Horrific fires?

         Devastating drought?

         Limited crop yields?

         Rivers, creeks and lakes running dry?

         Heck, I am just enjoying the best spring in memory here in Wyoming. And then knowledgeable people keep bringing up these horrible scenarios, which could occur as a result of this balmy weather.

         A typical Wyoming spring is really not a spring. The old joke that the four seasons in Wyoming are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter and Construction usually rang true around this time of year with “Still Winter” describing March and April.

Now it is May and we can look back on the driest March on record – zero inches of moisture. And just about the driest April on record, too. In Lander, April normally is our wettest month.

         Although I am loving this oddball spring, it seemed appropriate to see how things are going around the state:

         In Cheyenne, Tom Satterfield said it has been looking like a snowstorm at his place with all the cotton from the cottonwood trees in the neighborhood. They are a month early, he says. “Every morning walk sees new plants in bloom and fruit trees area glorious. Most of the bulb plants (daffodil and tulips) are gone but the lilacs are starting. ”

         Phil Roberts in Laramie says his crabapple trees blossomed out in mid-April. “The trees seem to be confused. They think they are in Fort Collins or Cheyenne.” Debbie Hammons says in Worland her normal lilacs, which she places on graves on Memorial Day, are now blooming. “

         Pat Schmidt in Thermopolis says he has been amazed at watching all the school children in his town running around in March and April without coats. Unprecedented.

         Bob Coe of Cody says “The Horse’s Head (rock formation) on the South Fork melted out early this year. The reins were showing in early April. Last year it was the second week of May before you could see them.”

         In the Buffalo area, ranchers and farmers in the Rock Creek and Clear Creek areas watch the snow on a peak in the Bighorns called the Ant Hill. If it had snow on it by June 15, it would be a decent year for irrigation, reports Jim Hicks. “Last year, it was covered with snow until mid-July. This year, the snow was nearly gone by mid-April. That has not happened since 1988.”

         Mary Murray of Lander who helps operate the horsemanship program at Wyoming Catholic College reports: “ Our horses shedded out a good month early – makes for happy nesting birds.”

         Leslie Blythe of Casper who has show dogs offered a similar comment. “Our dogs are shedding or what we call ‘blowing coat,’ much sooner than normal. With many shows coming up in May and June, this is not a good situation.”

         Steve Johnson, the pro at the Riverton country club, told a coffee mate of mine that they set an all time record for number of rounds in a day – over 250.   Cheyenne’s Airport Golf Club also had a record April, it was reported.

         Tom Cox reports that as a grandpa, this was been the best season ever for going to grandkids’ soccer games. The same is true about the usually non-existent Wyoming track season.

         In my back yard, we had some wild geese hatch out five goslings. I swear that is at least a month early. They have been coming to our place for the past three years and always build a nest on a little island in one of our ponds.

         As research for my new book, I have been spending a lot of time in the Red Desert. Local desert rats Jim Smail and Joe Motherway, who each have been going to the desert for over 50 years, say it is the driest they have ever seen it at this time of year.

         After worrying about floods in the Wind River Basin for the past two years, our snow packs are in the 45 percent range. This is a great cause of worry about fires later this summer and fall. Folks who know these things have been worried about the Shoshone National Forest for decades, as it would not take much to start a gigantic fire. So far the conditions are perfect to see such an event.

         It is so dry, our local lawn sprinkler expert Brian Clark was in our yard getting the system ready to go. He had over 60 calls from people in April, which was totally unheard of.

         Yep, sure looks like a dry season.

         One rare place that popped up when I asked Facebook friends for suggestions of their favorite “magical places” (and where I do not expect to go soon) was the summit of Devil’s Tower. 

Alan O’Hashi, the director of the Cheyenne International Film Festival, has been there three times and says it is spectacular. Maybe someone can send me some photos.

         Today’s column is a list of a great many magical places that were submitted in my quest to identify, not only the “seven greatest natural wonders” of Wyoming, but also the “33 other fascinating places,” which will be included in my new book.

         Here are some other suggestions. What do you think?

         Crazy Woman – Both Jim Hicks and Doug Osborn, who live in the Buffalo area, touted Crazy Woman Canyon in the Big Horn Mountains. “I love the lower portion of the canyon where the stream disappears in a sink and flows through giant boulders in other places. You can see brook trout darting around,” Hicks expounds.

         Lunch Tree – Jackson expert Clay James says this place is magical to him. Back in 1926 it was where the Rockefeller family had lunch when they started their quest to create Grand Teton National Park. It is just north of Jackson Lake Lodge.

         Red Desert – Cheyenne’s Rob Black loves desert places like the Boar’s Tusk and the vast sand dunes just north of Rock Springs. He is a history buff and just cannot get enough of the entire South Pass area, southwest of Lander.

         Squaretop Mountain – Hart and Josey Jacobsen of Lander love to go camping and sailing in the Fremont Lake area. David Kottcamp also lists the Green River Lakes trailhead, especially Dale Lake in that same area.

Medicine Wheel – Pat Schmidt of Thermop sent me a list that included the Medicine Wheel high in the Big Horns plus the FAA radar site near Lovell, Devil’s Canyon and Porcupine Falls and Bucking Mule Falls.

         Beaver Rim – Mike Brown says the Sand Draw/Beaver Rim area looks barren but when you venture off into it where you find incredible scenery and out of this world rock formations. The view from the rim back toward the Wind River Mountains is one of the best in the state.

         Wind River Mountains – Lander native Erica Davis Mazurie reminds that when her parents took her to the summit of Lizard Head, she was the youngest person to ever climb it. Bob Scholl and Dan Good say no place is like the Cirque of the Towers in the heart of the Wind River Mountains.

         Wind River Canyon – Lois Herbst of Shoshoni loves this canyon. Trent Blankenship of Pavillion says he has a special place on the Wind River where it is usually just him and some bald eagles fishing together. Kathleen Doyle Swanson of Casper still loves Sinks Canyon near Lander.

         High Uintas – Larry R. Stewart says as you drive south of Bridger Valley, only in the mountains on the Wyoming side of the border, can you find major wilderness. It is the only big mountain range in the country that runs east and west.

         Thunder Basin – Joe Quiroz says that on a calm day, at sunrise or sunset, sitting down on the ground “in arm’s reach of the exuberant forest of life that thrives within 12 inches of the soil surface. This is the one of the last great remnants of the shortgrass prairie that native peoples and the first pioneers saw with herds of bison grazing in the distance,” he says. Tom Mullen also loves that vast view over the basin that he had from his deck on his house on a hill in Newcastle.

         The expert – Former Tourism Director Gene Bryan offered up this partial list: Lake Marie in the Snowy Range, Dead Indian Pass in Sunlight Basin, Vedauwoo between Laramie and Cheyenne, Aspen Alley in the Sierra Madre Mountains and one of my favorites, too, the sun porch at the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone.

         Hidden places – Greg Bean loves the bottom of Outlaw Canyon “back in the days when I could still get down there.” Tom Lubnau of Gillette says his favorite canyon is near the top of the Solitude Trail in the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area in the Big Horn Mountains about the second week of August. Liz Howell favors the Powell Lakes in the same area. Lee Myers mentions Kirwin where Amelia Earhart had a cabin. Randy Wagner loves Fort Laramie, both the site and the area. Steph Kessler likes the Noble Basin in the Wyoming Range.

         Interest rates are going up.

         Our national debt is out of control.

         And both the country and he miss the late U. S. Senator Ted Kennedy a lot.

         Those were some of the main conclusions by senior U. S. Senator Mike Enzi during a visit to Lander last week.

         Here are some of the other items of interest he presented:

         • “You know, besides the national parks and the coal mines, there is a whole other ‘middle Wyoming,’ and I am glad that you represent us,” Jewelry store owner Eric Olson told Enzi.

         Olson’s comment got me thinking.

         Middle Wyoming?

         With energy our number-one industry and tourism our number-two industry, sometimes we find ourselves focusing so much on events that affect those two, the other things get shoved aside.

         To those of us living here, we know there are thousands of other important places, projects and businesses besides mining and tourism. 

         Olson is a perfect representative of some of Enzi’s favorite people. Enzi likes to tell stories of when he ran a shoe store in Gillette. And how his parents built the first modern-style RV Park in Thermopolis.

         Enzi has other insights that are worth sharing during his quick trip to Lander and his two talks to local groups:

         • He told the LEADER economic development group about his “one penny solution” to solve the nation’s financial crisis. He says if every national budget were reduced another cent the next year for each of a total of seven years, we would balance the budget.

Sometimes the simplest approaches to a problem work the best an this one is certainly easy to understand.

         Makes “cents” to me.

         • He said the national debt is staggering. It amounts to $49,000 for every man, woman and child in America. He said our debt now exceeds that of Great Britain and the countries the European Alliance using the euro.

         Lander accountant Rick Fagnant asked him if he could write a check to Enzi for $49,000, could he get free of his debt? It was good for a laugh.

• He also told about how vast the U. S. government is and how it is plagued with duplication. For example, when he became chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee, he found out there were 119 different agencies dealing with childcare. He was able to whittle it down to 79 before the Democrats took over the Senate and he was no longer chairman.

         • Later during lunch before he talked with the local Rotary Club, I asked him about the death of Ted Kennedy.

         In a column a few years ago, I wrote about how Enzi and Kennedy had combined to pass more bills than just about any other pair in Senate history.

         Enzi said he managed this by his “80 percent approach.” He says everyone ultimately can agree on 80 percent of a problem and if you write laws solving that 80 percent, you can work on the remaining 20 percent later, or maybe never.

         “If Ted Kennedy had lived, I believe we would have had a workable national health care plan,” he said. “Plus we would have had a jobs bill that worked, too.” I miss the guy and so does the country.

         Enzi says when he and Ted worked out something, Enzi could sell it to the Republicans and Kennedy could sell it to the Democrats. Now there does not appear to be anyone on their side who can get the job done, he concludes.

         • Enzi has an interesting background. He owned shoe stores in Gillette called NZ Shoes. He was mayor in Gillette during the boom years and looked on in horror one night when a drunken construction worker took a bulldozer throughout the town destroying everything in sight. The guy especially liked driving over sports cars, Enzi says.

         Finally, the man jumped off and left the big rig moving so it just kept smashing into things. Ultimately it ran into an apartment building and pushed it off its foundation and the big bulldozer fell into the basement.

“After that, every contractor installed remote kill switches on their machines, “ he laughed.

         • The senior senator feels Wyoming people are quite entrepreneurial and that is why he sponsors an annual inventor’s conference. It has been scheduled for April 21 in Rock Springs this year.

         • An avid fisherman, he also agreed to write the chapter about the North Platte River system for my new book. Now that is big news!

         (Part 2)

         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 progressive Mayor Del McOmie appointed an Economic Development Commission (EDC) in the early 1980s.

         That involved some interesting work, but it was also frustrating. The FDIC had closed one of our most aggressive banks and its president sent to prison. It never reopened. Other banks were running tight and didn’t have money to lend to start-up businesses. 

         Our local EDC talked to lots of entrepreneurs but without money few of these folks could get started.

         I went to the mayor and suggested we form a for-profit corporation to provide money for new businesses.

         We called it LEADER Corporation. We recruited 100 people who invested $1,000 apiece. With this $100,000 nest egg, we launched an effort that over the past 27 years accomplished a lot.

 Our Treasurer, Rick Fagnant says LEADER leveraged $4.5 million over the past 27 years, created or saved 200 jobs and helped more than 35 businesses, besides working on every other type of economic development activity imaginable.

         There were many wonderful people who worked to create the Lander Renaissance, such as Chamber Manager, the late Linda Hewitt. She had heard Bill Schilling talk about Main Street beautification in Cody and decided to duplicate it.        

The Denver Rocky Mountain News sent reporters to Lander to cover how our business district had been decimated. There were even broken windows in stores on 300 block, formerly the most expensive real estate in town. Now, most of those stores were closed.

         It was ghostly, like in “ghost town.”

         We weren’t ready to give up yet.

         LEADER met every week. I was the president for the first three years. It became a support group for the folks who hadn’t left. I called those weekly meetings “Workaholics Anonymous,” because everyone there was so desperate.

         More than 600 homes were empty, Main Street was almost devoid of operating businesses, our main industries had been shut down for years by then and the future didn’t look much better than the present.

         A targeted industry study determined there were four bright economic opportunities:

         Government. Because of Lander’s location, large federal offices like Bureau of Land Management, U. S. Forest Service. U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs and state offices like Game and Fish, not only would be staying, but might even expand. All did.

         Outdoor education. Lander is home to the National Outdoor Leadership School. It was turning into a terrific employer. Today, it employs 300 people. A few years ago, they finished construction of a $9 million international headquarters under the guidance of their progressive CEO John Gans.

         Medicine.   Despite the economic depression, there were over 85 medical doctors on the staff of the new 107-bed hospital. Medicine continued to be a huge money-generator to the local economy and many doctors invested in other businesses.

         Art. The most interesting loan made in its early days of LEADER was to Monte and Bev Paddleford who founded Eagle Bronze. Today it’s the largest art foundry in the country.

         The bottom of Lander’s depression probably hit in 1987, when we launched a “Vigorous Retiree Recruitment Program” as a way to find people to buy all those 600 homes. It worked well. The Welcome Wagon said at the end of the first year, more than 99 new people had bought homes.

         The hard-working people of Lander pitched in and made a dream become a reality. By 1992, the author Norman Crampton selected Lander as the number-five best small town in the nation out of the 100 he listed.

         His book was published the following year and Lander was on its way. The Chamber had over 400 inquiries from outsiders wanting to know about Lander. Soon, most of the houses were sold and Main Street filled up with thriving new businesses.

         The mines had, indeed, closed. But good people in key positions were able to visualize a bright future that could be created without having to rely on mining. That goal has been accomplished.

         Meanwhile, LEADER continues to meet. You can find me there.

         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 NBC Today Show and ABC’s Good Morning America.

         What was remarkable about this was that just seven years earlier, the town was mired in possibly the worst depression suffered by any county seat town in Wyoming’s history.

         What civic leaders accomplished in Lander could be used as a model for other cities and towns as they work toward developing communities that aren’t totally reliant on mineral companies for jobs and tax base.

         Today, it is hard to imagine that back in the 1970s, Lander had as a big a mining presence as any town in the state.

         Let’s set the scene.

         The big player was a U. S. Steel iron ore mine tucked in the mountains on South Pass outside of Lander. More than 550 miners worked there and most were members of the United Steelworkers Union. A few years earlier, those union members participated in what was hailed as the most generous labor contract ever written. Those 550 families enjoyed incredibly high wages, courtesy of the union contract, while enjoying the low-cost, outdoorsy Wyoming lifestyle of Fremont County.

         Not long afterward, the contract was viewed as a fiasco at U. S. Steel headquarters in Pittsburgh. Their company along with other American steel companies was getting clobbered in the marketplace by cheap, high-quality steel imported from Japan and Great Britain.

         In the face of this, the company wanted out of that labor contract. To do this, they had to start getting the union to agree with big concessions. Where could they start with such a plan?

         Why not little Lander, Wyoming, where a statewide union presence was a minority position and the workers could perhaps be persuaded to give in? Once they gave in, industry leaders thought they could use that to start a domino effect with other union employees around the country.

         As editor-publisher of the local Lander newspaper, I knew the iron mine wouldn’t last forever. But we knew more than ten years of high quality taconite ore still available when the company started making noises about shutting down. 

         Despite tremendous efforts by local officials to convince them to make concessions, the union members wouldn’t budge. Soon the mine cut back to half its employees. Still, the union wouldn’t budge. Finally, the company announced the mine was closing and immediately sold off all materials to a salvage company from Ohio.

         It happened so quickly. The mine was closed. The workers were out of their jobs.

         And then the other shoe dropped.

Also in the early 1980s, Fremont County enjoyed a tremendous boom when processed uranium ore called yellowcake soared to record prices of $50 per pound. Mines were created almost overnight in the Jeffrey City area east of Lander and the Gas Hills area east of Riverton. More than 2,000 men and women were working in those mines and hundreds of other people were working for support companies in Fremont County.

         Property tax valuations soared. Home values went up one and half percent per month for over two years. You couldn’t go wrong buying real estate.

         Life was good.

         It all came crashing down pretty fast. When yellowcake prices soared so high, the utility companies that owned the nuclear reactors, went to Congress and asked for restrictions to be removed on the importation of uranium from other countries.

         Like we have seen so often in other industries, America immediately exported all those uranium jobs to Australia and Russia. Soon, yellowcake was a glut on the world market and prices dropped lower than $10 per pound.

         Towns like Jeffrey City which had grown to 4,000 people with its own high school plus a chamber of commerce, fire department and even its own Lions Club, started to lose people.      

         I even started a newspaper in Jeffrey City, which lasted from 1978 to 1985. Current Worland publisher Lee Lockhart got his publishing start in that little town.

         Today, the population of Jeffrey City is measured in the dozens.

         Back here in Lander, business leaders had been pretty smug, including its local newspaper editor-publisher. I had predicted in print that Lander was bulletproof when it came to the vagaries of the boom-bust mineral cycles that had plagued other parts of the state over the decades.

         (Coming next week: How Lander turned itself around in seven short years).