did illuminate the blue and pink shadings of the rocks as I slowly wended my way uphill. The sheer slopes provided aerial views of the meadows and lakes below, meadows and tarns that looked like Scotland to me, not that I'd even seen Scotland. And expansive snowfields near the top made me reconsider my opinion on how the Snowies earn their name.

As I approached the top I was anxious to see the depths of this stunning range, anticipating an expanse of striking silver peaks reaching off into the distance. But there was no such thing. The crest simply descended gradually back into a landscape of rolling hills and meadows somewhat mirroring those I had just hiked up from. I was stunned. The Snowy Range front was nothing but a front, an anomaly on the landscape - a Potemkin Range. A damn beautiful Potemkin Range.

The Other Side of the Snowy Range 

The Exhumation
I was flummoxed. I'd never seen such a thing. As it happened, the explanation for this odd landscape was sitting in the front seat of my car, in the pages of John McPhee’s Rising from the Plains. I had a lot of books with me but had generally chosen exploring the landscape over reading about it so it would be another year or more before I cracked McPhee‘s book. When I did I learned I had come upon something big there on the Snowy crest, big enough to have a proper name - the Exhumation. It is, says McPhee, “the single-most important landscape-shaping event in this part of the West.” I say “is” because the Exhumation is still happening, and the reason the Snowy Range looms as a Potemkin Range is because the Exhumation has not yet happened there. At least that’s how I get it. Let me try and lay it out as best I can.

The story starts, of course, with the with rising of the Rocky Mountains, and I will skip over that because even though I've read explanations of this twenty times or more from as many authors, I still can’t make a lot of sense of it. The Laramide Orogeny, the Overthrust Belt - you’re on your own with those. Suffice it to say, the Rocky Mountains began rising about 75 million years ago and by about 45 million years ago they were pretty much risen. But as they were rising and when they were no longer rising so much, they were also eroding, and erosion is something I can understand. It is right in front of us, everyday, especially in the mountains. As McPhee puts it: “In the contest between erosion and orogeny, erosion never loses.”

So as the Rockies rose, wind and rain and cold and heat worked to break them down, and gradually built a pile of rocky debris at their base. The Rockies kept rising, erosion kept eroding, and eventually over 20,000 vertical feet of sand and gravel were piled up from the bottom. After tens of millions of years of this, by about 5 million years ago, the Rocky Mountains were buried to their necks in their own erosives. The debris piled so high it began to spill out over onto the Great Plains in great pulses, now mapped and identified by geologists, each one spilling over the one before further east out onto the plains. “5 million years ago“ writes McPhee, “you could have walked west across the Great Plains and stepped off directly onto Rocky Mountain summits.”

Five million years ago was roughly a turning point. The Rockies seem to have begun a new surge of uplift, and a cooling climate generated more runoff from the rising mountains. Steeper more powerful rivers began cutting through the accumulated debris, washing it into the plains, slowly uncovering the buried mountains. This is the Great Exhumation (Ok, I added the “Great”).

The Exhumation has been going on for five million years but it still has a long way to go. Much eroded sediment remains piled up, leaving mountains unexhumed, and a lot of those are in Wyoming. When 19th-century surveyors were looking for a route to build the first intercontinental railroad they discovered one of the places where the Great Plains still rose gently to near the crest of the Laramie Range. They called it the Gangplank and ran the railroad up it. Interstate 80 today makes use of the same ramp.

The Medicine Bow Range is another area yet to be exhumed . According to geologist Keith Heyer Meldahl, the Medicine Bow Range is surrounded by one of the most prominent expanses of unexhumed tableland in Wyoming. When I had driven up out of Laramie on the Scenic Highway and emerged at treeline onto the rolling meadows and lakes of the Sugarloaf Recreation Area, I was on this subsummit surface: “a high-tide line, but of rock, not water..[that] records the maximum burial level of the Rockies before the Exhumation.” The Snowy Range sits “like a model mountain set on a tabletop, still looking like an island in a pre-Exhumation gravel sea.“

On top of Medicine Bow Peak it was cold and very windy. If I had any sense I would have declared victory and gone back to my tent, but instead I set off along the mountain ridge for the seven-mile loop hike. The trail ran mostly through a Siberian plain of rocky rubble and cold wind, with long views out to lakes and lesser mountains in the distance. Finally it descended the far side of the range, got some protection from the wind, and gave up some pretty amazing views back up the length of the range‘s front.

For the most part I felt remarkably well; I was surprised by my endurance. But on the last leg I had some coughing fits that indicated I had taken on too much for what I optimistically believed was my first day back hiking. Back at the campsite I enjoyed a couple of hours just soaking in the warmth of the lowering sun, which combined with my waning adrenaline made for a peaceful and contemplative couple of hours.

The next morning broke cold and windy even down on the peneplain. I had breakfast in the car, coffee in the tent. My cough and congestion had gotten worse, and the color of my phlegm told me infection had set in. My hike had backfired.

I set out for Lander, some 180 miles away, the next significant town between Laramie and Jackson Hole. On paper it was a fascinating drive, and one I had been very much looking forward to. US 287 heads north out of Rawlins and leaves the North Platte/Mississippi drainage over a barely perceptible divide. In fact it is the Continental Divide but with an asterisk. It does not divide the Platte from the Green Rive drainage but from the Great Divide Basin, which drains nowhere. The Great Divide Basin is a sink, a 4,200-square miles more-or- less oval enclosure of alkali lakes, playas, and dry plains sitting on top of what would be the Rocky Mountain crest if there were mountains here to crest. But there is a gap here in the Rocky Mountains between the Medicine Bow Range and the Wind River Range that rises a hundred or so miles to the northwest. With no mountains to stop the clouds, the basin gets a mere ten inches of precipitation a year. It sounded fascinating and I would loved to have kicked around it a bit, but it would have been hot and trying at the best of times and this was not the best of times for me.

Highway 287 cuts through the narrow east end of Great Divide Basin so I drove out of it quickly and imperceptibly enough, into the drainage of the legendary Sweetwater River, a high tributary of the North Platte. Almost immediately I drove past the fork for Highway 220, which heads northeast to Devil’s Gate and Independence Rock, two major historic sites of the Oregon Trail I would have loved to visit. But I was  having trouble enough keeping my eyes open behind the wheel, so I stayed northwest with 287 and passed by Jeffrey City, a nearly modern ghost town - it had 4,000 people in 1980! - and spookier for it. I crossed the Sweetwater River four times as it flowed east toward Pathfinder Reservoir and the North Platte. I drove through ranchland of BLM sage reminiscent of the Colorado Plateau, and finally I drove into Lander.