Sheridan was a quaint little town of about 17K omni-generational residents. We found home at Peter D’s RV Park at the northeast corner of town. A clean little RV Park, but sites are stacked on top of each other like cord wood. And you’d better love howling winds. Those winds got so bad our last couple of nights, we had to bring in the windward slideouts or risk thrashing of the slide toppers.

After taking care of some routine business, Jeanne and I went into town to do our usual walkabout. Sheridan, like most of the other towns in Wyoming, was pretty much devoid of stray garbage and well maintained. It was also a continuing, refreshing experience to encounter ZERO instances of graffiti and homeless encampments/garbage dumps! Maybe a partial explanation for the lack of graffiti could be that there seems to be a proliferation of local residents who are well armed and willing to protect their environment from the thugs who currently infect a majority of our society. To borrow a famous movie quote (albeit altered), “Dorothy, your not in Kalifornia any more.” The main drag had a multitude of mostly cowboy & fishing themed statues. At Peter D’s direction, we had to poke our heads into King’s Saddlery, home of the world famous King’s ropes (as in those that are used in cowboy-ing and rodeos). King’s definitely jammed in a ton of goods into a small space! They make and sell saddles and all things leather having to do with the cowboy lifestyle. The back “room” to the showroom was a free museum of, well, you probably guessed it, everything of a western theme. Wall to wall saddles, guns, related equipment, and of course the prerequisite trophy heads mounted on the walls.

Jeanne, as usual, came up with our local sight-seeing adventure this time around – Shell Creek Falls. We loaded up Woodrow Wilson bright and early one morning and headed out on the 68 mile drive to the falls. This took us to Ranchester, then west on Hwy. 14 through the heart of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area in the Bighorn National Forest. There was still a bit of snow as we climbed into the 9,000’+ range, and we were giddy the whole way anticipating all the multitudinous herds of moose and elk we were about to behold. Sibley Lake sits right off the roadway and was a “cool” sight to see, totally frozen over. We stopped at Burgess Junction to have breakfast at the Moose Crossing Restaurant inside the Bear Lodge Resort. For any of you thinking of checking it out, better that you maybe start that diet you’ve been mulling over. A simple bacon-egg-hashbrown breakfast was absolutely ruined with the worst hashbrowns we have ever had (even Jeanne complained she dang-near broke a tooth gnawing on the badly overcooked potato shards). With our teeth still intact, we continued on to the falls. There is  a small Forest Service center on site and lots of concrete walkways leading to various sections of the canyon top overseeing areas of Shell Creek, as well as the waterfall. It was unfortunate for us that the FS center, the heads, and the parking lot were closed (I am assuming seasonally), however we could still access the walkways for all the viewing. In fact, there were many other folks taking in the views at the same time as us, I might suppose the place was just as busy as if it were open. We headed back home, planning on grabbing a little Jeep trail road (FR 26 aka: Copper Creek Rd.). Unfortunately (or very fortunately, depending on your perspective and whether you are a “glass half-full or half-empty” kinda spirit) the beginning of the road was covered with substantial snow. Not wishing to become a customer of the local Search & Rescue outfit, we sagely decided to backtrack Hwy. 14 instead. The whole moose-elk thing was a thorough disappointment, not a single sighting the entire 136 miles. We did happen upon numerous sightings of Pronghorn (sometimes referred to as Antelope, sometimes Deer) but like as was once said in another altered TV show phrase, as the Soup Nazi said in “Seinfeld”, “No photos for you!”

We have found the people of Sheridan to be over-the-top friendly. Special thanks to Peter D and to Tom Schwerr for your time, insights, and stories. We have successfully set up a visit by a mobile RV tech as soon as we land in Rapid City. Hopefully, we can get the grinding issue with the slideout resolved through him. Until next post we, as you, will just have to wait and see…