Up close and personal on U.S. 85

Since Brad has been in Wyoming for the last three years -- I mean months -- I've made several trips up to see him.

Last weekend I went with a purpose. Finishing the month and a half worth of paperwork he still hadn't gotten done from mid-April to the last of May. I was determined. We'd spend the whole weekend in the motel room working on it if we had to.

All the other times my youngest son and I have taken the eight-hour trip, it was in the daylight. This time I wasn't going to see daylight until I was about an hour from my destination.

Brad had told me about the whitetails sporting large racks in the area. But I didn't believe him. The four times Jer and I had gone up there I hadn't spotted one deer. The only thing I saw was antelope, frolicking in the pastures hundreds of feet from the roadside.

But that was at 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

At 6 o'clock in the morning, they all congregate along U.S. Highway 85 for their morning coffee. I saw hundreds of deer along the highway -- and no I'm not exaggerating. Groups of 10 or 20 deer would hear my car coming and decide the walk sign had just lit up for them. Luckily for me, I was able to see all of them and slow down as they meandered across the highway.

One deer however, -- a nice-sized buck with a 18-point rack with felt still firmly attached, and which appeared to spread at least halfway across my lane of the highway -- ambled out into my lane just as I approached his grazing spot. I honked the horn as I normally would, hoping to scare him and any relatives or friends he might have brought along with him, back into the sagebrush he had come from.

Instead, he loped along, down the middle of the highway. After an experience several years ago when I tried to go around a deer and he turned into the car and did several thousand dollars worth of damage, you might understand my concern. The two of us moseyed along, he on the hoof, and me in my Crossfire beeping my horn and dropping my speed from 80 -- I mean 65 -- to a mere 10 miles an hour. We drove along like this for the next mile until, obviously, he found some other kind of entertainment to keep him busy and he went from 10 mph to 50 in 6.5 seconds.

Several herds of antelope also found that grazing along the highway was preferable to the open fields.

Brad has often said that hitting an antelope would be something akin to hitting a jackrabbit. What he doesn't seem to understand is that I'm not driving a Ford F350 with a grill guard that could withstand an elephant strike.

The trip has taught me a very important lesson. If you're going to Gillette, make sure and do it between the hours of 9 a.m., and 5 p.m.

I have discovered that deer and antelope aren't near as pretty up close and personal. I much prefer to see them through a pair of binoculars, the viewfinder on a camera, the scope of a Mossberg or through the sites of a muzzleloader.

I think I'll save up close and personal for the zoo.