Same Guys Dancing

[{"type":"text","text":"Eddie Rabbitt -- Drivin' My Life Away"}]

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<title>Friday Morning Dance Party: Eddie Rabbitt -- Drivin' My Life Away | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Eddie Rabbitt -- Drivin' My Life Away

Friday Morning Dance Party: Eddie Rabbitt -- Drivin' My Life Away

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business

Kelli Tracy feels like she’s “living in a Hallmark movie.” She and her husband just closed on their own brick-and-mortar store in downtown Sheridan, and she’s now celebrating her 10th year in business. 

These days, her Lil Bee’s Bohemian clothing line ships all over the world, and the business brings in a comfortable $600,000 to $700,000 a year in sales. 

But, like any Hallmark movie, getting to “happily ever after” wasn’t an easy task. 

The journey started when she was unexpectedly laid off from a big corporate job in Florida as a quality assurance compliance manager. It was scary.

“I had just moved in with my now husband but, at the time, my boyfriend,” Tracy recalled. “And he was like, ‘Well you need to get a job. You need to maybe go back to bartending or go back to doing something so you have money coming in.’” 

Tracy had done plenty of bartending in college and had no intention of going back to it. She had a completely different idea, one people told her was crazy at the time.  

“The next day I started my own boutique with clothing out of my closet,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “That’s when Instagram first started. Like it was just coming out and the algorithms were great. Everything was great.”

She propped a mannequin she bought from California — a model she named Lola — in front of her phone, dressed it in her own clothes, and opened a Shopify account. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Lil Bee’s Bohemian was born."}]

Starting out, her biggest problem wasn’t finding customers. She had plenty of people clamoring for the outfits she was styling. 

Her trouble was finding inventory priced low enough that she could resell it with a healthy profit margin. 

“I didn’t know there were places like Fashion Go or like Marketplaces and all the things,” she said. “You can go to Dallas Market and like find all your vendors.”

Initially, to get inventory, she’d go to places like Ross and Marshalls to buy items for the outfits she was promoting on Instagram. It was rare, but if the outfits didn’t sell, she’d just return them.

That strategy wasn’t going to work long-term, she realized. She had to figure out something else.

“Then I met a lady named Holly who owns Baja Ranch and she’s the one who helped me,” Tracy said. “I was buying a bunch of her stuff off eBay, because it was really cheap, to resell. And so she asked me like, ‘What are you buying all this stuff for?’”

When Tracy explained she was starting a boutique and needed inventory, Holly explained where she could go to find wholesale items to resell. 

“I mean, you can buy from me,” she said. “But you can get all of this stuff here.”

And the prices would be much less expensive. Wholesale pricing, Holly explained, would let Tracy keep her margins, without relying on returns.

Tracy, meanwhile, helped Holly figure out how to start Instagram and Shopify accounts so she could improve her business model.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A $12,000 Surprise"}]

Once she had reliable wholesale sources, sales were booming. But there was a big problem. Somehow, despite making many, many sales, the money wasn’t adding up. 

“I was like, ‘Man, where is all the money?’ Like I know I didn’t spend all this money,” she said. 

Eventually she figured out that many of the purchases were landing in her business’ PayPal account. She thought that money would transfer to her bank account automatically, but it was sitting there, quietly waiting for her to go in and authorize its transfer.

“I was almost to the point of bagging it,” Tracy said. “I was like, ‘I don’t think I can do this. I can’t really afford more stuff.’ And then I wound up with all this extra money.”

The business was saved, and Tracy realized she had to get more organized. The scare pushed her to tighten up her books and treat Lil Bee’s less like an experiment and more like the real business it was becoming.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"One Closet Wasn’t Enough"}]

As the business grew, so did its footprint inside the couple’s home. 

It was no longer just her own closet. It was every closet in the house. She put racks in the spare bedroom, the living room, and even one hallway.

“It was just taking over the house,” Tracy said. “It was bad. I remember looking over at my husband and his two kids and the dog and they all looked at me like I was crazy.”

Finally, one day her husband said, “Hey, if you go get a place like a studio or like an office, this whole entire closet here could be your personal closet.”

Tracy heard what he was really saying. It was time for Lil Bee’s to grow wings and fly. 

“I had the keys to a showroom the next day,” she said. “Within 24 hours.”

The business doubled in size and quickly outgrew the showroom. She moved it next to a big warehouse, and just kept upgrading from there. 

“At one point, I think I had two, maybe three warehouses,” she said. “It just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

The growth looked impressive on paper. At peak, Lil Bee’s was doing more than $1.4 million a year in sales.

But the pace was grueling, the overhead relentless, and she was working all the time. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Right-Sizing Her Business"}]

By year eight, she made some decisions that shape the business as it is today. 

First, she decided to start making her own clothing designs instead of just buying and reselling other people’s ideas.

That would also allow her to boost the quality. No more thin, disposable stuff. She wanted pieces that people could keep and love forever.

She also decided just how big she wanted Lil Bee’s to be. 

“It just got to bee too much,” Tracy said. “It was just more, more, more.”

She realized that if she downsized her business, she’d still remain profitable and she would have more time to focus on her own designs.

That turned out to be a fortuitous move. Her ‘70s-inspired clothes caught the eye of a rising country star — Lainey Wilson.

Wilson, then an artist in Nashville, was a regular customer. 

“She bought bell bottoms from me and she called it ‘Balling on a budget,’” Tracy said with a chuckle. “She even spoke about Lil Bee’s on the Bobby Bones podcast.”

Eventually, Wilson and Tracy teamed up on a collaborative clothing line built around flared jeans and boho blouses. 

“We created four items together,” Tracy said. “It was a really cool, button-down top, a pair of jeans, like acid-washed black jeans, a bandana, and striped bell bottoms.”

As Wilson’s career took off, however, the partnership became more complicated. New managers stepped in, and access to the star tightened. 

“I couldn’t just call her up anymore,” Tracy said. “I didn’t take it personally though. She’s a wonderful person, and she’s the same way in person as she is on stage.”

The Lainey Wilson chapter was a fun, unexpected part of her business journey, but it’s not the one Tracy likes best. 

That's the one she’s in right now, designing her own clothes and selling wholesale to 146 stores across America as well as stores in Canada. She also ships orders direct around the world and has a loyal following in Australia. 

The boutique shop she just closed on in Sheridan exactly 10 years after starting her business is a full-circle moment. 

The store is just 800 square feet. But it feels just right for now.

“It’s packed so full of just amazing beautiful stuff,” she said. “I’ve got my entire line in there — all my blouses, and jewelry.”

There are sweaters, jackets, dresses, tallow makeup, bags and a hat bar, too. 

“When you get in there, it’s like a time capsule back into the '70s,” she said. “It’s groovy, and there’s not one thing that’s plain. It’s like a maximalist dream.”

It’s a dream that’s also planted in the one place in the world she’s decided she likes the best of every place she’s ever roamed — Sheridan. She got to know the town after visiting some friends, and just decided it’s where she’s always belonged.

“It’s just marvelous,” she said. “This last Christmas we had the Holiday Stroll and it snowed. I mean, it snowed so much that night, it was just marvelous. Everyone was out there with hot chocolate and their scarves and I was like this is nuts. Like I’m living in a Hallmark movie.”

Lil Bees and Kelly Tracy 8 16 26

<title>How A Sheridan Woman Turned Her Closet Into A Funky Worldwide Fashion Business | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Laid off from a corporate job, Kelli Tracy started selling clothes out of her closet on Instagram. Ten years later, she owns Sheridan’s Lil Bee’s Bohemian and ships her '70s-inspired designs to people all over the world from her Wyoming storefront.

How A Sheridan Woman Turned Her Closet Into A Funky Worldwide Fashion Business

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

Around Wyoming

The old ash tree had stood for an estimated 60 to 70 years on the west side of the Washakie County Courthouse. It was 3 feet in circumference when, in 1999, a tree company declared the ash was dead and a hazard. 

[{"type":"text","text":"They were wrong."}]

When groundskeeper Heather Shryack discovered the stately ash had been healthy when it was cut down, she was determined it wouldn’t go to waste.

“She's a scrappy little gal, and she really knows her gardening,” said her husband, Terry Shryack. “Heather saw the whole tree was solid as a rock and that there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.”

The Washakie County Commission agreed that it was Heather’s tree and so she promptly hired an oil field company to haul it to her husband’s sawmill, despite protests from the tree company. Heather wasn’t going to be stopped in her mission to save the wood.  

“Everybody's upset when a big tree gets cut down here, without a doubt,” Terry said. “It was a treasure that we weren’t going to let get by.”

Over the years, Terry had made furniture out of the smaller pieces of the ash tree at his house in Winchester, including a rocking chair and small end tables. 

As the decades rolled by, he forgot about the large pieces of the ash tree he had stored in their shed — until he decided to build a table with local artist Calvin “Cal” Fulfer as an ultimate honor to the old ash tree.

The result is a 600-pound table with a river of treasure running through it.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Artist"}]

Fulfer is an "old-school Deadhead" who spends his time in his workshop listening to the Grateful Dead and surrounded by repurposed art. 

Since retiring as a tile layer, he has dedicated the last decade to creating award-winning sculptures out of abandoned relics of the past. 

His walls are decorated with petroglyph fish made of old typewriter parts, Styrofoam Egyptian walls and computer circuit board bolo ties. Tiny snails made from old forks and marbles crawl across glass tabletops and a train sculpture runs its engine.

In the midst of this eclectic art, the giant ash table is set up in a corner and represents the largest art piece Fulfer has done to date. Fuller said it was based on a design from the Middle Ages.

“They call it a French trestle table,” Fulfer said. “They would send the servants out to put the table up for the banquet.”

The table can be disassembled into four sections by pulling out handmade dowel pins. A good thing, Fulfer said, considering the size. 

“Terry is a really accomplished woodworker and I'm more of a visual artist,” Fulfer explained. “It took him a year to build the table and me a year to build the top.”

This is the second table the duo built together. Two years ago, they built a table top out of Russian olive wood and Fulfer painted 101 goldfish as the accent. The table was for a fundraiser for Terry’s stepson, who had an emergency heart transplant. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Treasure River"}]

Fulfer had discovered a technique of painting an acrylic layer of a fish and pouring resin over the painting. He will repeat the process up to eight times to create a 3D image of a fish people are convinced is more than just paint. 

For this ash table, Fulfer wanted to keep the theme western. He painted trout and crawdads rather than his usual goldfish.

“Terry just kind of turned me loose at the tabletop,” Fulfer said. “While I was searching for the right theme, I started the process by visiting ant hills.”

Fulfer said he pilfered the ant hills for their tiny sand pebbles, which he washed before pouring on the bottom of his resin river. As he worked, he began hiding treasure into the bottom of his river and larger river rocks.

“I inherited a bunch of stuff from my brother when he passed,” Fulfer said. “He was a jeweler, and so I thought, why not, and put some of his rings and necklaces into the table.”

The ash table now honors not only the old tree that was cut down in its prime, but also bits and pieces of Fulfer’s own family.

“We call it Guardians of Treasure Creek,” Fulfer said. “It just kind of evolved into its own weird, fun river.”

Pieces of the ash tree still remain remain and both Terry and Fulfer continue to find ways to make sure the wood is incorporated into useful art.

“I’m just glad they rescued that old tree,” Fulfer said. “It's tough to tell what we're going to come up with next.”

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<title>Old Washakie County Ash Tree Cut Down By Mistake Remade Into 600-Pound Table | Cowboy State Daily</title>

When an old ash tree was cut down by mistake at the Washakie County Courthouse in 1999, the groundskeeper rescued the wood. For nearly three decades, huge pieces of the ash sat forgotten until a Worland craftsman built a 600-pound table from it.

Old Washakie County Ash Tree Cut Down By Mistake Remade Into 600-Pound Table

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

A slew of fantastic fossils from Earth’s earliest primates have been discovered in southwestern Wyoming, offering new insights into the evolution of humanity’s tiny, sap-sucking great-uncles and aunts.

A new study published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports on the tiny fossils of three prehistoric primates excavated at Smiley Draw, a sandstone site in the Wasatch Formation of the Eocene Period.

Among paleontologists, Wyoming is well known as one of the best places in the world to find 

. These discoveries add to that reputation while also showing how much remains to be found.

“We've made the picture of the early Eocene more complicated than what we once thought,” said Chris Beard, a Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “There will be much more to learn about these fossils, especially from southern Wyoming. There's a reason we're working down there.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Fascinating And Frustrating"}]

Wyoming has been a hub of primitive primate paleontology since the 1880s. The first fossils of lemur-like primates, dating to around 55 million years ago, were discovered in the Bighorn Basin around that time.

“A whole lot of work happened in the late 20th Century in the Bighorn Basin, especially with respect to this animal called Tetonius,” Beard said.

Tetonius, named after the Tetons, is a “vaguely tarsier-like creature,” as Beard described it. It was around the size of a modern-day mouse lemur, less than a foot long and under 2.5 ounces, but its closest living relatives are modern tarsiers.

Tarsiers are tiny, tree-dwelling animals known as “dry-nosed” primates. Endangered populations of these tiny primates still exist in the rainforests of Southeast Asia.

In their study, Beard and his colleagues described a new species of Tetonius, T. varleyorum, from Smiley Draw, an Eocene site in the Great Divide Basin in Sweetwater County.

“In Wyoming, you typically find Eocene-aged fossils in mudstone that erodes very easily,” Beard said. “This particular site is very unusual, if not unique, as it’s a layer of sandstone chock full of fossils. It’s rare to find Eocene fossils in sandstone, so Smiley Draw is exactly the opposite of what we normally expect.”

According to Beard, the discovery of a new species of Tetonius, based on its age and anatomy, is highly significant.

“It’s obviously a different species because it’s younger than the Tetonius and its younger descendant, Pseudotetonius, from the Bighorn Basin,” he said. “The fossils we found in Sweetwater County occur after that whole lineage has gone extinct in the Bighorn Basin.”

The study also describes fossils of two rarely found anaptomorphines, another group of prehistoric primates. Arapahovius gazini and Anemorhysis savage have never been found in the Great Divide Basin, and only a handful of other specimens have been found.

What’s significant is that the fossils of these three primates were found at the same site, which means they coexisted at the same time and place. That just raises further questions about life in the early Eocene.

“We’re finding animals that lived together at Smiley Draw that never ever cohabitated in the Bighorn Basin,” Beard said. “Tetonius, Arapahovius, and Anemorhysis don’t coexist there, but we find them together here.”

That’s why Beard said it’s “frustrating,” from a paleontological perspective, to compare Smiley Draw with the well-researched discoveries in the Bighorn Basin.

“We have an idea that animals evolve, they go extinct, and other animals replace them,” he said. “What we're finding at Smiley Draw is the animals that we think are going extinct at a certain time in the Bighorn Basin probably aren't going extinct elsewhere.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Gradual And Parallel"}]

Tetonius, Arapahovius, and Anemorhysis are all omomyids, a family of early tarsier-like primates known from several Eocene sites worldwide.

Beard said Wyoming’s omomyids are excellent examples of gradual evolution, which is what Charles Darwin proposed in his landmark 1859 book “On the Origin of Species.”

“There was a huge debate in paleontology about how evolution proceeded,” he said. “Did it occur gradually, the way that Charles Darwin predicted, or did it conform more to a punctuated equilibrium model, which was made famous by Stephen Jay Gould and his collaborators?”

The fossils of Tetonius and Pseudotetonius from the Bighorn Basin are a textbook example of gradual evolution. While they are distinctly different animals, Beard said the fossil record shows “no break in the single lineage chain from primitive to advanced.”

The key observation is the significant changes in the lower jaws of these primates, which Beard and his colleagues observed in fossils from the Bighorn Basin and the Great Basin Divide.

“These animals start out with fairly long lower jaws and lots of teeth in between their back teeth, the molars, and their front teeth, the incisors,” he said. “Through time, their lower jaws get compacted from front to back. They lose some teeth and develop a rodent-like incisor that sticks out of the front of their jaw, getting bigger and stouter over time.”

The purpose of this overly large incisor remains a mystery. Beard said that if you asked three different paleontologists, you’d get three different answers.

“In my opinion, they're using that big front incisor to gouge the bark of trees,” he said. “A lot of modern animals do this to stimulate sap or gum or resin to come out of the tree.”

Tree sap contains a lot of sugar. For a tiny primate with a high metabolism, that sap would be a valuable source of energy and nutrition.

Is this change in jaw and dental anatomy driven by a change in diet, or were the omomyids perfecting the tools needed for millennia of the same diet? That’s another debated question, but Beard said the latter is the most likely answer.  

These questions are significant to the new discoveries from Smiley Draw because they show the same thing happening – the shortening of the jaw, loss of teeth, and larger incisor – in Tetonius, but not exactly the same as in the Tetonius from the Bighorn Basin.

“The T. varleyorum from Smiley Draw has shorter haws and fewer teeth, so it’s similar but not exactly the same as what we see in the Bighorn Basin,” Beard said. “These are two different lineages evolving in parallel to achieve the same result.”

Parallel evolution is a well-documented phenomenon in nature. The legendary finches Darwin collected in the Galápagos Islands are an excellent example, as the different but related birds had beaks shaped to suit their diets on their isolated islands.

It’s more evidence that something strange was going on in Sweetwater County 55 million years ago.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hyperthermal Events"}]

Beard and his colleagues are studying all the mammal fossils recovered from Smiley Draw to see if they have the same story as the recently described omomyids. If they do, it would be further proof that different things were happening in different parts of Wyoming.

“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” he said. “We find animals living side-by-side at Smiley Draw that were already extinct or never lived side-by-side in the Bighorn Basin. They were only going extinct locally in the Bighorn Basin.”

Climate change might explain this discrepancy. The Eocene was a roller coaster of climate, which usually leads to extinction or adaptation for flora and fauna.

“We've got lots of iterations of what we call hyperthermal events in the Eocene, where the world warms up very rapidly and cools down again,” Beard said. “When the world warmed up, animals that were more tropically adapted spread northward, from Sweetwater County to Park County. When it cooled down, and they were no longer happy, the animals went back down. It's a very dynamic thing, and we're picking up a lot of these oscillations by looking at Smiley Draw.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Our Great Uncles"}]

This new study on prehistoric primates raised more questions than it answered. That’s not a bad thing, as it gives Beard and his colleagues more reasons to return to Smiley Draw.

Beard said his team was at the site collecting fossils in June. Some of those specimens are already being studied using a micro-CT scanner in North Carolina.

“I can tell you that we found additional fossils of early primates and primate-like creatures that are totally new just two months ago,” he said. “We’ll have a lot more to reveal from Smiley Draw.”

They’re not the only ones looking at overlooked spots in southern Wyoming. Paleontologists with the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History at Duke University have been finding 

phenomenal Eocene fossils in Bridger Basin

, including the best specimens of the earliest known primate-like mammal in the fossil record, Plesiadapis.

“The Bridger Basin is the Madagascar of the Eocene,” curator Matthew Borths told Cowboy State Daily in December 2024. “We transition from a few primates on the landscape to a lot of diversity, hopping around in the rainforests of Wyoming.”

Borths’s dream was to find an omomyid in the Bridger Basin, as they’re humanity’s closest Eocene ancestor. There’s no shortage of omomyids in Smiley Draw, which is less than 200 miles northeast. 

Beard said Wyoming is “better than any other single place in the world, including Europe, Asia, and Africa” for paleontologists studying the origins and evolution of the earliest primates. That’s just from what’s been discovered, let alone what’s still out there, waiting to be found.

“Wyoming is incredibly fundamental to understanding the deep origins of humans,” he said. “None of these animals are the direct ancestors of humans. They're probably great-uncles and great-aunts, but that doesn't make them any less important. In fact, in my opinion, it probably makes them more important.”

That’ll keep Beard and his colleagues busy for decades. There’s a lot more to find, study, and understand – if that’s an excuse to get dirty in Wyoming, all the better.

“I love Wyoming, personally and scientifically,” Beard said. “We wish that we had a perfect fossil record, but we don’t. 

"What we have are snippets and glimpses; we try to piece together what it means. Wyoming has been overlooked for a while, to be honest, and we’re very fortunate to have such an amazing fossil record there.”

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<title>"Something Strange Going On": 55 Million-Year-Old Primate Fossils Found In SW Wyoming | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A slew of fossils from Earth's earliest primates have been discovered in southwestern Wyoming. Scientists say the tiny primate fossils, around the size of a mouse lemur, is evidence something strange was going on in Sweetwater County 55 million years ago.

"Something Strange Going On": 55 Million-Year-Old Primate Fossils Found In SW Wyoming

Welsch mug

Jeff Welsch

Sports

Their Links of Dreams unfolded in every way they imagined: The long drive past cornfields on a lonely dirt road, a massive American flag and windsock fluttering over a clubhouse perched atop a knoll on the endless undulating terrain of northeast Nebraska, and the first religious glimpse of the No. 1 tee, fairways and greens unlike any others.

For Sheridan’s Josh Gardner and Jared Stiver, a moment coveted by golfers worldwide — but rarely experienced — was, at long last, at hand.

To secure a tee time at the Landmand Golf Club outside of Homer, Nebraska, 

Some 11,000 slots are made available each New Year’s Eve for the novel 4-year-old course; they’re gone in less than an hour.

Now here Gardner and Stiver were the first week of August, two regular guys from Wyoming, somehow entered to play Landmand in the inaugural The Heartbeat tournament, a Golf Channel creation, after Gardner took a Plan B New Year's Eve stab on the course's website. 

Soon they would be pitted against pairs from all 50 states over four days, a fortuitous practice round and three days of competition.

“Everything about it was cool,” Stiver told Cowboy State Daily less than a week after their return home. “You’re on top of a hill from start to finish, and you see forever and it’s all golf around you, and it’s all awesome.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Then the golf happens."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Course Unlike Any Other"}]

Gardner and Stiver have played courses of all shapes and sizes, in all types of environments, foreign and domestic.

[{"type":"text","text":"Nothing could prepare them for Landmand."}]

“We got there and I was just excited to be there,” Gardner recalled with a chuckle. “It didn’t really matter what was in front of us. Like, this is awesome. But by the time we got to the fourth or fifth green, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this four days in a row.’

“I wasn’t prepared for how massive it all was. The scale is hard to describe.”

Landmand was carved out of the treeless Loess Hills, and at nearly 600 acres is roughly four times the size of typical 18-hole courses. Fairways are the width of football fields. Gaping bunkers swallow golfers whole.

[{"type":"text","text":"Only the tee boxes offer any semblance of flatness."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"And then ... those greens."}]

On average, they sprawl to more than double the size of typical American greens. Some are four to six times larger. At three-quarters of an acre, the 17th green ranks as one of the world’s largest, in the same league as the revered Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland.

[{"type":"text","text":"Gradients rose to 25%."}]

“You could put seven Powder Horn greens in one there,” Stiver said of their home course in Sheridan. “Monster greens.”

Echoed Gardner: “Greens the size of Walmart. If that golf course was here (Sheridan) I’d take my kids sledding on it and they’d need a helmet. They’d be like the blue runs on a ski hill. In some spots where they placed the flag you couldn’t even see it.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Howling Wyoming-esque Winds"}]

The greens sport windsocks instead of flags, a nod to visibility and a notorious local climate. 

Winds can be so ferocious and unpredictable the course has two handicaps dedicated to them on the scorecard, one for gales howling from the southwest and the other for the nor’easters.

[{"type":"text","text":"Gardner and Stiver got a gritty taste of both."}]

“You’d think Wyoming boys would be good in a wind, but us Sheridan boys … not so good,” Stiver mused.

Agreed Gardner: “Guys from Evanston and Rock Springs, and the Casper Country Club boys, would be a better fit.”

It’s this enormity of challenge, the scale of the course, and its vistas — not to mention the modest $175 greens fees — that has golfers nationwide poised like expectant parents with their fingers hovering over their keyboards every New Year’s Eve.

[{"type":"text","text":"Then reality bites for those lucky enough to score a round."}]

But, unlike all other golfers except the locals who have the luxury of pouncing last-minute on a rare cancellation, Gardner and Stiver had four full days in the belly of this manicured beast.

Entering the final round, they were in 32nd place out of 52 teams. Five birdies and 18 holes later, they walked off their final monster green in 19th.

Two golfers from Sheridan won the lottery on New Year's Eve when they were selected to play at the toughest place to book a tee time in the U.S. All 11,000 tee times were booked in one hour and they played last week. "It's all awesome," Jared Stiver said.

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