shooting stars

[Today’s run: rest day]

I was out on the back patio last night operating my portable ham radio setup for the Thursday night 20 meter fox hunt.  No moon, so the stars were out.  I remembered that there was supposed to be a meteor shower so I looked up periodically to see if anything was happening.  I saw some airplanes and a satellite but no meteors.  Later, my wife told me that the meteor shower was the night before.

You can tell I’m not much of an astronomer!

But it reminded me of another meteor shower.  It must have been in the mid-1970s, possibly 1976.  Our family camping trip that year was to Wyoming instead of Colorado.  Over the winter I had found reference in a magazine to a hiking guide for the Wind River Range and talked my dad into ordering a copy.  And that’s where we went.

I remember we left the highway northwest of Pinedale, WY and followed a very long, rough gravel road for miles to the Green River Lakes Campground.  We did some hiking from there, the most memorable being a trip to Slide Lake for a bit of fishing.  We didn’t catch any fish.  I think I remember that some other hikers gave us their catch.  Maybe that was another occasion.

And we happened to meet on the trail the author of the guide book.  That was an unusual treat.

But one night we were there was the date for a meteor shower, probably this same August meteor shower that happened the day before yesterday.  My brother Jon and I slept in a tent that night and kept the flap open.  I remember lying on our sleeping bags, on our backs, watching the shooting stars.