I awoke this morning and thought, ‘oh, duh, Laramie is a mountain town.’ Sure there were cowboys and cowgirls dancing in the street to a band wearing LARGE cowboy hats, and it’s pretty flat in town overall, but the elevation is 7165′ and the thunderstorms mountain-issue. We waited in the car for an extra half hour before unloading our gear last night as lightning flashed, thunder rumbled, and a deluge of rainwater filled the gutters.
Earlier in the day, before the clouds moved in, we did a short walk/hike on the Happy Jack Trail in the Medicine Bow National Forest, 15 minutes out of town. Today, starting our return trip home, we drove the Medicine Bow Scenic Byway west, enjoying views of 12,000 foot peaks and… a wolf! By its size and color, we were sure it wasn’t a coyote loping through a clearing in the woods, but we weren’t certain of our assessment until a little fact checking revealed Wyoming wolf populations are deemed ‘healthy’ enough to permit a hunt. The concept of trophy hunting these animals is not a pleasant thought to my mind. Especially since Wyoming wolves were just down listed from Endangered and Threatened Status in 2012. Ugh.
Deborah Crooks (www.DeborahCrooks.com) is a writer, performing songwriter and recording artist based in San Francisco whose lyric driven and soul-wise music has drawn comparison to Lucinda Williams, Chrissie Hynde and Natalie Merchant.
Singing about faith, love and loss, her lyrics are honed by a lifetime of writing and world travel while her music draws on folk, rock, Americana and the blues. She released her first EP “5 Acres” in 2003 produced by Roberta Donnay, which caught the attention of Rocker Girl Magazine, selecting it for the RockerGirl Discoveries Cd. In 2007, she teamed up with local producer Ben Bernstein to complete “Turn It All Red” Ep, followed by 2008’s “Adding Water to the Ashes” CD, and a second full-length CD “2010. She’s currently working on a third CD to be released in 2013.
Deborah’s many performance credits include an appearance at the 2006 Millennium Music Conference, the RockerGirl Magazine Music Convention, IndieGrrl, at several of the Annual Invasion of the GoGirls at SXSW in Austin, TX, the Harmony Festival and 2009’s California Music Fest, MacWorld 2010, Far West Fest and many other venues and events. She toured the Northwest as part “Indie Abundance Music, Money & Mindfulness” (2009) with two other Bay Area artists, and followed up with “The Great Idea Tour of the Southwest in March 2010 with Jean Mazzei.
