Hot Springs State Park in Wyoming

More rummaging in the attic produced two more postcards (hidden in with a box of baby bottles no less!!). This is the first of the two:

I sent this card to my grandparents on 23 April 2009. It was right before my husband deployed to Afghanistan, and since at the time it was still just us two (and our two dachshunds, but no kiddos yet), we decided to drive the 19 hours from where we lived in Killeen, TX to Thermopolis, WY during block leave to visit his grandmother who lives there. I hadn't even been in the US for a whole year yet, so I greatly welcomed the opportunity to see a new place and be able to add another state to my list of "States visited". That made 3 after Florida and Texas, not counting New York, New Jersey and Illinois, since all I saw of those states was the inside of the airports.

This area was so much different from what I grew up with in Belgium, and Texas! Half the time when we woke up in the mornings, there were a few deer in his grandma's back yard eating fruit out of the trees. I got to see bison for the first time in my life, and eat it too. The state maintains a herd of bison on the edge of town. You can drive your car into the pasture and follow a dirt road through it. If you're lucky, you can see the animals graze. We got to see them off in the distance, but never close by. There's lots of mountains around too.

Thermopolis is the southernmost municipality in the Big Horn Basin, and gets its name from the hot springs located here, and is Greek for "Hot City". The largest one is shown on the card. The back of the card says

The Big Spring is the world's largest mineral hot spring, flowing 18,600,000 gallons of water per day at a constant temperature of 135 degrees.

For people who aren't familiar with gallons and degrees Fahrenheit (like me... I still need to use the converter app on my best friend Mr. iPhone), that would be 70.408.659,18 liters per day at a temperature of 57.22 degrees Celcius. In other words, a whole lot of hot water! These springs are open to the public for free as part of a treaty that was signed in 1896 with the Shoshone and Arapaho Indian tribes.
Their swimming pool uses water from the springs and is an outdoor pool that is open year round since the water is hot. They actually cool it down in a different basin first because it's TOO hot to be swimming in it. That hot water must be a nice way to warm up in winter, although I don't think I'd enjoy getting out of the water outside. Pin It