Summer Sunday: The Wyoming Winds

My husband, Andy, had one week left of vacation and our objectives were simple: to get the kids outside and explore somewhere new. I’d been dreaming about Wyoming for a long time. I hadn’t been in almost 20 years and my previous trips had been limited, mainly to Jackson and Yellowstone. I wanted to go Lander, home of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), and to the Wind River Range, where the peaks were lower in elevation and the fishing, supposedly epic.

But that was as far as we’d gotten. Although it was summer and in theory, a mellower time for educators, little about the past two months felt relaxed. I was finishing an MFA and working on a novel; Andy was racing to get the school ready for another year, knee-deep in hiring new teachers, giving tours to prospective families, and slapping together desks.

We put in a call to a friend in Jackson, who offered us a lawn towards the end of the week to camp out on; otherwise our plans were vague at best. We essentially just threw a bunch of backpacking gear and some fishing rods in the car and started driving north.

We pulled into an Wild Iris outdoor shop in Lander the next morning, our tails between our legs. Here we were in mecca of outdoor wilderness training, two NOLS alumni, without a clue about where we were going and how we might get there.

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