Daily Smile

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

<title>Daily Smile: Monday, May 27, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

We're out of ideas on how to describe this....

Daily Smile: Monday, May 27, 2024

 We're out of ideas on how to describe this....

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.

“What I wonder about more is whether the United States knows what it wants its role in the world to be.”

Jackson is asking a smaller version of that question of himself. 

He knows he wants a civilian job that lends itself to a stable family life, but he’s already running into something he hasn’t faced in a quarter‑century in uniform: job rejection.

While he figures out what comes next, he’s throwing himself into the mission he no longer wants to leave.

In the mornings, he’s in the kitchen making breakfast. He walks his daughter to the bus stop, then meets his son in the yard to throw a baseball. In the evenings, he’s at his daughter's volleyball games or reading to his son aloud from "Encyclopedia Brown" paperbacks. 

Some changes will take time. His wife has to remind him not to “XO” every household problem, shorthand for his Executive Officer rank. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Other adjustments are coming easily."}]

“My daughter is 12, and she is at the stage where I’m getting a lot more eye rolls,” he said, laughing. “I’m doing my best to be an embarrassing father. It’s a role I’m trying to lean into.”

Strait of Hormuz Inset July 18 2019 ZUMA Press via Alamy 6 13 26

<title>Wyoming Navy Pilot Flew Missions Over Strait Of Hormuz, Now Watches War From Home | Cowboy State Daily</title>

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.

Wyoming Navy Pilot Flew Missions Over Strait Of Hormuz, Now Watches War From Home

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

Renée Jean

Entertainment

A casual favor turned into a lifelong fascination for Glenrock’s Mike Cushman, owner of the much-in-demand Powder River Percherons, who have become a regular sight at many of the state’s largest and most popular parades.

“I used to lease a ranch back in the late '80s, and the guy who owned it had a hitch of Belgians,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “And one day he just asked me if, in my free time, I could help him with that.”

Once he’d learned how to handle Belgians, he started his own team, but the popularity of the large draft horse was driving up prices. That led him to give two dapple-gray Percherons a try. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It was like love at first sight. "}]

“We were trying to create something that had a little flair,” he said. “So those two just escalated from a team of four to six, and before we knew it we had 11 or 12 dapple-gray horses, and we were doing work all over Wyoming, anywhere from Jackson to Cody to Sheridan and Cheyenne and most all the towns in between.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The War Horse Of France"}]

Percherons are conversation starters everywhere they go.

The war horse of France, these animals are massive and athletic, while also being uncommonly beautiful and stylish.

They are actually bigger than the more well-known Clydesdales, standing at 6 feet from the withers and weighing up to 2,600 pounds. Their hooves are the size of dinner plates, which help support all that weight. 

Their actual origins have been lost to time, but the oldest known record goes back before the Crusades, when mares of the Le Perche region of France were mated with Arabian stallions. 

The result was a breed more athletic than most horses. In Cushman’s opinion, they’re among the most fearless breeds of horse anywhere.

“I suppose if I needed to, I could probably drive them through a fire,” he said. “They would trust and believe in me.”

To be clear, Cushman has never tried to drive any of his Percheron teams through a fire. 

He has, on occasion, put them through a bit of a commotion while testing them for parade readiness.

“I know if there was a protest line with a bunch of PETA people standing there waving flags and everything, I could put these horses right over the top of them,” Cushman said. “They would do that for me.”

Percherons are also super intelligent creatures, and full of personality. That’s led to some funny escapades over the last 24 years. 

Like the horse that managed to get itself captured in a bog. 

The poor fella had to wait until morning for rescue, but all was well in the end. 

One year at Don King Days in Sheridan, after the team finished its exhibition round on the polo field, Cushman remembers tying the team to the trailer while he and the crew went to lunch.

When they returned, a big gray gelding named Sarge was somehow standing out in the middle of the vast green field, enjoying a tasty snack of fresh polo field grass.

“I hollered at him and he jerked his head up and ran back to the trailer and put himself right back into the slot where he came from,” Cushman recalled, laughing. “Like a milk cow going into a stanchion.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"What had happened was a loose buckle. "}]

“The neighbor horse and Sarge would fiddle around with each other all the time,” Cushman said. “So the neighbor horse had grabbed the tongue of Sarge’s halter and pulled on it. He pulled that strap through and unbuckled it.”

Sarge knew just what to do then. With no humans around, it was time for play.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Turning Up The Volume"}]

Budweiser is famous for its advertisements featuring long, shimmering lines of large draft horses in their glittering harnesses, clopping down the street. 

It’s a classic six-up hitch — three teams of two, one pair in front of the next.

Percherons can do the same thing, but Cushman has his own idea of how to turn the volume up for parades.

Instead of the six-up, what he likes to do for a “wow” factor is a four abreast setup. 

Picture four massive Percherons side by side across the front of the wagon, rolling shoulder to shoulder down a parade route. It’s a wall of horse flesh coming at you, with a team that stretches nearly 14 feet wide.

“We get a lot of compliments on it,” Cushman said. “There’s a ‘wow’ factor in it.”

Cushman did that last Saturday in Thermopolis  because it fit the theme of the event. For the Fourth of July in Cheyenne, meanwhile, he plans to go with the classic six-up.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Small Town To Big Time"}]

Cushman’s Powder River Percherons have performed for small Wyoming towns like Kaycee and Thermopolis to much larger venues like the Denver National Western Stock Show Parade, where the crowds range up to 100,000 people. 

They’ve been as far away as Tucson, Arizona, on up into Montana, and over to Deadwood, South Dakota. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Most of the venues, though, are Wyoming."}]

“Wyoming is home,” Cushman said. “We just try to take care of our own.”

The horses have carried three Wyoming governors, including Gov. Mark Gordon, as well as former U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi. 

They’ve also carried several celebrities, like actor Cole Hauser, known to millions as Rip from the popular television series “Yellowstone;” and Robert Taylor, who played Sheriff Walt Longmire, the hero of Craig Johnson’s Longmire universe, in the television hit series of the same name.

The Percherons have also carried a number of Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association world champions, including legends like Donnie Gay and Larry Mahan. 

They’re popular in parades and weddings, but have also been tapped for funerals to carry someone’s loved one to a final resting place.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Training Each Other"}]

The horses might seem to naturally take everything in stride from parade to funeral, but there’s quite a bit of training that goes into that even temperament.

That training effectively starts before Cushman ever buys a horse with the Amish families who raise them. 

“We buy them usually when they’re 3 years old,” he said. “And we prefer the Amish horses, because they have good manners and they just haven’t seen the big city life or anything.”

Amish horses also seem to work harder, Cushman said, making them a better value than other options. 

“I mean, the Amish make their living with horses,” Cushman said. “Even the carpenters and the craftsmen will have a saddlebred horse, or will be riding a horse around back and forth to work or to the store or whatever.”

Cushman puts his new horses in a pasture near the interstate, which he believes helps desensitize them to big vehicles and unexpected noises — things that are common in parades.

He will also blend his new horses in with older, more experienced animals as he’s training them for parades.

“They learn from each other,” he said. “They go, ‘Oh well, this is not bothering these guys, why would it bother me?’”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Not A Good Wall Street Bet"}]

For all their popularity, celebrity passengers and big-stage appearances, the Powder River Percherons would not be a good Wall Street bet. 

By the time Cushman figures in hay, feed, farrier work, veterinary care, equipment, fuel, hotels, and wages for a crew of five to six people, the retired rancher knows he’s not necessarily breaking even with these horses.

“We aim to at least cover expenses for our travel and whatnot,” he said. “If we took in all the feed and care and the shoeing for these horses and charged that back to the customer, we’d be out of business pretty quickly.”

He likes to think of his horses as a kind of rolling ambassador for the draft horse tradition. The team is a labor of love, everywhere he goes, one where the real payoff is the gee-whiz-cool expressions he sees on the faces of young and old alike. 

His Percherons have rolled under flags and fireworks, past squealing children with grocery bags full of candy. 

When the show is over, they go home and wait for the next call, ever-ready to channel that eternal sense of Americana that every parade needs.

Percherons 1 6 13 26

<title>Up To 2,600 Pounds Each, Powder River Percherons Are Huge At Wyoming Parades | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Anyone who’s been to a parade in Wyoming in the past 25 years knows the Powder River Percherons, teams of dapple-gray draft horses that tower over crowds. Also called the "war horse of France," they're 2,600 pounds each and 6 feet tall at the withers.

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