Where to watch the Great American Eclipse 2017 if you're in Glenrock, Wyoming: Paleon Museum

At 506 West Birch Street, across from the historic Higgins Hotel (across South 5th Street) is the Paleon Museum. The Paleon Museum is a dinosaur museum which features world class exhibits, and the story of the museum itself is an interesting one which I'll be sharing a bit later in this blog.

But my question is...when you come to Glenrock - or any other city in Wyoming that's in the Path of Totality for the Great American Eclipse that is going to happen on August 21, 2017- where are you going to watch it from?

You can watch it from your hotel room, of course, or from the parking lot of a mall, or in a campground. You may even have to watch it from the side of the highway if you couldn't get into one of the cities in time (there may well be bumper to bumper traffic of people coming up from Cheyenne or down from South Dakota (if you're going to watch the eclipse in Lusk).

My thought is that, if at all possible, you should watch it from somewhere symbolic. Or somewhere that will add extra meaning to the event.

If you're in Glenrock, that meaningful place just might be standing in the parking lot of the Paleon Museum, or better still out on one of their dig sites that is on the outskirts of Glenrock. (Starting this summer, Paleon will be re-opening its week-long dig camps for amateur enthusiasts who wish to help on their digs. While they haven't solidified their plans yet, they are considering holding a camp over the day of the eclipse. Stay tuned to learn whether that idea comes to fruition.)

Why is watching the Great American Eclipse from the Paleon museum parking lot or their dig site more meaningful/symbolic? Well, it's sort of alpha-omega. There's nothing earlier in time than dinosaurs (well, there is, but work with me here), and a total eclipse, so rare over the continental US, sort of represents the space race (well, space, anyway) so it's just ideal.

I visited the Paleon Museum today and talked with Sean, Stuart, and one of the bone biddies. (More on that after I have transcribed the interviews.)

If you'd like to have an up-close-and-personal tour of people working on fossils, the Paleon allows you to do that. After a tour of the exhibits given by an extremely knowledgeable guide, you can go into the Preparation Room and watch the Bone Biddies at work. (Or in the case below, Stuart - the administrator of the museum himself,  working on an exhibit while paleontologist Sean looks on.)

Stuart using an air gun to remove accretions on the fossil

The fossil fish and the skeleton diagram to help placement of the bones, prepared by Sean

Stuart and Sean discussing the work

If you're interested in dinosaurs at all, you'll want to visit the Paleon Museum in Glenrock - before or after you've watched the Great American Eclipse of 2017.

(Note that there's a sign on I-25, near the exit to Glenrock, that says the museum is open only from May to November. That's actually incorrect, the museum is open all year round. There Winter season hours are Thursday through Saturday from 11 am to 4 pm. Call them at (307) 436-2667 if you want to make doubly sure.)

Check out their Facebook page for current news.

https://www.facebook.com/GlenrockPaleontologicalMuseum/