852. Rawlins, Carbon County (WY05)

Good show!  This was a beautiful pile of brick and mortar!  I’m not great at architecture identification, but even I would have been blind to miss the art deco style.  Of course, I can’t give myself too much credit.  I originally pulled up to the nicely (and by “nicely,” I mean traditionally) designed county annex, and I initially mistook it for the courthouse, primarily since the county clerk, treasurer, and assessor all work out of it.  In a weird way, this went along with my first impression of Rawlins.  It seemed like a town just out of step with time, almost like it was a stop on Route 66 but less kitschy.  From all the hotels, motels, and shops, I could tell that it was quite the happening hub at one point, probably before travel got as high speed.  Consequently, I wouldn’t call the town dead, but I might call it a little moribund.

There were any number of caches around town that would have made good candidates, but frankly, I was a bit tired.  I decided to take the easy way out and get the one closest to the courthouse: a nano on a fire hydrant about a block away.  A cache is a cache is a cache.  Having cut out the other Utah counties from my itinerary, I was running way ahead of schedule, so I decided to grab a Virtual in a nearby cemetery because there’s always a cemetery.

Once I entered the grounds, I dodged a couple of rabbits and other small varmints driving to GZ.  After noticing a family of deer and musing that life was teeming here or some kind of crap like that, I started working on the Virtual.  It led me to the graves of two men of the old West who died on the same day.  Normally, I would tell the story here, but the “when” and “why” factor intimately in the answer to the questions for the Virtual.  I found out later that it also involved a regionally famous criminal who I was familiar with because the story of his end is so gruesome. Again, I won’t recount it here in a place where children might read about it.  After all that, I took a moment to check what remained on my agenda.  Since Carbon was my penultimate county before returning to Denver, it was a short list with three goals: find a cache with “Wyoming” in the name, find an EarthCache before I leave the state, and find one last cache in…