To Dream of Wyoming and The Mountains: Visiting Wyoming

Have you ever known with complete certainty that you were meant to be somewhere? That you could wholeheartedly love a place you'd never been. Have you ever dreamt an entire life full of people and experiences you've never met or encountered? I certainly have. And for me that place was Wyoming. I was definitely one of those kids that played make believe games about going out west and marrying a cowboy. My friend Grace and I would take her mother's old table cloths and make old timey pioneer skirts out of them. We would spend hours in her backyard yard pretending to be homesteaders moving out west cooking over a camp fire and chopping wood. I took horse riding lessons in middle school, was obsessed with a children's book series called the Riding Academy, and my gift of choice for many of my childhood birthdays was to go horseback riding or camping. Much like my time in England I had spent most of my life romanticizing the crap out of it and dreamed regularly of the day I would saddle my horse and head out west!

Me at 5 years old living my best life!

Flash forward about 25 years, I'd just finished my degree in Archaeology, was back home in Texas and desperately looking for a job before those student loan payments kicked in. And then, one morning it happened. I got the call from a company in Sheridan looking for field techs to finish out the year's projects and they wanted me to come be apart of the team...I was finally headed to my happy place...Wyoming.

Over the next few years I was in and out of Wyoming working for that same company and it had been amazing. I'd had the opportunity to travel all over the state observing its rugged, desolate and mind blowing beauty. I hadn't been wrong as a kid, I loved Wyoming and all its far reaching corners. From the grasslands and high plains, to the sagebrush and Tetons, It was all beautiful in my eyes. But for me, nothing could beat

the Big Horn Mountains and the friendships I'd made there.

There is no place I love more on this earth than the Big Horn Mountains and the land surrounding them. Whether I'm observing them from a distance or right up in them exploring all that I can, there's just no place that makes me feel more connected to life, more comfortable in my skin or more in tune with the people around me than the Big Horns do. As cheesy or hippie dippy as it may sound, I see myself in the landscape. Every snow covered tree, every blade of grass blowing in the ferocious Wyoming wind, every rugged mountain peak or incomprehensible view that seems to stretch farther than possible, I see myself. This is a gift for which no monetary value could ever be placed.

For most of my life I'd really struggled to find friends that really enjoyed all of the outdoor activities I did, especially as I got older. One of the biggest reasons my time in Wyoming meant so much to me was because I'd finally found friends that truly enjoyed being outside, and boy did we get outside! We hiked and mountain biked. We went on kayaking trips and spent New Year's Eve backcountry skiing under the stars. We took naps by alpine lakes and ate dinner in our kayaks for full moon paddles. We told stories by the campfire and got up before the sun for dawn patrol skiing. We looked for fossils and dinosaur bones and scouted paths for a new mountain bike trail....We Did It All!

Wyoming and the friends I made there will be apart of my life and who I am as a person for as long as I live, there's just no way around that. They are a part of me so deeply ingrained in my DNA, I'm convinced if you looked at the cells and atoms of my body under a microscope you would see Wyoming. So to answer the questions I posed at the beginning of this blog, "Have you ever dreamt an entire life full of people and experiences you've never meet or encountered?", "Have you ever known with complete certainty that you were meant to be somewhere?", The answer is yes. Yes, I have dreamt an entire life full of adventure in the mountains and friends and then I had the unbelievable privilege of living that life.