We pulled into Glenrock and Casper in the afternoon. First, we stopped at the Glenrock Paleo Museum. This is a living museum. They have archaeologists working on site, cleaning and preserving various Jurassic and Triassic fossils from the area. Wyoming is a hotbed of dinosaur artifacts, so there is a lot of interest around here.
Also, the artifacts and skeletons here are REAL. Not plaster recreations. It’s astounding. We spent a decent amount of time here even though it’s rather small. And one of the scientists gave us a personal tour of the premises.
Then we headed over to the Fort Casper Museum. We didn’t take into account what time it was. Turned out it was 4:45pm, and they closed at 5pm. We sweet talked the clerk into letting us quickly check out the museum.
What we didn’t know is, there is an associated Fort Casper Park, which has wagon train and architectural artifacts from all over the area. It’s massive, and it’s on par with the quality of content like the Western Expansion Museums in Saskatchewan. That’s a high bar.
We proceeded to sprint though the grounds to “see” everything before it closed. Maybe a lengthy run was just what our wrecked bodies needed after driving for 2000 miles at high altitude.
It was a great museum, but sadly we never really got to take it in. Maybe some day we’ll be coming through and can check it out again.
