Vedauwoo - woo!

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Balanced Rock at Vedauwoo

One of the great pleasures of painting travel is discovering interesting, and even amazing new places. Sometimes there are little jewels hidden just off the side of the road - maybe a road we have been up and down many times. This was exactly the case on our recent workshop trip to Cheyenne, Wyoming. We were encouraged to take a short drive west on I-80 toward Laramie and get off at Vedauwoo (pronounced Vee-da-voo), a romanized version of the Arapahoe for “Land of the Earthborn Spirit.”

On previous trips in and through Wyoming we had noticed some unusual rocks at this spot from the highway, but had never stopped to investigate. This time we drove into the park which is within the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest to get a closer look and see what our painter friends were talking about. “Spectacular” is one word for the fascinating hoodoos and outcrops of enormous erosion-sculpted, 1.4 billion year old rocks. We drove the…