Autumn Equinox Wyoming Medicine Wheel

Equinox – September 22, 2013 – Wyoming

It was a wet and warm autumn in Wyoming this year. The drive with friends from Ranchester up into the Big Horn Mountains was an odyssey of color, light and freshness that only occurs during Indian Summer. A series of dramatic switchbacks and altitude gave us spectacular revelations of the Big Horn Basin. The projected overcast weather report changed and clouds disbursed leaving the splendor of Wyoming clear blue skies.

Dan knows these mountains well through camping, running sheep on horseback and collecting wood for his carvings. He has names for outcrops and stories to tell around each bend. He knows places to look where elk like to rest on hillsides, the names of streams as well as history.

Two years ago I visited this area with him in July to visit the Medicine Wheel, but that was a big snow year and we couldn’t get in. They were predicting eight feet of snow in this area the following week and it was likely the pass would close. There was just a small window for us to visit the site. This day had very little evidence of snow. The leaves on pockets of aspen were just starting to turn gold and light coral.

The 10,000 foot elevation Medicine Wheel is thought to have been constructed between 1200 – 1700 A.D. There are no specific artifacts to indicate who built it. It is near several early trade routes.

Part of the Big Horn National Forest, it has been designated a National Historic Landmark that acknowledges 10,000 years of Native American culture in this region. It continues to be used for ceremonial purposes.

The Medicine Wheel sits in solitude above timberline on Medicine Mountain with sparse, low vegetation sculpted by wind and snow. The wheel design is about 80 feet in diameter and is surrounded by stakes with horizontal wire to protect it. There is a wooden gate entrance only by permission for those offering ceremonies. On the wires hang hundreds of colorful prayer bundles and offerings that dance in the wind. Along the perimeter are small stones placed by visitors.

The directions are important in medicine wheel design. This center is a cairn of stones and other smaller cairns are in specific areas. There are 28 spokes radiating out from center acknowledging the four cardinal directions and other directions that relate to star, solar and lunar migrations, seasons, life stages, animals and plants. It is place making in a holistic, land based, circular-cyclical pattern. The medicine is in the teachings and messages that come through contemplation and observation.

You walk the perimeter of the Wheel in a clockwise direction. The pathway leading to the place comes in from the North. I walked it once slowly just to feel it out. There was a steady wind and I was fascinated with the sparseness of the site and rugged half buried stone patterns in contrast with the colors and textures of the offerings hanging on the fence.

I was attracted to a very large buffalo skull near the center facing outward between the south and the east. I carried a grey mottled river stone from Scotland. The second time around the wheel the impulse was to place it on the perimeter in the quadrant with the buffalo skull. In some interpretations that would be in the area of east – perspective and new beginnings and south – relationship and trust.

Autumn has always been a very creative time for me. And the equinoxes are times of balance and harmony in relation to the tipping of the earth’s magnetic pole. I seek out places built to experience these larger rhythms.