Cheyenne is barely in Wyoming, but it's still the capital. It's a very "Western" town, and they've done a lot in the downtown area to tell the history. Still, a lot of the old buildings aren't there anymore, so you have to look at pictures and do a lot of imagining. They DO have a great old Union Pacific railroad depot, which serves as their visitor center; and they have these cool boots that have been painted up with different themes and placed all over town. In a park, I saw the biggest locomotive ever made, the "Big Boy 4004," which was especially made for the Rocky Mountain trip from Cheyenne to Ogden, Utah, and back.
Between Cheyenne and Laramie, the Rockies rose to 8,640 feet. Just before Sherman's Summit, there was a stop in the median where the "Tree in the Rock" is located. When the Transcontinental Railroad came through the pass, the men working on the track found this pine growing up out of a rock, and they curved the track slightly to miss it. Some trains would stop to give the tree a drink of water, and travelers along the Lincoln Highway used it as a landmark, sometimes camping there.
The highest point on the Lincoln Highway was at the Summit. Today, the Exit 323 Rest Area is there. It has two monuments--a HUGE bust of Abraham Lincoln which overlooks the highway and a monument to the first president of the Lincoln Highway Association, Henry Joy. Joy was the president of Packard Motors, and he loved to get out on the road. This monument was first placed at his favorite camping spot on the LH in the nearby mountains, where he said he wanted to be buried. He wasn't buried beneath it, and the monument has been moved so that more people can see it and to protect it from vandals.
In Laramie, the views of the Rockies (this range is known locally as the "Snowies") are tremendous from almost anywhere in town. This is the home of the University of Wyoming, and I visited their art museum, which had a lot of Western-themed works and a gallery of astro-photography (pictures of space from telescopes). I snapped a picture of their football field, which was built in honor of World War II veterans and is called War Memorial Stadium. I was wearing my UW shirt, so I fit right in. Go Cowboys!!
