Trucking Across Wyoming · Apr 20, 02:27 AM
This set of pictures was taken along I-80 in Wyoming, which is the most dangerous stretch of highway in America. Many truckers and others have lost their lives or their loads on I-80, and that's no joke. I-80 through Wyoming is a beast in the wintertime, you never know what to expect. The winds come screaming through the high plains at 60 mph quite often. In some areas, after a snowstorm, it will continue to snow simply because the wind is blowing the soft, freshly fallen snow all around and over the highways, while the skies remain crystal clear. Evanston to Cheyenne can be 350 miles of pure hell sometimes.
The first time I saw Wyoming I was riding with my trainer Rudy. It was nighttime when we crossed into Wyoming from Nebraska heading east on I-80, I was sleeping in the back and Rudy woke me up to show me Medicine Bow. Medicine Bow is a National Forest in Southeastern Wyoming that runs together with the Routt National Forest in Colorado. Medicine Bow is an outlying part of the Rockies. There's a big mountain that you come down on I-80 and at the bottom of it you enter Laramie,Wy. Going east you leave Laramie and go up the mountain. My trainer always made it a point to show his students places like this because he knew we had never seen them and they were potentially dangerous places.
Even though it was nighttime and I couldn't see, I still had a sense of euphoria from just being in Wyoming. It's a place most of us back east have only heard about, but never been. I looked out the passenger side window of the truck for a while just to get a sense of the scenery. I noticed the fence like structures all over the side of the highway and my trainer told me they were to keep snow drifts from accumilating on the highway. There was a definite sense of adventure when driving to places like Wyoming for the first time. I saw the West as a wild frontier, a place with roads snaking through prairies and through forests, a place where Lewis and Clark once cut a path to the Pacific. The Oregon Trail also runs around I-80 out in Wyoming.
With CRST, we were always driving through Wyoming doing runs from the east coast to the west coast or vice versa. Over time Wyoming became a boring place to drive through and the trips through there became quite mundane. It's 400 miles across Wyoming, and most of it is barren, Badlands type scenery, though not quite as cool as the actual Badlands in Dakota. Once you reach Utah, there's some cool scenery, but through Wyoming it's easy to lose interest in driving. Nebraska is actually more boring, with its endless sea of prairies stretching for as far as the eye can see for mile after mile after mile. At least in Wyoming there's the occasional rock or two. The excitement that I experienced when I first saw Wyoming began to fade over time.
Once the excitement of seeing wyoming faded, I began to plan the trips so I could drive at night. I never really cared for driving with a co-driver, so I drove at night because most people have trouble sleeping in the day, so my co-driver was less likely to bother me at night. I couldn't stand it when a co-driver would sit up front with me while I was driving.
One of my favorite parts about driving is simply being alone with the highway. At night you're even more alone because there's less traffic everywhere. One late, dark and moonless night , I was heading west somewhere near Wamsutter when suddenly the whole sky lit up and I could see clear as day everywhere. From the south a bright fire like ball streaked across the sky and I was frozen in time, fixated on the object. I remember being able to see clearly everything inside the truck, which had been illuminated by the great light. The object slowly made its way across the big sky and disappeared into the northern edge of the horizon. I sat there in awe for what seemed like forever. When I first saw the object shooting across the sky, I had the impression it was a rocket or missile of some sort, that's how it moved through the sky. The object was probably a shooting star, and I don't know if I'll ever see one that big and bright again, it was amazing.
One other thing about I-80 in Wyoming that I remember is a hill on the western side of the state that I think lies between Lyman and Ft. Bridger, about 35 miles or so from the Utah line. The hill is like one huge roller coaster, except this ride goes straight down, and then straight up. To give you an idea about how big this hill is, you can start at the top of it and start going down hill in neutral and before long you'll have the needle buried. But, this is only the top part of the hill. If you're pulling a heavy load, then you just hold on and enjoy the ride. Once you start going and the needle is buried, you have to be going 150 mph or more and it's a white knuckle ride to the bottom, and certain death if that truck moves the wrong way in any direction. I mean, you're flying down this hill with an 80,000 lb machine and your knuckles are gripped so tight that you feel you could pull the steering wheel out if you wanted to, and then before you know it, you're shifting gears trying to pull your fat ass up the other side of the hill. By the time you reach the top you're going 30 mph with your flashers on cussing the trucks that are passing you. That's how big this hill is, you come flying down with enough steam that you think you could coast all the way to Salt Lake City, but you end up only making it a quarter way up the hill before you slow down.
The big companies can tell if you're flying like that and will threaten you with termination if they see on their computer you've been trying to get their truck up and over 200 miles an hour for scientific and personal excitement reasons. I was never fired from a trucking job, though I was threatened many times, as I think everyone is. The big companies like to constantly threaten their drivers to keep them in line because they know at the end of the day, there's not a damn thing in the world they can do or say from their computers to stop a driver from doing whatever he wants to. They can fire you later, but that's after the ride.
— Jon Fox
