You Pass Billions Of Years Driving Across Wyoming

If you're driving through Wyoming, you're driving through one of the most interesting places on Earth. But some people think of it as a long, boring trip.

Driving through Wyoming is a journey through hundreds of millions, and in some places billions, of years of Earth's history. In some locations, including driving up the Bighorn Mountains or through Wind River Canyon, there are signs showing how much history you're passing by.

Slow down and look from Thermopolis to Shoshoni along the Wind River Canyon Scenic Byway exposes roughly 2.5 to 3 billion years of geological time in a short stretch, featuring 2.5-billion-year-old Precambrian granite at the base and the "Great Unconformity" gap.

A drive along I-25 from Sheridan down toward Cheyenne passes through ancient coal swamps. Yes, the area was once a swamp. That is why there is so much coal there. The same is true of northeastern Wyoming. Look for Cretaceous hogbacks from the Western Interior Seaway and the high plains uplifted during the Laramide Orogeny.

Watch this video below. A geologist explains what your driving over.

Climbing from Red Lodge toward Beartooth Pass, you'll pass over a 3-to-4-billion-year timeline of Precambrian basement rocks, glacial U-shaped valleys, and ancient sea deposits. All of Wyoming, at one point, was at the bottom of a sea.

Along southern Wyoming, I-80 and the high-desert basins seem boring to many drivers, unless you know how it got there. The Medicine Bow Mountains and historical paths were carved through millions of years of tectonic and erosional activity.

If you know what you are looking at then you'll know why it is anything but boring. There are geology travel books and videos to help you understand what you are seeing.