Its awesomeness is threefold:
1) It's an ingenious solution to the snow-plow-knocking-over-the-mailbox problem: mount the mailbox on a spring to absorb the impact of the plowed snow. I've seen several mailboxes like this, so this photo is a tribute to all of them.
2) It's resourceful. The springs used for this type of mailbox all seem to have been salvaged from old pieces of farm equipment.
3) It's visible in the previous weather station photo.
Nothing spectacular, but at an elevation of 4624 feet, it's the highest altitude I've reached so far, and is less than 1000 feet lower than the pass I will take over the continental divide.
It's not really visible in this photo, but there's a snow-speckled mountain (another first for this trip!) just barely peeking out behind the trees in the background near the center of the shot.
Don needs to work on his prepositions.
Then I saw the panel on the bottom.
But I stopped to appreciate this sign, a nice change from the "NO CAMPING" signs you normally see at rest areas.
I spent last night at a Hutterite colony named King Colony. I believe there are currently 57 people living there, after their latest split sent half of the group to Roundup (once the population reaches a certain limit, the colony splits and one group moves to a new location). They were very friendly and welcoming, and Anna (right) and her daughter Lori took good care of me, making breakfast and packing me a bunch of snacks for the road.
A name whose origins are forever obscured, buried beneath the shifting sands of time.
After the quiet gravel roads of North Dakota, the high-speed truck and RV traffic on Highway 200 has been somewhat jarring to me. So it was quite nice returning to the solitude of gravel for today's walk, although my shoes and wheels may beg to differ.
