When we woke up we saw that we were in a canyon! When we arrived we had no idea what our surroundings were like because it had been really dark. It was quite hot so we showered and took off without further investigating the canyon (there was an artificial lake in there).
We had to take the same road back so we saw what we had missed earlier.
Wyoming is known to have wild horses so we went to tourist information and found out that there is a loop tour you can take where it is fairly likely to see horses. Unfortunately the road is unpaved, in other words washboard..
We did see wild horses, several herds in fact, but they were all so far away that there are no pictures - we used binoculars to see them. The wild horses or mustangs are really horses who escaped or were turned loose shortly after the Spanish had introduced the horse as a domestic animal. So technically the mustang is not native to America. However, the original horse, prehistoric three-toed mesohippus did originate in the geographical area of America and then migrated to what is now Asia.
These are some horse territorial
markers.
So there we were, high up in the hills on a dirt road and then it started raining. Lightning flashed around us and thunder rumbled loudly. It was pretty scary because we were so high up and there were no trees or anything nearby and we were the highest thing around that the lightning might strike. Eventually it passed though and pretty soon after that we made it down from the mountain as well.
We drove into what was called the Red Desert to see petroglyphs [kaljusse kraabitud pildid]. The Red Desert is named after the reddish rocky ground. This desert had quite a lot of vegetation, most of it sagebrush.
In the cliffs was also somebody´s nest.
Some of the petroglyphs were rather strange looking, like this elephant-bird on the left. There were also some modern additions like the handprints below. There probably were some old handprints as well but the really deep one was definitely made so deep by tourists visiting the site.
By the time we were done looking at petroglyphs it was almost dark and we still had about 20 miles of desert to cover before we were on a paved road again and then we had to find a campground.. By the time we got to the highway it was dark. That night I slept as David drove until he found a campground.
