Sabbatical News: Pictures from Ring Lake Ranch

Good afternoon everyone. Again, my thanks for your interest in following along with my travels. Here are a selection of pictures from Ring Lake Ranch. Some of you will know Ring Lake from personal experience. Others will know it from Sarah and my mention of it. It is a jewel of a place, tucked into a small glacial valley in the bowl of the Wind River Mountains, just outside the small western Wyoming town of Dubois. A quick word here on Dubois. First of all, the pronunciation will come as surprise, and to French-speakers perhaps a whiff of scandal. It rhymes with ‘noise.’ My father was a a native of Wyoming, and as far as I can tell, they are a people ready and willing to make any word their own. And also, Dubois was a favorite haunt of the outlaw Butch Cassidy. Welty’s ‘Department’ store claims that he did his shopping with them. Sarah and I have been spending a couple of weeks at Ring Lake every summer for about seven years. It’s tagline is ‘Renewal in Sacred Wilderness,’ which reflects the vision of its founder, a Episcopal or Methodist minister (depending on who’s telling the story), who wanted to create a space in the wilderness for people to gather and form community around weekly programs led by visiting academics, theologians, artists and songwriters and a variety of other speakers. The land on which the Ranch sits is sacred in the sense that is dotted with a series of petroglyphs, ancient rock etchings created by the descendants of the Eastern Shoshone. The belief is that Shoshone youth of a certain age would pursue something like a vision quest, spending days alone among the rocks discerning a sense of purpose for their lives. The artwork is part of the result of that discernment.