Same Guys Dancing

[{"type":"text","text":"Great White -- Once Bitten, Twice Shy"}]

Mix Collage 22 Jun 2024 11 41 AM 8992

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

<title>Sunday Morning Dance Party: Great White -- Once Bitten, Twice Shy | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Great White -- Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Sunday Morning Dance Party: Great White -- Once Bitten, Twice Shy

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

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

Raymond Felix brought a brand-new bike to Sturgis this year. New to him, that is.

“We bought it about two weeks ago,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I traded my Sporty in. I said, ‘We’re going to Sturgis, so I want a better bike.’”

The bike is a 2017 Softail Slim FLS with 5,000 miles on it, “practically new” for what was Felix’s first trip to Sturgis. He went with his family — his mom and dad, Leon and Alisa, and his girlfriend, Yessenia Marenco. 

The four were among hordes of bikers — literally thousands — riding the Devils Tower loop for a Sturgis Rally tradition called Wyoming Wednesday. 

Sundance’s claim to fame on Wyoming Wednesday is a burnout contest that’s been going on for more than half a century in front of the historic Dime Horseshoe Bar.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Legend Of The Burnout"}]

Local legends say the Dime Horseshoe Bar’s burnout actually started inside the establishment, which takes its name from a horseshoe pattern inlaid into the bar top with dimes.

The story goes that a bar patron decided to do a burnout inside the bar and the owner chased him out.

Other riders joined the fun, putting on their own spontaneous burnout event on the street in front of the bar.

It started a tradition that has continued ever since, though these days it’s more of a planned thing, complete with bike mechanics who swap used tires for new, saving the bikers’ good tires for their return trip to either the Sturgis Rally or home. 

The bar has since also built a stage for the bikes, elevating them above the crowd so everyone can see. That also helps keep the smoke over everyone’s heads. 

A set of fans blows the clouds of acrid, billowing smoke away from the bikers. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Big Father-Son Moment"}]

Felix had a dream for his first Sturgis, and watching the Dime Horseshoe Bar’s Burnout in Sundance was it.

But he didn’t just watch the burnout as he’d planned.

Jess Jones, owner of the Dime Horseshoe Bar along with her husband, Casey, is persuasive that way. 

She kept calling for entries, and Felix’s dad, Leon, kept urging Raymond to enter.

“They talked me into it,” he said. “I was like, ‘All right, let’s do it. I’m down for it.’”

Felix’s parents have been coming to Sturgis — and to Sundance’s burnout — since 2011. But until this year, Raymond couldn’t join them. All four work for the same delivery-driving business, which makes planning time off together tricky.

“It’s hard for all of us to take vacation at the same time,” Leon said. “This is the first year we got to do it.”

A friend showed Leon and Alisa all the cool places to go, including Sundance. 

“We love it,” Alisa said. “It’s amazing. Seriously, every year we look forward to coming.”

For Leon, finally sharing Sundance with his son — and seeing him compete so well in the burnout — was not just a great memory. It is a father-son milestone he cherishes. 

“It’s like a father’s dream to have your kid come ride with you,” he said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hitting Sixth Gear"}]

Felix had been told he probably wouldn’t be able to cycle his engine past fourth gear. 

But when he hit four without signs of strain, he kicked it up to five and then six. 

Smoke, he explained, is the whole point of a burnout. 

“The bigger the cloud of smoke is, the better,” he said. “So you go through first, second, third. You want to keep the gears shifting. But so it handled six just fine.”

Family and friends replayed the moment he hit sixth gear, and Raymond’s eyes lit up.

“Check this out,” he exclaimed. “The sixth-gear pin! I was in sixth gear!”

That ultimately earned him enough crowd appreciation that he took third place, along with a $250 cash prize. 

First place, and the $750 in prize money, went to Bill Snider, a regular from Michigan who said he will put the money back into his bike.

Snider was in Sundance hanging out with his daughter, Erica Goble, and her fiancé.

Goble drove to Sundance from Colorado to be with her dad, and said she thought the event was “pretty cool.”

Snider told Cowboy State Daily he spends little time at the Sturgis Rally itself, preferring to spend his rally time in tiny Sundance and Hulett in Wyoming.

“We go over there, but we go over there once, buy a T-shirt and leave,” he said.

In Wyoming, he said, he has found people are welcoming and treat you like family — and that’s what keeps him coming back.

Burnout 20260812 165049 8 15 26

<title>Why Sturgis Riders Have Packed Sundance, Wyoming, For 50 Years Of Its Annual Burnout | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally riders have packed Sundance, Wyoming, for its annual burnout for more than 50 years. Legend has it the burnout started inside the Dime Horseshoe Bar. “The bigger the cloud of smoke is, the better,” says one rider.

Why Sturgis Riders Have Packed Sundance, Wyoming, For 50 Years Of Its Annual Burnout

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,” Gardner mused.

Agreed Stiver: “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.

“The final round, I did feel better about it,” Stiver said. “I kind of knew how I could go and knock it out. By then I still didn’t know exactly where to go on the greens, but it definitely helped.”

[{"type":"text","text":"“Being in the top 20 was respectable for sure,\" added Gardner."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Giving A Wyoming-Style Gift"}]

The golf was the centerpiece of the adventure, but the experience didn’t end there.

Owner Will Andersen, Golf Channel host Gary Williams and the course’s architects were on hand to explain the Landmand concept and history. Their passion and detail gave Gardner and Stiver an entirely different perspective as they plied the course on days three and four.

Stiver also was struck by Andersen’s graciousness, and that he’d remember his name each time they’d bump into each other amid the throngs of golfers, staffers, media and spectators.

Small wonder: The duo made an impression when they presented Andersen with a spur with hearts cut into it made by renowned Sheridan craftsman Tom Balding. They also gave Andersen a copper shot glass from their hometown Mint Bar.

“Fifty thousand people have played golf here and nobody’s brought me anything,” Stiver recalls a touched Andersen telling them.

[{"type":"text","text":"“We just wanted to take a piece of Wyoming,” Gardner explained."}]

When it was over and they’d walked off the Walmart parking lot that was their 18th green for the final time, filmed by The Golf Channel shaking hands with their partners for the round, Gardner and Stiver said they both felt a palpable sense of relief.

[{"type":"text","text":"Their immediate reaction: Never again."}]

A week later, they are still nursing the bruises to their golf egos from what Gardner says is the toughest course he’s ever played. But they’re also certain their links version of PTSD will subside.

“There will be a day,” Stiver said with a chuckle, “when we’re ready to get hurt again.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Gardner agreed."}]

“The event itself was exceptional,” he said of a tournament where their $7,000 team entry fee covered everything from meals and drinks to their 10 daily range balls. “It was better than what I expected. Then to spend 10 hours each way with a buddy and a truck and no distractions and just hang out — it was just a great week.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Golf Envy Back Home"}]

They’re enjoying their few minutes of golf-envy fame back home, too, though a torn rotator cuff suffered at the Powder Horn member-guest event has sidelined Gardner from the duo’s mission of playing every Wyoming course over the next few summers.

[{"type":"text","text":"Landmand Is all anybody in their Sheridan circles wants to talk about."}]

Do they have advice should any of their golfing buddies somehow win the lottery on New Year’s Eve and land a tee time on this Links of Dreams in the Loess Hills?

“Just experience it,” Gardner said with a laugh, “because you’re not going to walk away going ‘I’m a really good golfer.’”

Contact Jeff Welsch at jeff@cowboystatedaily.com

Landmand Landman landscape inset 8 15 26

<title>Sheridan Golfers Finally Get To Play Toughest Place To Book A Tee Time In The U.S. | Cowboy State Daily</title>

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.

Sheridan Golfers Finally Get To Play Toughest Place To Book A Tee Time In The U.S.

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

When Brian Downing opened his eyes somewhere in Wyoming in the summer of 1975, he saw a giant pink elephant dancing above him.

[{"type":"text","text":"For a moment, he wasn't entirely convinced it was real."}]

Downing had gotten out of the Army a few months earlier and was hitchhiking from Washington, D.C., to Bellingham, Washington, before starting college at Georgetown University that fall.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"It was a respectable means of transportation then,\" he recalled."}]

Somewhere in eastern Wyoming, two Native American men picked him up and offered him a Coors. 

That alone was something of a novelty. At the time, the cold Colorado beer was hard to get east of the Mississippi River, and Downing remembers it as a welcome break from the summer heat.

"My hosts were at least somewhat inebriated and had a dismembered doll on the dashboard," Downing said.

[{"type":"text","text":"That was disconcerting, but off they went."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Eventually, Downing fell asleep."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"He woke when he sensed the car had stopped. Still groggy, he looked up."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"A dancing pink elephant and a sign for DT's Liquors."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"It took a moment to shake off the idea I was dreaming,\" he said."}]

The men dropped him off near Rawlins about two hours later. Downing continued west and made it all the way to Washington.

He doesn't remember much more about that peculiar ride, but more than 50 years later, he vividly remembers the elephant.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Seeing Pink Elephants"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"There is something almost too perfect about Downing's story."}]

Americans, after all, had been "seeing pink elephants" long before Downing saw his in Wyoming.

The expression became shorthand in the early 20th century for the bizarre hallucinations associated with heavy drinking and alcohol withdrawal.

Jack London famously invoked the imagery in his 1913 autobiographical novel 

, writing of a man who sees "blue mice and pink elephants" in his delirium.

In Walt Disney's 1941 animated classic, Dumbo and Timothy Mouse accidentally drink water spiked with champagne. What follows is one of the strangest sequences Disney ever put on film.

Elephants multiply, dance, march and morph into bizarre shapes in a surreal, ethanol-soaked dream.

"Pink Elephants on Parade" didn't invent the association between pink elephants and booze, but it helped plant the image firmly in American popular culture.

[{"type":"text","text":"And in Cheyenne, the joke became even better."}]

Because DT's wasn't named for delirium tremens, although it would make sense. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"D.T. Was A Guy"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Mike Moser has heard the assumption plenty of times."}]

Moser, executive director of the Wyoming State Liquor Association and a former Cheyenne bar owner, first moved to the city in 1980 and has spent decades in Wyoming's liquor industry.

"The vast majority of people don't realize the dude's name was D.T. Johnson," Moser said. "It wasn't the DTs that you get from alcohol. It was just his initials."

Johnson was also an important figure in Wyoming's early liquor industry. Moser said he became the first president of the Wyoming State Liquor Association in 1945.

It wasn't until the early 2000s that DT's expanded, Moser said. The owner bought A&A Discount Liquor and converted it into a second DT's.

That larger operation became DT's Liquor Mart and Tusker Bar. It eventually closed in late 2024.

[{"type":"text","text":"The old Lincolnway DT's kept going."}]

Moser said the Sullivan family owned the store for years before Kevin Georges bought it.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Kid Who Bought The Place"}]

Georges was born and raised in Cheyenne, and he remembers a handful of markers around town that stuck in his mind as a little boy.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"We always would drive by the pink elephant,\" Georges said."}]

Sometimes on Sundays, his parents would take the kids to get doughnuts and swing past DT's so they could see the elephant moving above the building.

"That was a marker for us," Georges said. "I was familiar with the pink elephant way back when, having no idea even what the building and the establishment was." 

Georges came from another old Cheyenne retail family. His family had operated a furniture business for generations.

Eventually, the furniture industry began changing, and the family faced a decision about whether to remain in the business or try something different.

[{"type":"text","text":"Mike Sullivan, then the owner of DT's, was a close friend of Georges."}]

A conversation between the two turned into an idea, which turned into negotiations.

[{"type":"text","text":"In 2008, he officially bought the place."}]

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

[{"type":"text","text":"For Moser, the staying power of DT's isn't simply about a funny sign."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"It's unique,\" he said of the elephant."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"And its location helps."}]

"Lots of people drive on Lincolnway, so everybody knows where it is," he said.

Moser sees DT's as part of something that's becoming increasingly uncommon: the locally owned neighborhood bar and liquor store that survives long enough to become part of a community's identity.

Retail has changed dramatically during his lifetime. Grocery stores and other businesses that were once locally owned have given way to large corporate chains.

[{"type":"text","text":"Local watering holes have proved more stubborn."}]

"I think there will always be a place for the neighborhood bar because that's where we meet our friends," Moser said.

"There's not too many businesses where you can still walk in and shake the hand and have a beer with the owner."

Bars and package liquor stores, he said, remain among the "stalwarts of small business."

"I think that's part of the nostalgia that the liquor industry has that most industries, sadly, have lost," he said. "We're still hometown businesses."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Still Nodding"}]

Roadside America was once filled with strange things built to make travelers look twice.

Giant cowboys, dinosaurs, doughnuts and fiberglass animals loomed over highways, each competing for the attention of motorists speeding past.

Many disappeared along with the businesses they advertised, but the pachyderm keeps keeping on.

The rooftop animatronic is old — exactly how old, Georges doesn't know — but much of its original mechanical construction has survived.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"Back in the day they built things to last,\" he said."}]

The old parts can still be serviced, Georges said, and DT's makes a point of maintaining them. About two years ago, the elephant got another fresh coat of paint.

"We hope that it never goes down," Georges said. "We make sure that we keep that icon moving."

D Ts pink elephant 8 15 26

<title>Drinking Wyoming: No, You’re Not Drunk — That’s Just DT's Dancing Pink Elephant | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Back in 1975, a hitchhiker woke up beneath Cheyenne’s giant pink elephant and wondered if he was hallucinating. He wasn’t. The booze-loving pachyderm has been bobbing over DT’s for decades. "We make sure that we keep that icon moving," says DT's owner.

Drinking Wyoming: No, You’re Not Drunk — That’s Just DT's Dancing Pink Elephant

Jen Kocher - Headshot CSD

Jen Kocher

Around Wyoming

For the Haux sisters, the enduring mystery of their father’s fate still crystallizes around one stark image: His truck, abandoned in the Red Desert, an image taken from a newspaper article.

Clifford “Russ” Haux of Mills vanished on Nov. 26, 2003, near Wamsutter in south-central Wyoming where he worked as an oil-rig driller. The 42-year-old husband and father of three had gone out with a co-worker to free a stuck vehicle and never returned.

The last image of him is his fading headlights as he drove off into a winter night trying to find a place to cross a ditch.

One minute he was there, the next, he was gone — last seen driving his pickup into a ditch, looking for a place to cross.

For two years, extensive searches turned up nothing. Then a hunter found his purple Ford Ranger less than six miles from where he was last seen. Its front tires were stuck in a washed-out riverbed, with evidence suggesting he’d tried to free them.

His children – Lois, Justy and Chancy – grew up on memories and secondhand stories, left to wonder what had happened to their father.

The story doesn’t add up based on their recollections of their dad: A guy they describe as a “driller through and through” and seasoned “mountain man” who was also a skilled outdoorsman.

“I don’t know what happened out there or the trauma he had to go through,” Justy told Cowboy State Daily. “Anything could have happened.”

The Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office likewise can’t speculate about what might have happened to Haux after he left the vehicle. But there’s no evidence to date to suggest Haux was a victim, said Jason Mower, public information officer with the department.

“Based on the evidence available, including what was found when Haux’s vehicle was later located, the disappearance has been considered accidental rather than the result of foul play,” Mower wrote in an email to Cowboy State Daily.

More than two decades later, Mower said the case remains active and unresolved with no new leads they can publicly release at this time.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Disappearing Headlights"}]

His daughters have many questions about what transpired the night their father disappeared and how his vehicle went overlooked for two years, given the extensive search efforts described in the documentation shared by the sheriff’s office.

All they know is that Haux and his friend and co-worker left the oil rig the night of Nov. 26 to retrieve his Suburban that they’d gotten stuck in a mud bog on Nov. 18.

In the early morning hours of Nov. 19, Haux’s rig mates returned to camp, Mower said. Haux apparently stayed with the vehicle and was rescued on Nov. 20. The sheriff’s office did not specify how Haux was recovered, though his daughters were told it was by a search plane.

It was this vehicle that Haux and his rig mate were going to retrieve the night he disappeared.

Nearly 23 years after Clifford “Russ” Haux vanished in the Red Desert near Wamsutter, his daughters are still haunted. The 42-year-old husband and father of three had gone out with a co-worker to free a stuck vehicle and never returned.

Sunday Morning Dance Party: Great White -- Once Bitten, Twice Shy

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