Wyoming Picnic & Jeffrey City

Today we took a roadtrip 60 miles towards Alabama. We visited Jeffrey City, WY, which has become a ghost town. There are lots of apartment & townhouse buildings, houses, large schools, even an olympic size indoor pool—all deserted and weathered by time. Jeffrey City was once a boomtown with thousands of residents. There was a uranium mining business there in the60s, and thousands flocked to the community to live and work in the mines. By the late 1970s, the demand for uranium dropped and jobs dried up. People left everything just as it was—they left houses half built and the paved roads were cracked with weeds growing in them. It was interesting to see how much a place can change when no one is there to keep stuff maintained.

Amanda, Lily, and I stopped in between and had a picnic. For an hour, we could not hear or see anything but our little family. No cars, no people, no cell phone service. Just us. Its nice sometimes to get away from everything. We did see a group of 55 pronghorn antelope a mile away, and they came within 400 yards of us.

Here is Lily loving life on a blanket in the Wind River Range.
Here's the Wind River Range looking towards the Oregon Trail. This is 35 minutes SE from our house.

Having lunch at our picnic. No one around, not even any ants. I guess its so dry, they must have packed up and left.

Mule deer--decisions, decisions. Duck under the fence, jump over the fence, or pace the fence.

One of the only surviving homes on the range in Jeffrey City.