Medicine Bow National Forest: The Snowy Range and the Road Above the Trees

Wyoming Highway One Thirty passes through the Medicine Bow National Forest over the Snowy Range, crossing the Medicine Bow Mountains at an elevation of ten thousand nine hundred and forty-seven feet. This is one of the highest paved passes in Wyoming, and the road is closed from roughly November through May depending on snowpack. When it is open, it offers something that most Wyoming mountain drives do not: a maintained route above treeline on a high alpine plateau, where the views extend two hundred miles on a clear day and the lakes sit in glacial cirques so blue they seem edited.

The Medicine Bow Range is older in its exposure than the more famous ranges to the west. The Precambrian basement rocks in some sections are among the oldest exposed stone in the state, pushed up during mountain-building events that predate the Rockies. The peaks of the Snowy Range top out above twelve thousand feet, snow-covered into July in wet years, and the alpine meadows above treeline are the kind of terrain that supports plant species found nowhere else at lower elevations.

The forest takes its name from a cultural practice: multiple Plains nations came to this country to harvest bow wood, particularly the timber along the upper Medicine Bow River. The Arapaho and Shoshone nations used this country seasonally for hunting and materials gathering long before the forest reserve was established. The reservation boundaries drawn in the late nineteenth century put their reservation land to the north and south of the range, but the hunting patterns continued into the reservation era.

The Centennial Valley below the pass is a working agricultural landscape of hay meadows and cattle ranches that has changed relatively little since the homestead era. The contrast between the alpine crest and the valley floor is exactly the altitude change it looks like.