A Trip to Radium Springs

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Interior of an old building at Sarah Gillespie's Radium Springs Resort, Fremont County, Wyoming. 
Interior of an old building at Sarah Gillespie's 1800s resort at Radium Springs, Fremont County, Wyoming.

I slept in a bit this morning, then fixed breakfast. After we cleaned things up, we headed into Lander to shop- groceries and a few other items at other stores. On the way into Lander we saw a young mule deer, but saw no wildlife on the return trip. Well, that's not exactly true. We saw a hawk land on a power line pole. It likely was a red-tailed hawk, but at 70 miles per hour, ...

Once back to South Pass City, we put things away and I fired up the smoker so that we could make frittatas for breakfasts this weekend. Connie spent much of the day, on and off, making and then cooking English muffins. I wrote most of the day.

We had an early dinner, featuring smoked salmon. Great stuff. I had almost bought another fillet today while grocery shopping. Maybe next week. We finished eating a little after 5:00 and then went down to the office, where we were assembling for a staff field trip to Radium Springs. The springs are some 20 miles away, mostly gravel and rough dirt roads, which took about 45 minutes each way.

The springs are in the middle of nowhere, and Sarah Gillespie, an 1800s resident of South Pass City, had built a couple of buildings that she wanted to manage as a bit of a resort. She evidently had some business for a while. I guess the attraction was to sit in the radioactive waters and, who knows, maybe glow in the dark.

Buildings at Sarah Gillespie's Radium Springs Resort, Fremont County, Wyoming. 
 
Buildings at Sarah Gillespie's resort at Radium Springs, Fremont County, Wyoming. The interior of the left-hand building is shown above.
 

Radium Springs source at Sarah Gillespie's Radium Springs Resort, Fremont County, Wyoming. 
 
 Radium Springs source at Sarah Gillespie's Radium Springs Resort, Fremont County, Wyoming.
 

 
 
Radium Springs outflow at Sarah Gillespie's Radium Springs Resort, Fremont County, Wyoming

The building and surrounding area are rustic, so this was a nice outing. On the return trip, Joe Ellis, Ashley and others took a side trip to try to find an old mine. I was fine to head home. Jan was riding with us and suggested our own side trip to a nearby mine, the Hidden Hand. There wasn't much to see, a few shafts and a collapsed building over one of the shafts. But it too was a nice outing. On our way back to the main road we saw Joe et al. returning. We made a couple of short stops along the road, so they beat us back to South Pass City by a couple of minutes.

We saw four pronghorn antelope on the way out to Radium Springs and about eight on the way back. We dropped Jan off at the office- he needed to pick something up- and we drove up the road to our trailer. There were six mule deer, two does and four young, just across the street and down one lot from our trailer.

I was so excited I got a glass of wine and sat down at the computer to write. 

 

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