Serving the Platte Valley since 1888
Serving the Platte Valley since 1888
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“Time sure does change things,” said an airline passenger to his companion. “When I was a boy, I used to sit in a flat-bottomed boat on that lake down there below and fish. Every time a plane flew over I’d look up and wish I were in it. “Now I look down . . . and I wish I were fishing.” Time (or the lack of it) has always been a prime topic for people who work hard and miss out on all the fun activities that living in Wyoming can provide. This time stress is especially bad about this time of year. Spring and summer are...
It is hard to believe the internet has been in my life only a little over 20 years. I started using it when I moved to Australia and set up my hotmail account. Not everyone I know had an account, but my family did and it was a great way to stay in contact. When I came back to Wyoming, I set up a website called spoiledbartender in 2000. Believe it or not, there were no websites on bartending back then. I remember being at a trade show in Las Vegas for the liquor industry and I...
It can be all too easy to focus on the things going wrong in our lives that we overlook the things going right. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple thing to wake us up to that fact. At the same time, that simple act can hit us like a ton of bricks. For me, it was a fire pit. The past few summers haven’t exactly been great for getting out of town with my family. Last year, especially, was difficult as I was wrapped up in covering how the pandemic was impacting life in Carbon C...
Thank you, Foster. You could sum up Foster Friess in one word: Generous. He did more for more people than anyone I have ever known. He and his wife Lynn gave away $500 million in their lifetimes. Amazing. Foster Friess died May 27 at age 81. My story with Foster is a personal one. I had worked with him and Lynn some 20 years ago on some obscure project and had not had any contact for many years. Out of the blue in April of 2018, he called and asked me to help him with his governor’s campaign. There is no hesitation when F...
I can remember my step-grandmother telling me stories when I was in high school and college that used to amaze me. Not because they were so extraordinary in their content, but in their time frame. She grew up in San Antonio when it was still a relatively small city in Texas. Certainly not the 7th largest city in the USA as it is now. Mama Linney actually was my stepmother’s aunt. My stepmother’s own mother died when she was three and her father was some merchant seaman who...
“I love you, pop.” “I love you, too, son.” ·The last words exchanged between a father and son. As a long-time newspaper writer, I knew that someday I would be writing Dad’s obituary. Some twenty-one years ago on May 23, 2000, was that day. I said good-bye to my 81-year father a few days before he died. Tom Sniffin Sr. was being treated for an assortment of ailments at the Boulder, CO Community Hospital. When Nancy and I left him Friday, May 20, 2000, he was just being prepped for an experimental procedure to use a special de...
This summer will mark 13 years since Staff Sergeant Tyler Pickett lost his life to a suicide bomber in Iraq. Since then, the promise of a memorial park for the Saratoga High School graduate has gone unfulfilled. Hopefully, that will be changing soon. A member of the Class of 2000, Tyler Pickett was 28 years old when he was in Iraq on June 8, 2008. By all rights, he should have been home as he was originally supposed to be on leave at that time. However, his leave had been deferred. Pickett would end up being the first and...
I recently had the privilege of volunteering as a judge for the Platte Valley Legacy Foundation. On May 6, the morning of the Platte Valley Expo, I joined other community members in the business wing of the Platte Valley Community Center as we interviewed students from Saratoga Middle High School and seniors from Encampment K-12 School. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. Being a member of the dreaded Millennial generation, I’m all too familiar with the assumptions people...
Dear Editor, Our county is 20 years late to address some basic issues affecting quality of life for our citizens and visitors alike. We are about to get run-over by the big Green New Deal Electric Microbus. The lemmings following politically correct mandates threaten to change our lives forever. Wind turbines are industrial activity. They should be zoned that way. Carbon Power & Light directors should lead rural coops out of Tri-State Generation. I puke every time I hear their ads. Texas Deep Freeze is a perfect example of...
Columns sometimes come easy and sometimes they are a struggle. So I was pleased to be about three quarters into a column on “Spring” that was coming out pretty well a few weeks back. Then I got totally sidetracked from my train of thought. The phone rang and, the next thing I know, I am taking a survey about tobacco. It was a federally funded survey for Wyoming health and it seemed like a good thing to take a 15 minute time out to complete the survey. I figured it would be...
Today’s grads face one of the most uncertain times in history. I call it a merging of two seemingly mutually-exclusive ideas – they have a tail wind behind them PLUS a head wind facing them. The tail wind is the fact that there just are not enough workers for the jobs that are out there. If you have skills, a good resume showing success at previous jobs, and a good attitude, your future should look very, very bright. One of my mottoes is that someone is looking as hard for you as you are looking for them – you just have...
Murphy’s Law posits “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. A lesser known fact is that Murphy’s Law almost always coincides with a Monday. This is a fundamental basis of our universe, alongside the truths that cats will always land on their feet and toast will always land butter-side down. This Monday, May 3, is by far probably one of the most frustrating I’ve had in quite some time. For the first time since our July 31, 2019 edition I really thought there wouldn’t...
My nervous “afraid of the dark” wife is amazed that her brave husband will get up in the middle of the night to check out all the strange noises she hears. This has been going on for more than half a century and, frankly, even I am impressed by my fearlessness. Patiently, during the entire time of our marriage, I have been awakened in the middle of deep slumber to a voice saying: “Honey, did you hear that?” I roll over and say, “What? I didn’t hear anything. Go back to sleep, it will be all right.” A few minutes later...
Dear Editor, Wind power in Carbon County has been much more contentious than what was covered in the Weickum article, History documentation is dependent on who tells the story. This paper (Sun) illustrates that with the old news excerpts of mining in the early 1900’s and the exaggerated claims of farming potential by newspapers of the 1880’s, many in the Territory of Wyoming. Terry Weickum is originally from Goshen County and started his Carbon County political career pushing against Agricultural land lot sizes in zoning ame...
There are literally millions of Americans who will be visiting Wyoming this summer seeking out those secret spots. I will be one of them. This column is my annual “Wyoming Bucket List” of those places that I have always wanted to visit. Some of them were featured in my three- volume trilogy of coffee table books about Wyoming but many were not. Either way, I am eager to go see them. Now readers need to know that Wyoming is full of many of the most scenic places in the world, such as Yellowstone National Park, Teton Nat...
Every year around this time, I start feeling the call of spring even though warm weather is still a bit of dream. understand why I get like this. Where I grew up in Maryland, by this time in April, daffodils have come and gone, cherry blossoms are blooming and even tulips are putting forth their color. It is just imprinted in me, mid-April means spring is here, much less late April. Since most other places I lived were tropical, with the exceptions of Shanghai and Suzhow,...
I really picked a heck of a week to reduce my caffeine consumption. Since I’ve been at the Saratoga Sun, it has not been uncommon for me to drink anywhere from three to five cups of coffee in a day. Often, if the pot is a day old and there’s still some coffee left, I’ll just reheat it and drink that. That’s not counting the two or three sodas I was drinking, either. Or the occasional double shot after a long meeting the night before. It’s not like I didn’t drink any coffee...