Ed Strube hands you a pair of blacked out safety glasses and has you put them on. A little light comes in around the edges, but you are, for all intents and purposes, blind. Then he puts your hand on the rope that will lead you through Casper Mountain's braille trail.

"When you're finished, you'll end up knowing every major tree on Casper Mountain by the feel," he promises.

It's scary, this being suddenly blind and trusting in a slender rope to guide you.

Knots warn of a plaque ahead. Strube reads them to you, but you could read them yourself if you knew braille.

The first two trees you learn about are a ponderosa pine and a sub-alpine fir. The ponderosa is scabby and scaly; the fir is smooth with lateral ridges. Other plaques deal with the ground's transformation from a soft forest floor to rock, the scent of mint plants and sagebrush, lichens, decaying plant matter that will build more forest floor, even the touch of water in Elkhorn Creek.

The trail, dedicated in 1975, has survived a flood and a tornado, but now it needs help, said Strube, who designed it and was instrumental in getting it built.

Underbrush needs to be cleared out and trees thinned to prevent fire that would destroy the trail, and the men who've cared for it for 31 years just aren't as young as they used to be.

Strube points out boards that need to be fixed, stations that must be moved, places where horsetail ferns must be transplanted because of the wear and tear from visitors.

Strube, Casper Lions Club members and other volunteers have been working at getting the brush cleared out - but there's still deadwood left over from a tornado that struck the area about 20 years ago, and many trees marked with the aqua blaze that targets them for removal.

Strube, a retired high school science teacher, got the idea for the trail when he was chosen to go to a National Science Foundation session in Colorado. Near the end of the course, the group went to the Roaring Fork Braille Trail in Colorado. Each participant wrote down his thoughts at the end. Strube wrote that he wanted to create one on Casper Mountain.

He came back and did just that. It took five years, and the Lions had to haul out 50 truckloads of trash from what Strube terms a "hippie camp," but by 1975, they had dedicated the trail. In 1976, it was the first trail in Wyoming to receive a National Recreation Trail designation, and the 13th braille trail in the nation to do so.

"This is my life," Strube says, looking across the first bridge and up the mountainside. "This is the dream of my life, and I'll keep at it until I'm in the box."