August 5, 2016: View of I-80/US 30 from the Wyoming Welcome Center, the highest point on the interstate.
Kimball, Nebraska — From a college football stadium to a tri-state corner, this day had a little bit of everything.
The first stop of the day was before I even left Laramie, at War Memorial Stadium. The “Bucking Horse and Rider” silhouette is everywhere around Laramie; in addition to being the logo for the University of Wyoming, I learned later that day the shape is the longest-running drawing used on license plates.
The I-80 rest area southeast of Laramie is a haven for highway history. It’s the highest point on the interstate and US 30 in the country. There are informative panels about the Lincoln Highway and the state in general. There’s a monument to Lincoln, and a monument to Henry Joy, the father of the Lincoln Highway. (The Joy monument was moved from Rawlins, a site he had picked out but was abandoned after I-80 was built; the Lincoln monument was moved its original location a few miles away, the highest point on the original Lincoln Highway, in 1969.)
A war-weary version of Abraham Lincoln is used for his monument.
I had yet another monument to see, the one for the Ames brothers, two miles away from the interstate. Oakes and Oliver Ames — the former the namesake of Ames, Iowa — were “instrumental in completing the Union Pacific section of the [transcontinental] railroad,” a marker at the monument says. But Oakes Ames’ involvement in the railroad turned into his involvement in the Credit Mobilier scandal. The monument was placed near the highest elevation of the railroad — but as UP improved its system, huge segments of the first transcontinental were left behind, including the one past the Ames monument.
A short distance east of the Ames monument is the “Tree in Rock,” which was along the railroad route, and then US 30, and today is between the lanes of I-80.
I exited off 80 to follow the Lincoln Highway again into Cheyenne, which goes right into downtown and the Cheyenne Depot Museum, and found myself at… a food truck rally. So I got a wood-fired pizza before going into the restored depot and seeing the museum and the model trains upstairs. The whole museum was excellent and highly recommended. The main area of the former depot was open and had a map of the railroad inlaid on the floor (with Omaha marked for the starting point and date, July 10, 1865).
With the capitol closed for construction (and already visited, in 1995) my only other stop was the state museum. It was also excellent and highly recommended. It does a great job of telling the state’s story chronologically, in the traditional museum way of artifacts and informational panels.
To be continued…