Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"Now let's all watch a cat enjoy a \"puppichino...\""}]

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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Smile: Friday, May 17, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Now let's all watch a cat enjoy a "puppichino..."

Daily Smile: Friday, May 17, 2024

 Now let's all watch a cat enjoy a "puppichino..."

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

Renée Jean

Business

CHEYENNE — Two years ago, Ranch Eats food truck owner Troy Strand thought he’d finally solved his hiring problems. He decided to offer his food-service workers not just health insurance, but a 401(k) retirement benefit with a 4% match on top of that.

Wages at Ranch Eats start around $18 an hour and can climb to $40, plus gratuities and tips. 

“For the health insurance, we cover the costs for the employee 100%, and then they have the option to add on their family,” he said. “And if they want dental and vision, they have the option to add that on as well.”

Strand has been layering on more perks to keep workers, recently starting an employee of the quarter program, which includes a special outing with a limo ride and a $250 bonus.

Those measures have helped Strand with retention, but haven’t solved his hiring crunch.

“I keep banging my head against the wall,” he said. “I think we’re at about 24 employees right now, but we could easily hire another six full-time, and they’re just not there.”

Jobs range from cashiers to caterers with cooks and prep cooks in between. Experience isn’t required.

“We have a really good management team to teach everyone what they need to know,” he said. “We tell everyone we live by three principles, and we can teach the rest. 

"Like, we don’t expect people to have cooking experience or know how to drive a food truck or any of that. We tell them if you can be honest, if you can be on time, and a person of your word, and don’t lie or steal, if you can just do that, we’ll teach you everything else.”

Even that isn’t enough. In the last month, Strand hired roughly a dozen people. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Just one is still there. "}]

Strand isn’t alone. Across Wyoming, windows and billboards are sending out the same message — “We’re hiring” — for everything from cafés on up to medical clinics. 

With too few workers to go around, businesses have been quietly curtailing their hours on what seem like odd days — Tuesday and Wednesday — and billing that as “new summer hours.”

That structure lets them focus on high-traffic days while trying to avoid burning out the limited staff they do have.

In downtown Laramie, 2nd Street Deli co-owner Chrissy Matthews has watched the hiring crunch hollow out her schedule board.

Her deli needs about 15 people to comfortably cover roughly 20 shifts. But the applicants she’s been able to hire, who are mostly young, college-age workers, want to keep their shifts on one or two very specific days.

“We’ll have four people on vacation at once,” she said. “And then I’m scrambling, because everyone only wants two shifts, at best.”

That’s forced her to cut back hours. The deli used to stay open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., but now it adjusts hours to match what her patchwork staff can handle.

Back-of-the-house applications, meanwhile, have been even more difficult to fill. She hasn’t seen an application for that in more than a year, even though that’s really where 2nd Street Deli has the biggest need.

The staffing crunch turned personal a couple of months ago when her father died. There was no one she could rely upon to pick up the slack while she was trying to manage arrangements and take the time to grieve.

“We were only able to take two days off,” she said. “It was very heartbreaking.”

If restaurants and food trucks struggle to hire people at $18 an hour, it might be tempting to think the solution is just a matter of paying people more.

But Wyoming’s hiring crunch doesn’t disappear at higher income levels. 

Kyle Brost, chief executive officer for Gottsche Rehabilitation and Wellness, leads eight clinics across rural Wyoming. He would hire 10 people yesterday if he could, positions that range from paying $60,000 to $120,000 per year.

“We could have mental and behavioral health in every single one of our clinics,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “We have it in one clinic. Speech and language, we can have in every clinic. 

"Right now we have no speech and language therapists, and we’re understaffed in really three clinics in terms of occupational therapy, physical therapy.”

Despite offering above-median pay, hiring medical professionals to Wyoming has been challenging for the past 20 years, Brost added, but the pandemic seemed to make things significantly worse.

“A lot of people in the industry switched over to being travelers,” he said, referencing transient contract workers. “Travelers, while I appreciate them, they’re not joining the community. They’re not getting infused into our towns and contributing to where the town is going and what the lifestyle and the community engagement is.”

Brost hopes that will soon turn a corner, but said other challenges remain.

“Spending six to eight years to get a degree in physical or occupational therapy is expensive,” he said. “And then the Department of Education reclassified quite a few professions as not professional degrees, which limits the amount of student loans people can get.

"There’s just a lot of more broad macro-level things, like people leaving rural communities and not coming back.”

One of the hidden barriers to hiring and recruiting comes down to housing, Brost said. 

In places like Thermopolis, for example, it’s easy to sell prospective employees on the job. Thermopolis has a lot going for it in terms of quality of life with Hot Springs State Park in its back yard, as well as world-class fishing and plenty of outdoor adventures in the Wind River Range. 

But when those applicants start looking for housing, they have trouble finding something suitable.

“There’s just not enough inventory on the market for people to have,” he said. “We’ve got a new hire starting July 1 who is married, starting a family. 

"A two-bedroom, one-bathroom place probably isn’t going to be the right fit for them, but there’s not a lot on the market that is a three-bedroom or above.”

Most of what is available, meanwhile, is older.

“If you’re not interested in rehabbing it a bit yourself, it’s probably not going to feel like a great home for you,” he said. “I was just talking to somebody yesterday about this. One of the resident doctors who is just coming in this fall for the hospital said, ‘You’re buying a house that needs a lot of work to it, and you’re also paying a lot for the house in order to do the work yourself.'”

When other areas are offering better housing stock for more affordable prices, that makes Brost’s pitch for Wyoming tougher. Even when he offers sign-on bonuses and help with moving expenses, those incentives can’t create housing that doesn’t exist. 

“Your home is where you spend a lot of time outside of work,” Brost said. “So, if you can’t find a place that you love and appreciate and value, it’s an easy decision point to be like, ‘Well then, I’m going to choose this other spot.’”

Economically, Wyoming Business Council Chief Strategy Officer Sarah Fitz-Gerald sees the labor crunch as part of a bigger economic squeeze. 

The cost of living is rising faster than household incomes, which is pushing many working-age people to leave Wyoming at one of the highest rates in the nation.

“(It’s) just killing our economy,” she said. “We really think that Wyoming should be a place where, when people work hard, they should be able to get ahead.”

It was true for a long time, she added, but inflation has dramatically changed the dynamic. 

“Right now, we’re seeing costs rise immensely, whether it’s groceries or gas or housing,” she said. “Those things have grown over 50% in the last five years, whereas our median household income has only grown about 6%. We’re just not keeping up.”

The struggle to close the hiring gap makes it harder for existing businesses to expand in ways that would create the better jobs that could attract young people to stay in Wyoming.

“If you’re one of those people who’s trying to work hard and get ahead and trying to make ends meet, a lot of time you’re going to move somewhere else,” she said. “By the time people are in their 30s, 70% of people who were born in Wyoming have left because of this kind of squeeze. 

"So yeah, it is having a big effect on the economy.”

Housing isn’t the only challenge, she added. Families of working age are struggling to find essential services, too, such as childcare.

“People are coming together and trying to figure out how to solve those big problems,” she said. “I really see that there’s a path forward by kind of solving these problems one by one when we talk about housing, when we talk about childcare, which will make it easier for Wyoming employers to compete in this really tight labor market.”

The numbers are worrisome, Wyoming Chamber of Commerce CEO Dale Steenbergen told Cowboy State Daily.

He has been tracking workforce trends statewide and points to studies showing that Wyoming has lost more jobs per capita over the past five years than any other state, even as its unemployment rate continues to remain low.

“We can’t afford to export any of our kids, and we’re exporting a bunch of them,” he said. “And we’re trading them for political refugees who are retired. When you’re running an economy, that’s not very good math.”

Meanwhile, those retirees will need more services — but the current workforce has little slack left to provide them. 

Eventually, Steenbergen expects wages to increase, which may entice some retirees to return to the workforce, helping the situation at least some. 

But the retirement cliff that’s adding to this dynamic is just getting started. 

Wave after wave of Baby Boomers are exiting the workforce. An estimated 11,200 Americans will turn 65 every day through at least 2027. 

By 2030, every Boomer will be 65 or older, and they’re all leaving both a labor and knowledge gap behind them as they exit the workforce.

“This is not just a Wyoming problem,” Steenbergen said. “It’s a nationwide problem. I see that Chipotle in Missouri, they’ll pay just as much as a Chipotle in Cheyenne. 

"So that’s really the problem we have … there’s hardly a state in the union that doesn’t say, ‘We have workforce problems, and we have to be able to find workforce.’”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Money Left On The Table"}]

Back at Ranch Eats, Strand’s struggles to turn a dozen new hires into a handful of long-term employees has a similar bottom line as the medical clinics struggling to hire. 

They’re both leaving money and opportunity on the table simply because they can’t hire enough people to serve the existing demand. 

For Ranch Eats, that’s meant taking fewer catering jobs than the business otherwise might, while at 2nd Street Deli it’s meant reduced hours and unexpected closures. For Gotsch clinics, it’s fewer services, even as demand for health care is rising.

All of which to say, those “We’re hiring” signs aren’t going anywhere any time soon in Wyoming. 

Making them disappear is a lot more complicated than simply raising wages. It’s a complicated puzzle that includes unwieldy puzzle pieces like inflation, housing, and child care. 

Solutions for all three have to fit together to reverse the ever-dwindling workforce trend.

Labor crunch Elvis mural IMG 5904 4 2 copy 6 13 26

<title>From Cafés To Clinics, Wyoming’s Labor Crunch Is Holding The Economy Back | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming business owners say they are leaving a lot of money on the table because they can’t fill open jobs, forcing them to turn away customers and reduce hours. “I keep banging my head against the wall,” said one owner.

From Cafés To Clinics, Wyoming’s Labor Crunch Is Holding The Economy Back

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

Outdoors

Public Lands

Finding treasure and beauty underwater does not require a trip to one of the nation’s coasts.

Divers in the Mountain West may not get to see sharks, colorful fish and coral reefs, but they pull out antique six-shooters or older Coors cans with no pop tops out of the Colorado River.

They also get views of the rock layers below the surface at Flaming Gorge Reservoir that few every see.

For Las Vegas’ Ken Wige, diving a stretch of the Colorado River below the Hoover Dam has become an ongoing treasure hunt involving recovering lost cellphones for people, wallets, a wedding ring, and even a couple of weapons.

One of those weapons he pulled from the river he can’t talk about except to say that it belonged to someone involved in “national defense,” but the other found about three years ago appeared to be a Western-style six-shooter in a holster that was covered in rust.

“If I were to guess, it probably was down there a good 10-plus years to be able to be stuck in the holster,” Wige said. “It was just an old Western revolver, it looked like. I was dying to get it out of there, but it would not come out.”

Fellow diver Tony “Gunner” Pierce of Provo, Utah — aka Tony “Nitrox” on social media dive pages — plans to join Wige this weekend on the river. 

Like Wige, he is an advocate for diving in the West and enjoys rallying people to different spots from Wyoming to Utah and Idaho year-round to explore what is going on underneath the surface of reservoirs, rivers, and lakes.

Both men have enjoyed more traditional diving hotspots such as Florida or the Mexico coast, but they have stories to tell about the adventures much closer to home and cheaper for those who have the gear and want to enjoy a weekend under the water.

Pierce, a dive instructor, said he became interested in scuba nine years ago after taking his daughter Carly to a dive shop just to do a “discover” dive in a pool to see if they liked the sport. 

That led to certifications and a trip to Florida for an open water dive.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'Hooked'"}]

“We’ve been hooked ever since,” he said. 

Pierce went on to get advanced certifications and not only become a dive instructor, but an advocate for dives that don’t cost a lot of money and bring divers together.

He said he wants to counter the criticism that in Utah and the West, there are no good places to dive and that new divers have trouble finding a dive buddy.

“A long time ago, I pretty much said if anybody wants to go dive with me for free ( they can go),” he said. “It’s just the love of diving and being able to connect with new families, new friends.”

He started posting on social media and now he schedules a year’s worth of dive events in advance, gets the permissions or whatever else is needed, and invites other divers to meet him on location.

A dive in May had him and others at Sulphur Creek and Woodruff Narrows reservoirs in the Evanston, Wyoming, area looking to see if any snowmobiles, four-wheelers or other craft were on the bottom left by ice fishermen. 

He was recruited by the city of Evanston to do the dive.

Pierce said he talked with Wyoming Game and Fish and local law enforcement agencies, which told him they had no open cases related to missing equipment, but they were interested in him taking a look at what was below.

“We got there with other divers and except for the fishing pole, shoe, or hat or sunglasses — some trivial things — the bottom of both reservoirs were spotless,” he said. “There’s no leaking gas, no leaking oil, there’s no rubber in there.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Flaming Gorge"}]

Pierce said his favorite place to dive is Flaming Gorge Reservoir south of Green River.

“When you dive off Flaming Gorge by the visitor dam it’s a sheer cliff,” he said. “The original timbers cut down to help build Flaming Gorge are still there, the ropes are there, the cables are there. It’s just absolutely mind-blowing.”

A long-haul trucker during the week, Pierce said a typical weekend dive for him involves maybe five or six divers. 

They typically meet on a Friday and do a day dive, night dive, and another day excursion on Saturday. 

Dives are kept to 100 feet and above, and the deeper dives will require some decompression stops before surfacing.

In Nevada, Wige, also a trucker, said he started diving seven years ago and is now a master diver. 

A few years ago, he discovered the 2-mile stretch between Willow Beach and Emerald Cove downstream from the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.

He immediately came across cellphones, fishing lures, and other treasures to return to people. Wige said the current as water is released from the dam constantly uncovers items that he and other divers find along the bottom.

Since the waters are part of the National Park System, he has worked out a protocol with rangers that allows him to take cellphones pulled from the bottom to try and find their rightful owners. 

Every dive, members of his team pull out trash as well as items such as old bottles fishing lures, wallets, and anything else that might fall out of a raft or kayak.

During the past four years, he and his associate divers have found two guns, three boat engines, 15 Apple Watches, 20-30 GoPro cameras, and 254 phones — 50 of which were returned to owners.

“It’s just amazing diving when you find something and can return it to someone,” Wige said. “A lady, I found her cellphone, and I contacted her and she wouldn’t stop crying. I’m like, ‘Ma’am, you phone is working.’ 

"She’s like, ‘No, you don’t understand, I came to Las Vegas to film my daughter giving birth. … You’re telling me I’m getting all that back.’”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Soaking Phones"}]

When they recover phones, Wige takes them home and soaks them in rubbing alcohol for a week and then tries to power them up to see if he can determine the owner. 

If the phone owner cannot be determined within a year, he destroys the phone.

Wige said they’ve also pulled out Coca-Cola bottles from the 1920s and Coors beer cans that need a V-can opener.

Under federal rules, any firearms pulled out of the river as well as suspected historic items must be turned in to National Park Rangers. 

He said the six-shooter pistol that he pulled out of the water was turned over to rangers.

Other old stuff they’ve seen below the water include railroad-like ties that appear they may have come off a sternwheeler or similar boat from the late 1800s.

“The wedding ring, they lost it jumping off cliffs,” he said. “They told us where it was and three weeks later, we made it up there with them. One of my divers found it and returned it.”

Wige said he does not try to sell anything he finds. The valuable recoveries are meant to be given back to owners. Some of the bottles his divers keep. 

He has an ongoing list of people that he gifts the fishing lures to for free.

A typical outing involves maybe eight to 10 divers and Wige uses his powered rubber raft to go out in the river and drop four on five on location. 

He then returns to the beach to get the others and when the first divers air is used up, the next set jump in.

Most of the time they are swimming in 20-40 feet of water, he said.

While he enjoys diving in Cozumel, Mexico, for a couple of weeks a year, finding lost treasures and returning them to others gives him the most enjoyment from the sport, Wige said.

“It just brings a whole new level of experience,” he said.

Colorado river and diver inset Will Eye via Alamy 6 13 26

<title>Six-Shooters And Cellphones: Divers Find All Kids Of Treasure In Colorado River | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Divers who plunge the depths of the Colorado River and Flaming Gorge Reservoir find all kinds of treasure, from antique six-shooters to cellphones. One woman burst into tears when given her phone back that had her grandchild’s birth video on it.

Six-Shooters And Cellphones: Divers Find All Kids Of Treasure In Colorado River

Zakary Sonntag

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

When Iranian forces brought down a U.S. Army helicopter Monday off the coast of Oman, Dillon Jackson’s reaction wasn't shock so much as recognition.

“The first thing I wondered is what happened, what were they doing?” he said. “What did they see, or not see?”

It’s the reflex of someone who has spent years training for moments just like that.

Jackson, a Wyoming native, spent 22 years in the U.S. Navy flying helicopters over some of the world’s most volatile waterways, including the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

He retired just one week before the incident off Oman, but incidents like this still pull him back into the same calculus of how things unfold and how quickly they can go wrong.

“There’s a lot of ways that could have gone differently,” he said. “A lot of Navy helicopters go into the water, and one or more of the crew members don’t make it out.”

What People Don’t Understand About Hormuz

For many Americans, a phrase like “naval presence” or “blockade” conjures a simple image of ships lined up on the water like net buoys of a fishing boat. 

Jackson said the reality is much more complicated. 

Across the Persian Gulf, and even through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, there are thousands of miles of water and hundreds of vessels to account for at any given time. Tracking them requires constant surveillance, meticulous coordination, and patience.

“One of our missions in the helicopter community was to fly up and run radar in order to track all the ships out there,” he said, explaining that it gets tough when vessels use radar-avoidance tactics.

“It’s a lot harder when they start turning broadcasting systems off,” he said. “Now you’re trying to find people who don’t want to be found.”

Even an area as confined as the Strait of Hormuz is difficult to manage amid shifting national interests.

“The thing most people don’t understand is just how narrow it is. You can see land on the right side of the ship and land on the left at the same time. These aren’t wide-open places,” he said, adding how in that environment, the margin for error narrows too.

“In some ways, it’s like if Wyoming went to war with Idaho. The countries (in the Persian Gulf) are about that size and the distances aren’t that great,” he said.

Though he deployed in conflict zones around the world, the strain Jackson felt most wasn’t physical. 

The lessons that stand out most from those years aren’t about tactics or preparedness, but about the way life in the Navy can reshape relationships with the people waiting at home.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Cost That Doesn’t Show Up on a Map"}]

As his deployments accumulated in places as far flung as North Korea and the Middle East, physical separation resulted in emotional distance too.

He met his wife while stationed in Pensacola, Florida, where they bonded over a shared love of horses and imagined eventually settling into a quieter life with a few horses of their own. 

Neither anticipated how difficult it would be to build that life around constant movement between different duty stations and long deployments.

It was an emotional balancing act, said Jackson. At points, something as simple as a call home could feel like a tripwire. 

“I might try to make light of things  —tell her I saw whales or a rainbow — and it might be the only good thing that’s happened all month,” he said. “Back home, she’s had a hard day, and it can sound like I’m just out there having fun on some cruise.”

The situation required compartmentalizing, but Jackson needed to be careful not to separate himself too much.

Life “underway” could swing from long stretches of routine to moments of sudden intensity, and the same mental compartmentalization that helped him manage on duty carried over into life at home.

“That compartmentalization helps you function in stressful situations, but if you’re not careful, it can also become a way of keeping parts of yourself walled off, and that’ll show up when you come home,” he said.

The balancing act became additionally hard with the arrival of their two children. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Miles Between Family"}]

That tension came into sharp focus during a nearly 11‑month deployment in 2020. 

He was stationed in the Persian Gulf on the USS Reagan, meanwhile his wife was back in Washington state, parenting their two young children by herself and juggling the pandemic stresses of school disruption and social isolation.

When he called home, his kids didn’t always want to talk to him. When they did, every mile between them was felt.

“The longer that tour goes on, the harder and harder and harder it becomes, because how do you talk to a 5-year-old kid once every few weeks for five minutes on the phone and stay engaged when you've been gone for months,” he said. 

“Sometimes after the call, everybody’s just sadder. My last six years in the Navy, it feels like I really haven't been around (my family) much at all,” he said. “There’s a reason divorce rates are so high in the military.”

That strain is common among service members.

The crew of the USS Gerald R. Ford was in the news this year after their deployment stretched to a record 326 days for an aircraft carrier. It struck a familiar chord with Jackson.

“There’s a part of you that has to ask: What is happening in the world that justifies keeping the 5,000 sailors on board that ship out there that long, and who’s making that decision, because that is a huge cost to all of those families,” Jackson said.

These experiences have reframed how Jackson understands his own story, particularly where it began. Now, stepping away from the Navy, he’s looking back at that beginning with a different perspective.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Escape Velocity"}]

Growing up in Kemmerer, most people Jackson knew either worked in an open‑pit coal mine, a nearby power plant, or on the surrounding ranches. 

His dad was a miner and cowboy; his mom worked at the local school. 

Like a lot of kids in small towns, Jackson said  he craved to see the world beyond it.

“I used to tell people small towns have their own gravity,” he said. “I called it escape velocity — I spent 18 years trying to build up enough speed so that when I left for college, I wouldn’t get pulled back.”

He made his first break by heading to the University of Wyoming, and after college he took a job as a residence director at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. 

He’d always wanted to be a pilot, figuring it the easiest way to see the world.

To the friends he grew up with, and who knew him as a long‑haired guitar player, Jackson would have been more likely to join the Peace Corp than the military. 

That changed in September 2001, when he woke one morning to his clock radio and heard news of planes flying into buildings. 

The next week, he walked into a recruiting office, setting him on a path that would take him into the Navy and, eventually, around the world.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Shark Week"}]

In Japan, he befriended the owners of a small counter bar near his apartment. In Thailand, he once ordered a simple “chicken and rice” dish and got a curry so strong the memory of it still makes him sweat. 

From Singapore to the Persian Gulf, one of his favorite parts of the job was simply interacting with people different from him.

He also came to see the Navy itself as a kind of compressed version of the country.

In a destroyer’s ward room or a carrier’s flight deck, Jackson worked with Americans from all 50 states. 

To him, it was the closest thing to a working model of the country: a handful of people from everywhere learning each other’s quirks, arguing, ribbing — and watching Shark Week.

“The captain of the ship would come into the ward room to get coffee, and finally one time he says, ‘'Man, what is it with you pilots and watching Shark Week?’” said Jackson. “Without skipping a beat, I turned to him and said, 'That's our motivation to stay airborne.'”

As he steps away from a 20-year career, Jackson is thinking deeper now about the institution of the military as a whole. 

During that time, he’s said he’s seen a cultural shift that’s made it harder to separate the institution from the political conversations surrounding it.

“We get to look at history with a clear lens. You don’t get that with the present,” he said. "I’ve got a lot of confidence in leadership to figure out what the Navy needs to look like for the next 20 or 50 years.

Dillon Jackson, a Kemmerer native, spent 22 years in the U.S. Navy flying helicopters over some of the world’s most volatile waterways, including the Strait of Hormuz. “The thing most people don’t understand is just how narrow it is," Jackson said.

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