Laramie Peak

 

Laramie Peak the highest mountain in the Laramie Range of the Rocky Mountains stands 10,276 feet above sea level. The Peak, as we locals call it, doesn’t sound too impressive until you look at the land around it. Only a few miles away the land is 5,000 feet lower. This makes Laramie Peak more than a mile high from the surrounding area, now that’s impressive.

Easily seen for more than 100 miles, travelers on the Oregon and Mormon trails watched it for more than a week, wondering if they would ever reach it. Laramie Peak let voyagers know that they had reached the mountains, a place on the trail they had waited many months to reach.

Mark Twain in his famous western journey, Roughing It, wrote of the peak. “We passed Fort Laramie in the night, and on the seventh morning out we found ourselves in the Black Hills, with Laramie Peak at our elbow (apparently) looming vast and solitary--a deep, dark, rich indigo blue in hue, so portentously did the old colossus frown under his beetling brows of storm-cloud. He was thirty or forty miles away, in reality, but he only seemed removed a little beyond the low ridge at our right.”

We live in a beautiful area between Fort Laramie (13 miles east) and Laramie Peak, (35 miles west)The North Platte River, Oregon and Mormon trails are less than a half mile away. We take a look at the peak every day, if the top has cloud cover the wind will blow, if the top is visible, mild weather and its never wrong.

I took these photos of Laramie Peak last week, one from atop Spotted Tail Mountain in Guernsey State Park and the small one on the right from west of town.