Serving all of Eastern Laramie County since 1908
Serving all of Eastern Laramie County since 1908
Sorted by date Results 51 - 75 of 200
There is this new sad joke where the new Wyoming state license plate depicts the back end of a U-Haul truck with our Steamboat bucking horse emblazed on the end gate. – Pat Henderson, Sheridan In a recent column, I opined that a lot of Wyoming is going through good times along with the obvious bad times hitting places dependent on energy industries. Many of my friends let me know that even places that appeared healthy are nervous and confidence is breaking down. For example: In Sheridan, f...
There is always a tired old saying: “When you lose your job, it is a recession. When I lose mine, it is a depression.” That has never been truer in Wyoming than it is today. A few years ago, I could not find a discouraging economic word as I travelled from one end of the state to the other promoting my Wyoming-themed coffee table books. But lately it seems I am driving in and out of a patchwork of wildly diverse places where a lot of folks are suffering economically while nearby other folks are...
Although Wyoming has outstanding interstate freeways and high quality two-lane highways, if you want to get a good discussion started, just mention your favorite back roads. I did that in last week’s column about my favorites and the response was terrific. For example: Pat Schmidt of Cheyenne: “The Transpark Highway from Lovell through Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. It was meant to go clear to Hardin, Mont., tracing the west edge of the canyon, but was halted a short distance into Mont...
Wyoming’s back roads and mountain roads are some of the best-kept secrets of our great state. These are the places favored by the locals and cherished by visitors who can’t help coming back to them again and again. On Fathers Day Nancy and I drove up the winding switchbacks of the famous Loop Road that starts at the end of Sinks Canyon just outside of Lander. It was busy up there that day. On one big switchback, we encountered a bicyclist, a motorcyclist, a big SUV and a large pickup towing a f...
It could be argued that many of the core values and traditional activities cherished by most Wyoming people do not match up with the values of the majority of American citizens. If not so today, how will those values match up in the distant future? This column is being written looking ahead to the year 2040, when another generation has approached middle age. Trends concerning hunting, guns, rodeo, treatment of animals, gender stereotypes and our love affair with fossil fuels that are rapidly...
After visiting six states in the last three weeks, it is abundantly clear that we are no longer in the pesky drought that affected western states in such a dire way over the last two decades. The greenest state, though, is Wyoming. The Red Desert now has a new name: The Green Desert. Our famous foothills outside of Lander that protect us from the awesome beauty of the bare Wind River Mountains, known as the Lander Front, are as green as my front yard. Rivers and creeks are running high. By the...
Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park has been in the news a lot lately, and, indeed, it should be. I took the liberty here to call this park “Wyoming’s” but the reality is that this wonderful place belongs to the world. I happen to think it is the most amazing place on the entire planet. And what a gift to all of us Wyomingites that it is located right here in our great state. Most of you know that I travel the state giving talks about my coffee table books. One of the places featured a lot in...
If I were asked to give a commencement talk to a group of high school graduates this year, here is what I would have told them: Today’s graduating seniors face a much different world than the one faced by their parents and grandparents. These graduates face a time when even a college education might not be enough. They face a lifetime of education. A paradigm has occurred here. We are living during a time when the world is changing so fast, successful workers will need constant retraining and c...
Xenophobia: intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries. The definition of the oddball word Xenophobia came true in all its ugliness here in Wyoming when the United States government wrongly imprisoned more than 11,000 Americans of Japanese descent in a camp between Cody and Powell during World War II. However, there are so many stories that have come out of that incarceration and many of them are positive. One of the best and most often repeated is how a young Cody Boy...
Not sure how to weave torrential rains, big major league home runs, some crazy Cheyenne bicyclists and a few other items that caught my eye into a coherent statewide column, but here goes: The Great Cheyenne flood of 1985 dumped six inches of rain on the state’s capital city and caused devastating damage and killed some folks, too. Here in Lander, we endured 4.64 inches of showers over a 48-hour period on May 6-8 and I started to think about that Cheyenne deluge. Nearly a thousand basements were...
When it comes to national and state elections, 2016 will be remembered as a real doozy. Most folks I talk with cannot remember a national election campaign like the one that we are witnessing. For two things, there has never been a campaign this long and there has never been one with so many candidates. The media is covering it like a sporting event. But it is not. It has become a Reality Show. Nationally, the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns are providing most of the entertainment...
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, our little town of Lander had a group of crusty old fellows known as “the 9 old men” who pretty much ran things. Now keep in mind, in those days Lander was a big town in Wyoming. It was bigger than Gillette, Douglas, Cody, Riverton, Green River, Evanston, Rawlins, Worland, Jackson, Powell and Buffalo. Today, most of those towns are bigger than Lander or about the same size. Our nine old men included Pharmacist George Case, Hotelier Harold Del Monte, Banker Har...
(Note: Last week, we wrote how Lander lost 550 high paying iron ore mining jobs and Fremont County lost 2,000 high-paying uranium-mining jobs in the 1980s. This is how local leaders turned the town around.) Impartial observers like the late Gov. Ed Herschler would point at Lander as the “worst hit” town in Wyoming during the 1980s depression. To those of us who lived through it, we certainly agreed with him, although that distinction brought us no solace. There was work to do. Our pro...
It is a recession when you lose your job. It is a depression when I lose mine. – Old saying. With the loss of over 5,000 energy jobs, it should be interesting to readers to read about what happened during the last Wyoming bust at the most mining-oriented town in the state. Here is that story: In February 1993, a book was widely quoted around the country, which rated the 100 best small towns in America. Lander ranked number 5 and was prominently mentioned by the author during a visit to the N...
As a state that relies on fossil fuels for much of its economic success, it is interesting to equate Wyoming’s energy job recession with nations with a similar destiny such as Russia and Saudi Arabia. Here in Wyoming, the recent layoffs in the Powder River Basin coal mines and at railroads that haul our coal, plus steep declines in oil and natural gas prices, have sent shock waves throughout the state’s economy. Until those coal jobs were lost, the state seemed to be more concerned about los...
How do you prepare for a 36-inch spring snowstorm that is headed your way? Before I answer that question, let me set the scene for you: It was on a fantastic and amazing Easter Sunday afternoon when we got the news that this wonderful warm weather was about to change – and it was about to change in the most dramatic way possible. Three feet of snow? I always tell people that the Wyoming winters are mild. It is spring that will lay you low. Here in Lander, we average 110 inches of snow per y...
Have you ever seen anything like the current political race for president of the United States? After watching from 1956 to 2012, I have never seen anything like this bizarre Trump-Cruz-Hillary-Bernie circus. It “trumps” any other presidential election. Perhaps its craziness can be blamed on GOP front-runner, businessman and reality TV star Donald Trump. Or maybe it is because of the incredible length of the campaigns and the fact everyone, everywhere can keep up with every single sound bit...
Last week, we took our time cruising through that amazing labyrinth known as Wind River Canyon between Shoshoni and Thermopolis. The narrow towering walls staring down on you (sometimes through the sunroof) can make a person feel pretty small. It took Mother Nature millions of years to carve that gorge through the Owl Creek Mountains, sometimes gouging out less than an inch a year. Over time, you get this impressive cut in the mountains. And how important is this cut? It is a primary route for...
Is Wyoming on the downhill slide toward another bust? Our coal mining industry is under attack. Oil and natural gas prices have plummeted so fast that expensive fracking projects scheduled all over the state have been cancelled. Thousands of men and women have been laid off. Tax revenues are down and continuing to decline. Whoa, this is starting to sound familiar. Are we going back to the future? If so, this is not our first rodeo. Back in 2008, the whole country reeled over the biggest...
A small book full of firsts about Wyoming was written two years ago by First Lady Carol Mead, and it is an excellent compilation of unique events that happened first here in Wyoming. It would seem to make sense to me that every school child in the state should have access to it. I have written news stories, books and columns about Wyoming for 45 years and learned a lot from her book. Most everyone in Wyoming and across the nation knows about the two biggest “firsts” that occurred here – Yello...
It was September 1990, and then-Wyoming Gov. Mike Sullivan’s Irish temper was hot. It was at the Lander One Shot Antelope Hunt and I was driving then-U. S Sen. Al Simpson back to the hotel headquarters. Sullivan spotted us and came charging out. Simpson took one look and said: “Oh darn (well, words sort of like that), this is not going to be pretty.” As he rolled down the window, Sullivan let Simpson have his full fury about some project Sullivan had been working on for years and that he felt...
The political fates of our nation and of Wyoming are being decided right now across the country through a series of presidential primaries, debates and caucuses. Here in Wyoming, we are merely observers. Or are we? I was recently in Nevada, one of the battleground states, and got to follow some of the national candidates and make some observations on the national scene. On the Democratic side, I always assumed Hillary Clinton would be our next president. She is not my choice but with all the...
Soon, members of the tourism industry in Wyoming will be gathering in Cheyenne to celebrate a banner year, which saw about ten million people visiting the state in 2015, including over 4 million visiting Yellowstone National Park. These numbers are spectacular and deserve to be celebrated. And while we celebrate our number-two industry we also have to be vigilant that members of the Legislature do not attempt to gut bills that call for Wyoming to spend money promoting tourism. While our...
Picture this: State Sen. Leland Christensen (R-Alta) is walking the neighborhoods of Worland knocking on doors. It is cold and snowy. He encounters “a friend of a friend” and they talk for 20 minutes. This is an example of politics in the least populated state in the country on some of the coldest and shortest days of the year. Christensen, like ten others, is seeking nomination for the state’s lone Congressional seat and he is working hard. He shares his story along with a photo of himse...
It is embarrassing to see how shortsighted and stingy, the “settler” members of our Wyoming legislature can be. Gov. Matt Mead pointed out this during a recent meeting with the Wyoming Press Association when he criticized a vote by members of the Joint Appropriations Committee to reject $20 million in federal money for Medicaid. Mead’s recommendation lost narrowly. Yet most folks hope it can be resurrected during the budget session. For these committee members to vote down such an important infu...
