Their crowns looked like umbrellas that had been turned inside out and were streaming off the trunks downwind. “Wind erosion has tremendous significance in this part of the Rocky Mountain region,” Love said. “Even down in Laramie, the trees are tilted. Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain. When the land was surveyed, the surveyors couldn’t keep their tripods steady. They had to work by night or near sunrise. People went insane because of the wind.” His mother, in her i905 journal, said that Old Hanley, passing by the Twin Creek school, would disrupt lessons by zakelijke energie making some excuse to step inside and light his pipe. She also described a man who was evidently losing to the wind his struggle to build a cabin:
He was putting up a ridgepole when the wind was blowing. He looked up and saw the chipmunks blowing over his head. By and by, along came some sheep, dead. At last one was flying over who was not quite gone. He turned around and said, “Baa” -and then he was in Montana.
Erosion, giving the landscape its appearance, is said to be the work of water, ice, and wind; but ‘vind is, almost everywhere, a minimal or negligible factor, with exceptional exceptions like Wyoming. Looking back across the interstate-north up the crest of the range-among ponderosas, aspens, and limber pines we could see the granites of Vedauwoo Glen, which had weathered out in large blocks, as granite does, along intersecting planes of weakness, while wind-borne grit had rounded off the comers of the blocks. Where some had tumbled and become freestanding, grit flying close above the ground had abraded them so rigorously that the subsummit surface was, in that place, a flat of giant mushrooms. The cliffs behind them also looked organic-high piles of rounded blocks, topped in many places by narrowly balanced boulders that were zakelijke energie vergelijken undercut almost to the point of falling. Love, contemplative, appeared to be puzzling out some deep question in geomorphology. At length, he said, “When wild horses defecate, they back up to a place where other wild horses have defecated, and so on, until they build turd towers, like those, in the air. Domestic horses do not do this.”