Hanna, Wyoming No. 2

In Episode 3 of Prehistoric Road Trip we traveled to a cattle ranch / wind farm outside the town of Hanna, Wyoming, to meet up with a team of paleontologists researching the 56 million-year-old fossil plants found in the rock layers of the surrounding landscape. They were studying an ancient climate change event caused by a massive influx of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that wasn’t unlike the global warming we’re experiencing today — except, what’s happening now is on the scale of a few centuries, not a few million years. You can watch that segment of the television series here: Leaf it to the experts; Studying plants to understand an ancient global warming event

After eight months of planning the shoot from a windowless basement office in Chicago, this was the first field site we filmed at in June 2019 — and it was this view that greeted me as soon as I stepped out of the car at our campsite, with the setting sun radiating through clearing storm clouds. There’s something richly poetic and profound about filming a climate change segment on ranchland that’s now dually used for farming wind, too.