850. Green River, Sweetwater County (WY04)

The Sweetwater County Courthouse is, in fact, a courthouse.  It no doubt performs its functions capably.  That said, we were not amused.  It made me think of Ector County, but that’s hardly a mark in its favor.  But it didn’t really matter to me because I had already found a cache.

It was even a cute cache, a miniature 3D printed frog with a magnet and a nano-sized hole for a log.  Once I found the right lamppost, it was signed, and the county was done in my eyes.  I spend some driving time thinking about Green River for a different reason than normal.  It represented something that I had been considering but I felt hadn’t truly experienced.  I had, from time to time in my travels, gotten a taste of the long distances and remoteness of the West.  Driving from Globe to Flagstaff or Gallup to Aztec hadn’t been picnics, but they also weren’t the norm, either.  In most of my travels, I’d drive thirty or forty miles to get from one county seat to the next, meaning I’d spend almost as much time photographing and caching as I did driving.  A single day might get me fifteen counties plus or minus, depending on the traffic, terrain, driving conditions, town size, ease of cache acquisition, and how hard I’m pushing myself, with my current record being twenty-three counties in a twenty-four-hour period (and I could have made twenty-four counties if I had been five minutes faster in Bentonville, but that’s neither here nor there).  But Wyoming and several other states were a different story.  The drive here from Evanston had been a hundred miles, and from here to my next Wyoming stop, a hundred twenty-five.  As you can imagine, I’ve done some half-assed mapping and planning in anticipation of a theoretical future return to Wyoming, and the amount of just driving is a little staggering, even for me.  And much of the West is spread out that way.  I knew it was going to be a bear, but (and excuse me for mixing my metaphors) that little blue line on a map looks much different when you’re standing on the bank of a rushing river.  I’m going to do it, of course.  As I have sometimes said, “Victory or death!” (Though it’s really more like victory or mild annoyance).  I just know that one day those long drives are going to take a toll I don’t expect.  Then again, I don’t really think I imagined making it this far, so what do I know?

I’ll tell you what I know: I don’t like holes in maps.  There was a nearby Utah county that I hadn’t been to, and if I didn’t go now, I’d have to come back out here, and we all know I hate doing that if I don’t have to.  So, I turned south and took a short, forty-five-minute drive down to…