Oregon Trail floozies are discovered in Jackson Hole

If you've ever been to Jackson Hole, Wyo., you must have seen the very unique elk antler arches that surround the town square. When we were vacationing there in 1988 a Japanese man asked my husband if he could take his wife's picture alongside Norbert because he was wearing a cowboy hat and boots and they wanted a picture of "a real American cowboy." We laughed a lot about that.

Well, last month when we were vacationing there, another kind of comedy was happening under the antler arch. Workers were replacing it with new antlers and also doing some repair work on the foundation when they saw an old brass box sticking out of the ground. The men were surprised when they opened it to find what was called "antique pornography" from the 1800s.

There were pictures of women showing their shins. That may not sound very sexy but the titles of the photos were a bit more revealing with words like "The Fur Trapper" and "Floozies of the Oregon Trail." The old wild west town of Jackson certainly has some interesting history.

Another very interesting and dramatically beautiful area that we saw last month was the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. The jagged mountain range was named Sawtooth because it looks like an upside-down saw.

While we were crossing the awesome mountains on our motorcycle, we stopped to view a historical site at the 8,450-foot elevation. When I took off my helmet, a swarm of tiny "no-see-ums" flew into my hair and bit my scalp. That caused lots of little itchy bumps on my head that lasted a long time. I should have kept my helmet on.

One other time when we were exploring Moab with our Fish Springs friends Gail and Tom McCormick, we were bitten by the no-see-ums. Gail and I both were targets of these miserable pests.

I guess they like girls' longer hair than guys because they didn't bother our husbands at all. I feel itchy just thinking about it.

On the road again: It was our wedding anniversary this month and we celebrated with a two-day getaway over the mountain. We wanted to get far away from the heat and also the smoke that was plaguing Carson Valley.

We rode the motorcycle around Lake Tahoe and I thought we'd see more evidence of the recent Angora Fire but most of the devastation was hidden from the road. The Tahoe basin was still smoky so we continued to ride northwest to get away from it. We went to Truckee and the sky was thick with smoke and the temperature was rising.

We kept on driving down Highway 89 in peaceful Plumas County as the temperature rose while the gray sky thickened. We stopped at a roadside rest and a man there said the smoke was coming from a fire near Susanville while another man said it was from the Thomas Fire (wherever the heck that was!) or maybe from Independence.

Nobody seemed to know. After going through socked-in Graeagle we knew we couldn't out-run the smoke and it was time to get to shelter. We were so hot and sweaty and we needed to find a motel so we headed for nearby Portola.

My eyes were stinging by the time we checked into the motel. We stayed there in an air-conditioned room and watched the local television weather reports and discovered that the fire causing our smoke was coming from the Antelope Complex fire. In our attempt to beat the heat and smoke, we had driven right into it. But things worked out OK anyway.

There was a nice steak house just down the street and we had a romantic evening cuddling in the motel. The next day a giant thunderstorm with hundreds of lightning strikes chased us back down the mountain.

-- Linda Monohan can be reached at 782-5802.