My yesterday morning. Kinda long.

It was dark when I left Feral Horse Town, headed east. Sunrise wouldn't arrive for twenty minutes, theoretically, and the high mountains would delay the dawn even more. The mountains themselves were just a dark grey silhouette, with no texture or topography. Above them the sky was a lightening grayish-green, turning orangish as you look south. It was warm, didn't even bother with a t-shirt under the uniform, much less a jacket or vest.

The highway heads almost due east, straight towards the mountains, through farm country. Not much has changed since I first saw this community twenty-eight years ago. Except most of the farm houses are newer, and one hay farmer is using the plastic liners for his round bales. Making a long row of what looks like alien equipment in an open field.

As you near the river, trees become more common, and are finally dense at the reservoir's edge. Nearly everyone else from yesterday's meeting is in those trees now, picking their routes and letting the dogs have their morning breaks before they head into the brush to hunt pheasants.

Everyone but me.

I have another goal in mind for my morning before our work resumes at 09:00. I need to visit an old friend.

It's only 32 miles. Each way.

Passing through the trees, the highway goes straight across the causeway. When the reservoir is full, the water laps at both shoulders of the road. Almost a mile and a half across along the top of a large dike. I've been here when the wind had waves crashing on the rocks and splashing up onto your windshield. But not today. Not for a few years, it looks like. Here, the entire bottom of the lake is dry, well vegetated with grasses and low willows. It's been a long drought.

After you cross the river, the highway sidles up on top of the benches to the mountains. And as lush and fertile as the cropland is on the west side of the river, it is arid and dry on this side. Mostly bare dirt and clay, with sage nowhere near as dense as home. The texture of the mountains is starting to be seen, steep rocky cliffs and jagged canyons. Topped with dark conifers, with trees hidden in the high crags. The crest of the highest ridges are barren and white with snow. There are no foothills... the mountains just rise straight up from the basin.

The road bears southeast, towards the red scars on one promontory. The switchbacks of the only road to climb this face. Tan, steel terraces jut out to support the road as it hangs over steep cliffs. Those and the round, white FAA dome atop the highest peak are the only visible signs that man has touched these mountains.

Twenty miles from town the road begins to climb. My ears pop four times before the first switchback. In this early light, about a dozen deer are scattered along the roadway at the low elevations. The GPS says we have already climbed nearly 2,000' above town. We'll gain another 4,000' in the next ten miles. Over a mile of verticle gain in 40 minutes. My ears pop four more times in the switchbacks.

This is an unnerving stretch of highway. Four-hundred foot dropoffs just past the concrete guardrails. Concrete and wire lining the cliffs above to keep boulders off the road. Signs say a 10% grade, with truck escape ramps about every mile or so. There has been no traffic since I passed the bentonite quarry far below.

Above the switchbacks, the road continues to climb, but now we are weaving in and out of groves of douglas-fir. My ears continue to pop. At last we crest over the shoulder of the mountains, and enter a different world. For this country is covered with snow. Not a dusting of snow, or drifts, but a solid blanket of the white, at least a foot or two deep on the level, with many large drifts. Been a few snowmachines tracking alongside the highway, and out onto the points.

Something tells me the road will be closed.

I look up at the highest peak, off to my left, and see the red alpineglow just touching the white limestone cliffs at the peak. The FAA dome is right up there, but I cannot see it from down here.

A roughleg soaring across a snow-covered willow field was the only wildlife. Yes, it is winter here. After all, it is November. This highway is closed by this time most years.

I reach the sign for the turnoff and am surprised to see the gravel track has been cleared of snow. Most of it is still covered with a thin layer of frozen slush and ice, but there has been traffic. Probably hunters this past weekend. I know I'm not dressed for this weather, but press on. The snow is 1-2 feet deep on both sides.

The track hugs the south side of a slope until reaching a saddle, and then slips over onto the northeastern slope of the high peak. We're above most trees now, with only scattered patches of krumholtz. Halfway across this face the road splits, with the cleared path heading steeply up to the FAA dome. The gate along the main road is open, but the road is full of snow, and impassable. I park where others have unloaded their snowmachines and ATVs and continued past the gate, packing rutted trails along the roadway. The GPS says 9,600'.

A sign says it is 1¹/₂ miles to the Medicine Wheel.

The Medicine Wheel. It and a couple other similar structures are North America's equivalents to Stonehenge. And probably served similar purposes. A wheel of white limestone, with 28 radiating spokes from a central cairn, with a half dozen outer cairns. When I lived and worked here for half a summer, I made several trips to this wheel. And one long hike. And then left it for more than a decade. With one visit with the family and some close friends about a dozen years ago. I cannot be this close and not try to visit.

It is 07:10. Forty minutes to get here. Forty minutes back, and I still need to check out of the motel and drive out to the unit by 09:00. Can I hike a mile and a half in and back on hard packed snow in fifty minutes? Maybe. On past hikes, the GPS has said my normal, leisurely pace on the level is about 3.7 mph. Push that up to 4 mph and I can get there in 22 minutes.

A voice in the back of my mind is pointing out how unwise this is. I am not prepared for this weather, no one knows where I am, and I probably don't have enough time anyway. But I have been driven since I got up this morning. Not sure why, but I have to try.

Quick change into hiking boots, and grab a cap and a jacket, along with the binocs. No time for putting on a t-shirt or the thermals in the overnight bag. The backpack with emergency gear and water is there on the seat, but 30 pounds will slow me down. I leave it.

A few meters past the gate I find a small pool of blood in the snow. Someone had some luck and made a kill this weekend. Is that a good omen? Or a bad one?

It's an easy walk. No wind on this side of the peak, but the frozen ruts from ATV wheels are hard to walk in. I try to stay on the flat snowmobile tracks, but end up back in the ruts, my hips swiveling to keep one foot in line with the other.

I walk like the masked heeler.

When I crest around the north ridge of this triangular peak, I can finally see my goal, not quite a mile to the northwest. It looks different than I remember, but it's been a lot of years. I follow the road onto the connecting ridge, into the light breeze from the west.

I find scuff marks where someone's ATV slid out to the edge of the road, one wheel over the brim. They just missed a good 100 meter drop down a steep rocky slope. Bet that had a real high sphincter factor. But the other side of this ridge is sheer limestone cliffs, and even more intimidating.

07:30. It's been 15 minutes and I figure I'm just over halfway there. Not quitting now. I break into a trot across the rest of the ridge.

The road swings around to the north side of the wheel to approach an interpretive sign. I cut across a snowbank directly to the east side. It's 07:33.

The Wheel is different. The chain link protective fence is gone. In its stead is a circle of heavy log posts, connected by three thick strands of rope.

All natural. Cool.

It is smaller than I remembered. Perhaps because of the wood ring, as opposed to the old steel barrier.

At least a dozen prayer bundles are hung on the eastern side, along with narrow streamers of colorful cloth. I suspect a few of you may have a better appreciation of this site than I. A small raptor (eagle?) feather is tethered to one rope with leather thong. Another bundle of feather, grass and twigs is wrapped in tanned antelope hide and hung nearby. Several offerings are small bags of cloth or leather, a few with beadwork.

The tines of a deer antler stick out of the snow near one cairn. Several wooden staffs lined with colored streamers lay fallen within the enclosure. At least one set of old human footprints in the snow.

What used to be a sterile archeological relic has become a living, changing spiritual center. I do not accept the claims made on this place by most local native tribes, since none of them were within hundreds of miles of this place when the wheel was built, but I do appreciate the change they have made here.

I follow the perimeter of the wood and rope barrier, walking clockwise. There are more prayer cloths strung in the scrawny conifers on the southwest side, atop the limestone cliffs. I feel like I am in Nepal, watching Buddhist prayer flags fluttering in the wind.

A raven croaks at me, soaring above the cliffs. It is backlit by the sun, a silhouette lined in silver.

A single small prayer bundle hangs on the west side.

I ignore the new interpretive sign on the north side. But there is a small sign on the nearest post. "Please Walk Left."

Yes, I assume native Americans would prefer a clockwise direction. So why did it feel so natural to me to go this way?

Back at the eastern prayer bundles, I decide to circle the wheel one more time. Watching the views to the four directions, instead of the wheel.

Southwest looks into the basin, its badlands all the more prominent with the early morning shadows.

One hundred and four miles to the west is the crest of the Absaroka (pronounced "ab-SORE-ka") Range, just catching the early morning sun.

Yellowstone.

Did the makers of this wheel love that place as much as we?

To the northwest and much lower is the Pryor Mountains and Montana. To the northeast is Porcupine Creek and my first and only skinny-dipping pool. And the tapering end of the Bighorn Mountains. To the southeast is the FAA dome and a reminder that civilization awaits.

It's 07:43 and I'm back at the east side. I truly regret not having prepared a token to leave in this place.

Time to go.

I quickly kneel to touch one limestone rock, and then begin the twenty-two minute hike back to the truck and the 21^st century.