DAYS 46-48 - Dubois, WY - 907 miles from home

Yes, I'm covering three days in this post.... Apologies, but two of those days have been "zero" days - days to run errands and just to rest. We've been 'banking' miles for a week now, walking our tootsies off so we could linger in a single place - and these past three days have all found their anchor in the same Wyoming town: Dubois.

Dubois maybe takes itself just seriously enough. The unofficial motto of Dubois is "Where real cowboys work and play" - and its main street features the "world's largest jackalope exhibit." Oh, and apparently the town's founders wanted to name it "Tibo" after the Shoshone word for "White Man": what Wikipedia calls the tribe's "affectionate" name for their Episcopal priest, Father John Roberts. Instead the town got named for 1910 state governor Joseph Carey's friend, senator Fred Dubois. In protest the residents rejected the name's French pronunciation and insisted on calling their home du-BOYZ.

So here we are in Du BOYZ. Kate and Bob and I are very happy campers at the moment: the surrounding red and gold striated sandstone buttes, the steel gray and sagebrush dotted hills, the river, the adorable stores and taverns, the boardwalk through town, the Bighorn Sheep Museum, the hospitality at the Cowboy Cafe (really really good food and SEVENTEEN homemade pies to choose from), and our spacious and gracious RV Park home for these past two days - the Longhorn Ranch .... And oh, this morning as I was meditating by the river I heard a kerplop, looked up, and saw a huge rainbow trout breach the surface a few times as he gulped up the mosquitoes. How can you not appreciate a haiku morning?The silver river / Rainbow back first, a trout leaps / Sound of the water.

Day 46 had us hiking from the Continental Divide to Dubois, dropping down a good 300 feet and seeing the mountains transform around us... more horses, more split rail fences... I found myself walking fast, with more energy than usual (perhaps because I was finally going downhill - ha!) and feeling something turn over inside. Suddenly, for the first time in this trek, I was feeling western.... I was feeling the West. Hard to explain. Our Liberty Walks icon wears cowboy boots, so maybe I was just finally walking a mile (or 15) in her shoes. And then, suddenly, there I was in Dubois... passing the jackalopes and galleries selling Native goods, and knives with antler shafts, and western hats; past the restaurants with names like The Fluffy Cow and The Moose Outpost. Kate and Bob were waiting for me at the Cowboy Cafe, and that first sip of Pako's IPA in a frosted mug was just about the best sip I've had of anything ever.

The Walk itself is one thing: step after step, moving through America at the exact speed my body is made to move - connecting, once again and maybe for the first time ever, with the breadth and depth of this land. So, the walking itself is profound. But the people are at the very heart of this pilgrimage: the folks like Jalet and Pat, Ginny and Terry and Mia, Kay and Megan, Juanita, Colleen, Amanda-Gayle, Helen, Tena and Delwin, Dale and Kelly, Rhett, Carolyn, Shirley, Sylvia, Melinda and Glen - a woefully incomplete list because there have been so many kind folks who have fed us and housed us and kept us laughing past our bedtime.

In an RV park, sometimes our literal camp host becomes our host - as happened last night when Craig Bellot welcomed us into his and his wife Laura's spacious rig, cooking us up some fantastic seafood stew, full of gulf shrimp and the delicious tender and mild freshwater fish known as "white perch" or "crappie" - which Craig fishes every year in a lake on the border of his home state, Louisiana. In retirement Craig is also a chef, as it turns out - having been retired now for almost longer than he worked in his days as a south Louisiana commercial fisherman. These days he and Laura travel fulltime in their RV, camp-hosting here and chef-ing there. Craig's all-time favorite gig in these years was as chef for a hunting outfitter - before Covid shut that business down. He'd take huge scoopfulls of crawfish and throw them into a skillet with eggs in the morning, serve it all up with strong coffee and fresh biscuits. "The guests would go nuts," he told us, "with these little lobsters in their eggs. But it was just downhome breakfast for me."

That rich Louisiana accent - the tender fish stew - the moist evening breeze off the river - the mosquitos and meat bees attacking us and our food: everything suddenly felt very bayou and not very western at all. And then later when the conversation turned toward more exotic fare - "have you ever eaten squirrel? what about bullfrog?" - we learned that, contrary to popular opinion, not everything 'tastes like chicken.' For instance, bullfrog tastes like swamp.

And then this morning as we entered our day of full rest, just before the rainbow trout inspired some Wyoming-river-bayou-swamp haiku... I got news that we'd made the front page, above the fold, in the Eugene, Oregon newspaper.

Tomorrow we walk on toward Crowheart.

Craig Bellot, our Louisiana host in Wyoming (at the Longhorn Ranch).

Badass Kate Kimball: on the roof of Libby, investigating our broken air conditioner.

Jim Woods, mobile locksmith and avid outdoorsman - fixing our broken backdoor in a Staples parking lot in Jackson, WY. This is how we spent our first 'zero' day this week - running errands in Jackson before heading back to Dubois. (Jim: what a treat to meet you!)

Dubois, WY - outside The World's Largest Jackalope Exhibit.

En route to Dubois, Highway 26.

This is the Teton valley - complete with pasture, rolling hills - and on the far hillside: a lone pronghorn. They are fascinating creatures: closely related to the giraffe and the fastest land animals in the Americas. They can sustain faster speeds than the cheetah.

Wind River by the Longhorn Ranch, Dubois, WY.

Meditating by the river.

Above the fold.

Da