Laramie Hoping People Will Forget Mathew Shepherd?

Monday, July 16, 2012--Laramie to Casper to Thermopolis

After breakfast, I headed out to explore Laramie going first to the University.  One interesting thing I did not know is that the University of Wyoming is the ONLY state university in Wyoming!!  Any other state institutions are just community colleges, so anyone wanting a college education within the state must go to UW for the degree.  I stopped to see the UW Art Museum and Heritage Center which share the same ugly building.  There were 4 different art shows at the museum, and two of them were quite interesting--art from Papua New Guinea and art moderne works by American artists.

From there, I drove to the main part of the campus.  I had looked online, and the only page I found that said anything about Mathew Shepard seemed to be an independent one.  It identified the location of the bar where he was the night he was killed, and it showed an image of a bench which supposedly exists on the UW campus at a point called Quealy Square.  It also points out how road names have been changed since his murder.  While I explored the campus which is quite beautiful with a large green in the middle that has landscaped (trees, large stones, benches) sitting areas at points around it and with beautiful old stone buildings, I looked for the Shepherd bench.  I never found it.  I looked at the campus map, and there was no reference to Quealy Square or to the bench.  Inside the student center, there was a much more detailed map of the campus with an index, but Quealy Square was not named on the map nor listed in the index.  Then when I went downtown, the building housing the bar where he had the encounter with the two men who murdered him was missing and replaced by a new tourist office which takes up the whole block.  I could see no memorial.  It makes me think that Laramie and the University of Wyoming wish people would forget about what happened there and do not feel that no kind of memorial (a bench, wherever it exists, is not much) is needed.  Too bad.  I left the city with a bad feeling about it all.

I took back roads to enjoy the scenery.  The first one took me westward over the mountains through Centennial to Saratoga.  The former is almost a ghost town with only 100 residents but lots of motels and cafes on the scenic route.  The latter, at the end of the scenic route was a quaint, attractive town.  The second one took me northward from that area to Casper.  The first route was beautiful and paved all the way.  The second one, had wonderful scenery, but much of it was unpaved.  The problem wasn't that but was the fact that the surface was very rough like a washboard making it necessary to only go about 15 mph much of the time.  My neck was sore from the tension.  I'll pick my back roads from now on based on whether they are paved or not.

Casper is about the same size as Cheyenne and as Laramie.  All three have close to 60,000 residents.  Casper has more of a "business" look to it.  The downtown has tall bank buildings, for instance.  Downtown was quite interesting.  There were two old movie theaters still operating with one of them showing an independent film.  But Casper was overrun with tourists.  I don't know if it is because they have a rodeo every night all summer making people want to stop there for the night or what.  Anyway, I couldn't get a room there.

Since I had seen everything I wanted to see in Casper except their community college campus which has been named one of the 5 prettiest in the country, I decided to head toward my next projected stop.  It was a little over 100 miles westward.  I arrived in Thermopolis and ran into another problem.  There are only a couple of major motels and they were full.  I expected that, but I hoped to find a small motel.  Well, the small motels have offices that are already closed for the night.  I'm going to a camping site that I passed on the way into town and pitch my tent, I guess.

Steps Walked:  12,024