The first couple of months in a new place becomes a practice in information sorting. Where to buy certain groceries, when to ride your bike where, best coffee shop, and now, as a furmom, where to take your dog. There’s a prairie dog colony near my house, and many daily walks center occur near there. Sometimes the light and brown palette are sublime.
One of my favorite new web platforms is Sniffspot, a rent-by-the-hour doggy park AirBnB. For $9 an hour, Ivory can enjoy an acre to herself to run, fetch, dig, and (often) bark at passing herds of antelope. What’s nice about this particular acre south of Laramie is the 360-degree views, so if I time it right, I can bring a book and watch the sun go down over the Snowy Range in the Medicine Bow Mountains. It’s a nice way to end a day: reading, sunsetting, and tiring the husky out.
Like most habits, dogwalking can turn rutty, revisiting the same old haunts because they’re familiar or convenient or the information sorting machine can’t handle any more tasks. For me it’s been the two dog parks in town, the prairie dog village, neighborhood walks, and forays into the outskirts of campus.
And then, a suggestion from weeks or months ago reappears, and the rut gets disrupted.
What I’m learning about Wyoming is that there isn’t an app for that. I’ve got high speed internet and my colleagues and I learn new technology almost every week, but from what I’ve seen Wyomingites don’t post their secret spots online. I’ve been to a few rural towns, and although the apps don’t tell me there’s a dog park in town, the people will tell me it’s down yonder by the Safeway. And they don’t use online platforms like Sniffspot. In the Laramie area, there’s exactly one private dog park available to rent out by the hour. And there’s plenty of open space. I don’t see as many side hustles here as I did in Colorado. Population density perhaps? Or approach to life?
So, my new boss mentioned Monolith in what I call information overload June, my first month on the new job. Learning a new university that operates like a corporation (I’d forgotten) while learning a new job is kind of a lot. Although not a dog owner, she’d told me about this monolith place southwest of town where people take their dogs. After an unsuccessful Saturday outing (because I relied on Google Maps instead of common sense), I returned after work a few days later for a nice stroll along the ranches and the Laramie River. You won’t find Monolith on Trip Advisor and it’s got barely a mention on Google Reviews, but if you recall that Wyoming has mucho public land and know the names of the some of the agencies, you can dig and find more information on it.
Monolith Ranch is owned by the City of Laramie and leased out in some kind of water rights thing I haven’t wrapped my head around yet. Fishing and strolling are the main activities here, so we took it for a spin. There was only one person fishing, and we barely acknowledged one another. Better to leave well enough alone.
Ivory and I enjoyed our collective almost solitude, breathing in the slow-moving river and the end of day.
SheSpoke 