Bicycling Montana, Wyoming,
Colorado and New Mexico - 2006

Meeteetse to Thermopolis, WY

June 15, 2006
Distance 56.2 Miles
Climbing Elevation: 1,605 feet

We got up shortly after 7:00 AM, did all of our usual morning stuff and left the motel to go to breakfast, riding the bicycle to the restaurant where we ate a full breakfast. After breakfast we headed to Thermopolis. The first five miles were not a lot of fun because we started up a hill in Meeteetse and continued up hill for 5 miles. In the first five miles we climbed 535 feet of the total for the day. And if that was not bad enough, the wind gods deserted us and we had headwinds for the entire day. Therefore instead of 13 to 15 mph on the flats we were going 10 to 11 mph. The good news was that most of the time we were going downhill.

We stopped several times during the day. One time we stopped to take a picture of a pronghorn antelope. A short time later we saw two pronghorn antelopes about 50 feet to the right of us. They stared at us then started running parallel to our course, got ahead of us by 50 feet and crossed the road in front of us, running full speed until they reached a fence on the other side of the road where they suddenly stopped and slid under the fence before running off.

We finally reached Thermopolis, got a motel room, dropped most of our baggage and rode our bicycle to the famous hot spring.

A large portion of the area looks like the Yellowstone hot springs, various ponds that over flow and let their water run into the nearby Big Horn River. We spent more than an hour looking around and even went for a soak in one of the pools available for public use. We then returned around 5:00 to our room and a quick trip to the restaurant for dinner. Then back to our room, to clean up prepare this write up and then to bed.