Sunday 9-8-24 Return to Wyoming & Sibley Lake Campground

 

Sibley Lake Recreation

I woke up at 7:00 am and got dressed. We had a cinnamon raisin bagel for breakfast. We put everything down and secured. We were on the road by 7:45 am.

Our destination for today was 190 miles away. We started in Montana and ended back in Wyoming. The first road we drove on was a four lane divided highway to Columbus, Montana. In the beginning the road had tight curves and then it straightened out a bit. We drove by a lot of ranchers with horses, cattle and a couple of them had sheep. We passed by a group of wild turkeys. The scenery was beautiful mountains, rolling hills and prairie. I took a few pictures but there was a lot of smoke. We took a bridge over a reservoir that ran on both sides of the bridge. It was very low. We didn’t see any boats but there were a few fishermen. There were people camped in tents by the river. We stopped a couple of times to stretch our legs.

 

Wyoming mountains

 

More scenery from the Minnie

 

When we entered the Big Horn National Forest we drove a curvy mountain pass that went up to 9285 feet in elevation. It was slow moving but we made it to the top. Then we went back down to 8,000 feet. The terrain going up the mountain was prairie and had a mountain creek running along side of the mountain. We saw a big herd of domestic sheep coming over the top of a hill into a ravine. There were people riding horses and dogs herding the sheep down the hill.

As we drove towards the Sibley Lake Campground we saw a few dispersed camping areas. The road you had to go down looked pretty rough. We found our campground with no problems. The road in Sibley Lake Campground was a little rough and it was a dusty dirt road.

Once at the campground we drove around to find a site. There were some sites with power and were first-come-first-serve. The sites were marked available for tonight or tonight and tomorrow. Larry was confused so he stopped and talked to one of the hosts. She said that there were two first-come-first-serve sites and one was already taken. She told us we could have #17 but we may have to move in a couple of days, the park service was going to do some work on their site and they were suppose to move to site #17. We will see what happens.

Our site is a beautiful site with trees for privacy, fire-ring, picnic table and power. The restrooms are vault toilets but are clean. We didn’t have to get the blocks out to level the Minnie. There are some cross country ski trails nearby for us to hike. The lake isn’t too far away.

 

Deer in the Sibley Lake Campground

 

Sibley Lake

 

After checking-in and paying for the site, $17.00 per night with Senior pass. We setup our chairs and had lunch. We had a Philly cheese-steak Calzone for lunch.

After dinner we went for a walk around the campground to find the hiking trails. We walked to the lake. We met a girl and her father fishing on the fishing pier. They had caught three rainbow trouts for dinner. Dad’s job was to clean the fish, she just caught the fish. We also met a couple in the other loop. They told us there was a nice trail, that almost goes around the lake. They enjoy doing this trail in the evening. We walked around for 45 minutes for 1.5 miles. Then we went back to the campsite. Larry read a bit outside in his chair and I walked around for another half hour,  I had to stop because of  the smoke from a campfire which was a couple of sites from us. I ended up doing 1 mile. As we walked we saw a deer in the trees and met a few dogs. This campground is gorgeous with all the pine trees. We had a great day.

By the end of the day I had done 13,000 steps. I got my goal of 100,000 steps this week.