We returned today from an overnight stay at the ranch in Wyoming. Friend Leon was visiting from San Francisco, and we were glad we had time to take him up there and also poke around a few interesting Wyoming spots along the way.


Mona, Leon, and Mdog relax in a cool spot by the pond after a hot walk around the Russian olive trees where the cows hang out.


Mona relaxes on the deck after dinner...note the tent set up in the background - the extra bedroom.


During dinner, a neighbor rode up with her son, and left off some cookies to show her appreciation for a hay deal she had done with Clark.

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On the way back to Fort Collins, just South of Laramie, we stopped at the location of a long-gone railroad town called Tie Siding. I had read that there was an old airmail guide sign painted on a big rock formation, that identified the plae and pointed the way North for Laramie. Sure enough, after we found the nearby stone foundation of the old jailhouse that identified the location and climbed up the massive granite flanks, we soon could make out places where the paint (long gone now) had inhibited the formation of lichens that otherwise covered the surface. At first it was difficult to piece together, but eventually as we surveyed the are the large letters

TIE
SIDING

could be made out. Below that was an arrow with N in the middle of the shaft, pointing North. It was a moving moment, as I recalled also reading about this area that a young airmail plot had lost his life in a crash of his little mail biplane on a nearby hill during an early November snowstorm in 1920.


The edge of the rock formation where the airmail marker is found dominates this old photo of the Tie Siding telegraph station and outpost alongside the old Union Pacific tracks.


The faint outlines of the old airmail marker don't immediately reveal the message up close, but I'm guessing that from a few hundred feet above it would still be legible.

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