Daily Darwin

[{"type":"text","text":"Even the East German judge had to score this one a 10...."}]

Darwin 9 8 24

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

<title>Daily Darwin: Sunday, September 8, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Even the East German judge had to score this one a 10....

Daily Darwin: Sunday, September 8, 2024

 Even the East German judge had to score this one a 10....

Kerry Drake

Business & Tourism

The addition of Cheyenne to a proposed Colorado passenger rail project has longtime boosters in both states more confident than ever the service will happen.

The reasons for such optimism over bringing passenger rail service to Wyoming are two-fold. 

First, the Front Range Passenger Rail district is hopeful it can build an effective infrastructure, unlike inherent problems that doomed previous efforts.

Meanwhile, the economic case for Cheyenne officials and residents to go all in on the proposed Colorado rail system is stronger because the benefits to the capital city taking advantage of increasing Front Range population appear clear.

Still, while signs for FRPR success in Colorado are encouraging for starting in 2029, supporters say, both the district and Cheyenne officials agree expansion to the north won’t happen unless Wyoming develops a funding system to support it.

Wyoming and South Dakota are the only two contiguous states with no passenger rail service. Wyoming hasn’t had service since the Pioneer route was discontinued in 1997, though Amtrak serves Laramie, Rock Springs and Evanston with buses. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Never Say Never"}]

Never Say Never, a Cheyenne group determined to make it happen, has been meeting with FRPR officials for the past three years. It also is trying to solicit interest from state lawmakers, the Wyoming Department of Transportation and the City of Cheyenne.

One member of the group, Michael Rudolph of Cheyenne, was a NASA engineer who worked on the 2020 Mars rover project. His job was finding bugs in the software that directs the precise movements of the camera that serves as the eyes of the vehicle.

“If we can go 140 million miles to Mars, we ought to be able to go 45 miles from Cheyenne to Fort Collins,” quipped Steve Borin, a regional business developer and the founder of Never Say Never.

“Cheyenne is listed as a potential future extension, but Colorado has no political incentive to push north,” added Borin, a regional business developer. “Their taxpayers are not paying for Wyoming’s benefit.” 

Once the initial phase is up and running between Denver and Fort Collins, he said, Cheyenne must use its resources to join the FRPR district. 

“If we don’t, all we’re going to get is a bus ticket to the border,” Borin said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Colorado Project Optimism"}]

James Flattum of the FRPR district is clearly hopeful. 

“I think there’s a strong consensus that a future connection to Cheyenne is full of potential,” he said. “When you look at the distance between Fort Collins to Cheyenne, it’s really reachable.”

Another positive aspect, he added, is that north of the Denver suburb of Westminster all of the existing track to be utilized is owned by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.

“We have such a strong working relationship with them,” Flattum said. 

Oddly, the downturn of Wyoming’s coal production and moving it by train is working in Cheyenne’s favor.

“What has changed in the world over the last 20 years is there are significantly fewer coal trains running on this alignment,” Flattum explained. “BNSF’s strategy is to send those trains on a different alignment to Nebraska from Denver.”

A major milestone was reached in the FRPR’s plans, he added, when the group recently released its delivery plan, a document intended to show the full picture of its short- and long-term vision.

“We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got a ‘spine’ in Colorado that really connects our core centers and this kind of first act that we’re contemplating,” Flattum said. “And the more successful we are in securing a reliable and frequent service here in Colorado, the easier and quicker it’s going to be for us to expand to Wyoming, and south to Trinidad, Colorado, and perhaps Albuquerque, New Mexico.”  

Flattum said FRPR is taking an incremental approach to keep costs low, starting with three trains a day between Fort Collins and Denver over the next three years using revenues voters approved in 2024.

The FRPR Board will make a decision by the end of August whether to pursue a sales-tax initiative for Colorado’s general election in November.

“We’d be able to fund up to 10 trains a day between Fort Collins and Denver, and then eight trains a day to Pueblo with a 0.333% sales tax,” Flattum said. 

That is expected to generate about $295 million annually.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Bedroom Community?"}]

The Front Range continues to grow and housing costs also are rising fast. Fort Collins is considerably more expensive than Cheyenne.

“As Denver's metro expands northward, Cheyenne becomes an increasingly attractive bedroom community — if the commute is solved,” Borin said. “Without rail, it stays out of reach for anyone working in Fort Collins.”

According to a Never Say Never fact sheet, the cross-border commuter market already exists at a meaningful scale:

• Approximately 7,100 Colorado residents commute into Wyoming for work — nearly three times the number going the other way.

• About 1,600 workers from Larimer and Weld counties (Fort Collins/Greeley) commute specifically to Laramie County each day by car.

• Roughly 20% of Cheyenne's workforce commutes from outside the city, including northern Colorado.

Borin said a University of Wyoming economist has noted that Wyoming's economy would be stronger if those Colorado commuters lived in Wyoming.

“They’d spend their paychecks on Wyoming mortgages and groceries instead of Colorado ones,” Borin said.

Never Say Never claims that by spending between $300 million to $400 million on infrastructure, Wyoming would get about $1.4 billion back over the next three decades in tax revenue and economic activity.

“The mechanism is not a subsidy,” Borin said. “It's removing the coordination barrier — cross-state planning, zoning authority — that only the government can remove, then letting market forces do the rest.”

Borin maintained that “the window to act cheaply is now.” He estimated land near a future Cheyenne station can be acquired today for $10,000 to $20,000 per acre. After a rail announcement, he predicted, it will cost five to 10 times more. 

“A $2 million to $4 million land acquisition today is the most asymmetric public investment Wyoming could make — small downside, very large upside, and it keeps all of its options,” he said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Loving The Depot"}]

Flattum said the FRPR is impressed with Cheyenne’s preservation of its historic Union Pacific Depot. He said it’s an example of how forward-thinking Cheyenne is.

“Whenever we come up and visit, the depot gives us a huge amount of inspiration,” the FRPR official said. “How cool would it be if we can work together to bring trains back to this station?

“Really, all you’re going to have to do is build a connector track to get to the station facility,” Flattum added. “If Cheyenne specifically wants in, whatever is going to be possible under Wyoming law and Wyoming politics, if they pass funding as well, we do have a very realistic path in terms of engineering and project execution.”

He described expansion to Wyoming as "very doable, but it’s really going to have to come down to voters in the Cheyenne metro area — do they fundamentally want it?”

Kerry Drake can be reached at: Kerry@CowboyStateDaily.com

Passenger Rail Colorado Amtrak 5 5 24

<title>Colorado-Wyoming Passenger Rail Can Happen If Cheyenne Provides Funding Support | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Leaders of a project to provide passenger rail service between Colorado and Wyoming say it can happen if Cheyenne does its part with funding support approved by voters. “If we can go to Mars, we can go 45 miles from Cheyenne to Fort Collins,” said one supporter.

Colorado-Wyoming Passenger Rail Can Happen If Cheyenne Provides Funding Support

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Wyoming Life

Sunday morning, I threw some clothes in a bag and headed east, Sturgis-bound.

For hundreds of miles, Wyoming unspooled beneath a great blue sky, the prairie rolling toward the horizon through cattle, sagebrush and long stretches of nothing at all, until the earth began to rise and the plains folded themselves into the dark, pine-covered ridges of Meade County.

[{"type":"text","text":"Motorcycles seemed to materialize out of thin air."}]

One became three. Three became 20. Packs merged with packs until the highway itself appeared to be migrating toward Sturgis, chrome flashing in the sun and the low thump of exhaust echoing off rocky bluffs.

I left the interstate for an old highway where limestone walls rose around the road, waterfalls spilled from cliffs and disappeared into the trees, and the air seemed to change as the prairie vanished behind me.

[{"type":"text","text":"I had crossed into the primal kingdom of the Black Hills."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"A crow cawed from somewhere above, and a shiver ran down my back."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Too late to turn back now."}]

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

For most of the year, Sturgis is a South Dakota town of close to 7,000 people. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Then August comes."}]

, transforming the place into a temporary city of chrome, leather and humanity, with Main Street as its pulsing center. I was told about half-million people were there Sunday.

Somewhere near the entrance, a 66-year-old Louisiana man was waiting to show me the ropes.

Manny Myers was sitting in a low-slung, tricked-out trike customized down to the smallest details, his gray beard hanging down his chest in two long braids and not one but three packs of Marlboro Blacks riding in the pocket of his sleeveless orange shirt.

The Pantydropper — the name of this wild beast — was painted with ghost flames and built around a 350 V8 car engine sitting obscenely exposed in front of us.

The name is a nod to the toll, but "You get a free ride," he told me with a smirk, because he knows my aunt.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"It goes zero to 100 in a second,\" he said."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"This was not reassuring."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Biker, Not An Enthusiast"}]

Manny has been coming to Sturgis for 50 years. His first rally was when he was 16, after hitchhiking from California, but his love affair with motorcycles began more than a decade before that.

[{"type":"text","text":"He was 5 when his father got a Honda 305 and began taking him for rides."}]

Manny remembers there wasn't much talking, just his father in front of him, the road rolling beneath them and Mother Nature whispering into his little ear.

[{"type":"text","text":"One day, Manny looked at his father."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"Dad, are we bikers?\""}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"No, son,\" his father told him. \"We're enthusiasts.\""}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Five-year-old Manny thought about that for a minute."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"You might be an enthusiast, Dad, but I'm a biker.\""}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Sixty-one years later, not much has changed."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"We climbed aboard."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Winding Turns"}]

Manny took the wheel first, steering us away from Sturgis and onto the old highways that twist through the Black Hills.

The Pantydropper was impossible to ignore. The exposed V8 growled in front of us as Manny worked the turns, his two gray braids lifting in the wind and a Marlboro Black burning between his lips. 

Motorcycles were everywhere, traveling alone and in packs, and riders waved as they passed.

[{"type":"text","text":"Manny waved right back."}]

For a while, I was content to sit beside him and watch the world go by, the road winding between walls of pine and rock as he handled the trike with ease.

[{"type":"text","text":"Then, without warning, he pulled onto the shoulder and scooched over."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"Your turn.\""}]

The mini ape-hanger handlebars felt awkward in my hands, and The Pantydropper was harder to steer than I expected, requiring actual muscle to wrestle around the curves.

[{"type":"text","text":"But it had a windshield and seatbelts, so I hit the gas."}]

I was terrified, but I didn't want to let my new friend down, and "bikers don't like pussies," he had told me earlier, so there was that.

We passed the Boars Nest, where people crowded an outdoor deck strung with star-spangled bunting and flags.

Then we zipped around another corner and there, rising unexpectedly from the trees, was a 60-foot stone bust of Abraham Lincoln.

[{"type":"text","text":"The Great Emancipator stared at us solemnly."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"The trees became a blur."}]

Beside me, Manny smoked his cigarette, totally unconcerned that a reporter he had met only hours earlier was now piloting his baby through the Black Hills.

Laughing like little kids, our hair whipping wildly in the wind, I began to understand.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'Ah, Shit'"}]

It was about 4 p.m. when we decided to turn around and head back toward Sturgis, but this time when I hit the throttle nothing happened.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"Ah, shit,\" Manny said."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Apparently, a wire had come loose."}]

The Pantydropper could still idle, so we began creeping down the highway at 2 mph, and before long a procession of motorcycles and cars stacked up behind us.

[{"type":"text","text":"Manny considered the problem."}]

Then the sprightly senior climbed out of his seat and scrambled onto the front of the trike, one leg on the hood and the other still in the cab, until he was hanging halfway out of the machine.

[{"type":"text","text":"From there, he began operating the throttle by hand."}]

His Marlboro Black was still burning from his lips, bobbing above the exposed V8 engine.

Suddenly, we were hurtling angrily down the highway again, The Pantydropper roaring like a demon from Hell with Manny clinging to the front while I steered.

[{"type":"text","text":"It was going remarkably well."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Until I saw flashing lights."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Busted"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"A South Dakota state trooper was behind us."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"We pulled over."}]

Manny climbed down from the front of the trike, and the trooper approached.

[{"type":"text","text":"He looked at both of us with complete horror."}]

He asked Manny to go sit in the patrol vehicle for a minute, then turned his attention to me.

[{"type":"text","text":"It slowly dawned on me what was happening."}]

He appeared to want some reassurance that I knew this strange, double-braided man, that I was OK and that I had willingly climbed aboard.

[{"type":"text","text":"I assured him I had."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"I was, in fact, there voluntarily."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"I was a journalist."}]

The explanation did not make the situation sound any more reasonable. If anything, it seemed to affirm for both of us the peculiar lunacy of a reporter hunting for a good story.

I don't know what Manny said inside the trooper's car, but somehow he talked his way out of a ticket and came back with an idea.

We rigged a jumper cable to the lever he'd been pulling, creating a makeshift throttle he could operate from inside the trike.

Then we fired up the horses, reins in hand, and off we went, me still steering while Manny worked our homemade throttle, winding our way back through the Black Hills toward the gathering thunder of motorcycles in Sturgis.

[{"type":"text","text":"Manny was cackling."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Hell-Raiser To Helper"}]

Having survived our run-in with the law, we crested a hill and spotted a sign advertising $20 steaks.

[{"type":"text","text":"We pulled in, and he told me what Sturgis was like a half-century ago. "}]

It was rougher then, with fewer rules and considerably more danger. These days, he considers much of it a tourist trap.

The old outlaw mythology is still everywhere — leather, loud bikes, nearly naked bodies and enough skulls and flames to decorate the gates of Hell — but now it shares Main Street with families on vacation. During the day, little kids weave through the crowds while motorcycles rumble past despite women walking around wearing almost nothing. 

Manny has watched Sturgis go from a place your mother might warn you about to a place where somebody might bring their mother.

[{"type":"text","text":"Manny has changed, too."}]

There was a time, he said, when he came to Sturgis mostly to "fight and drink."

Today, the old hell-raiser has become something of a helper. He told me he spends much of his free time trying to make the world a better place, and when he comes to Sturgis now, he isn't looking for the trouble that once drew him here.

[{"type":"text","text":"He just wants to ride."}]

He gets up early and cruises the old highways while the rest of the rally is still sleeping off the night, following the roads wherever they take him, much as he did as a little boy riding behind his father in the hills of California. 

His trikes draw attention everywhere they go. People stare from the roadside. Riders turn their heads as they pass. Strangers wave, and Manny waves right back, like the unofficial mayor of Sturgis greeting "the peasants".

[{"type":"text","text":"Eventually, we climbed back into The Pantydropper and rolled toward town."}]

We ended up at "The Beach," a little sandpit where bikers gather to do burnouts. One man revved and revved until his tire blew apart.

[{"type":"text","text":"I climbed out of the death trap, grabbed my things and waved goodbye."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"It was getting dark, and Sturgis was just waking up."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"\"Goodbye, my sister in the wind,\" Manny called after me."}]

Kolby 3 wheel sturgis 2 8 10 26

<title>Sturgis 2026: Climbing Into A 3-Wheeler Called The Pantydropper Was Not A Good Idea | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Climbing into a three-wheeler called "The Pantydropper" with a 50-year Sturgis veteran who boasted "it goes zero to 100 in a second," ended up with me at the wheel and the flashing lights of a South Dakota patrol car behind us.

Sturgis 2026: Climbing Into A 3-Wheeler Called The Pantydropper Was Not A Good Idea

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

Renée Jean

Tourism

Will Grant still has the two horses, Chicken Fry and Badger, that he rode across Wyoming in the summer of 2019 when he retraced all 2,000 miles of the Pony Express trail. 

Chicken Fry was born in New Mexico, and no one knows for sure how old he is.

“He’s had some hard miles on him,” Grant said. “Not a hard life, but plenty of work. So we rope off them a little bit, but not too much, and they’re like trail horses.”

Some of those hard trail miles happened in a landscape that deeply respects its roots. Wyoming, Grant told Cowboy State Daily,  has cared for its Pony Express Trail better than other states.

“You can see it there,” Grant said. “It’s very well marked in Wyoming. Very well marked.”

Mosquitoes in Jeffrey City are particularly bad, while South Pass can be freezing cold even in July. 

That’s left Grant wondering how Pony Express riders kept their feet and their hands warm, given that they were riding through South Pass in January of 1861.

“The winds through there are no joke,” he added.

These are just a few of the gritty details Grant learned about Wyoming as he rode through it on the back of a horse, surrounded by a vast, windswept sea of sagebrush. 

He had known from the outset that he would face the same brutal elements the pioneers did — shifting mud, relentless wind, desert conditions, mosquitoes, and the like.

But, as he wrote in his book, “The Last Ride of the Pony Express,” thinking about the hardships ahead of time and experiencing them firsthand are two very different things. 

That point became starkly clear under the flash of a sudden Wyoming summer storm. Grant and his two horses, he realized immediately, were the highest point on the landscape. They were walking targets clad in iron horseshoes. And there was nowhere for them to take cover. It was just miles of open sagebrush in every direction, as far as his eyes could see.

The crack of thunder overhead filled him with dread as he rode across the land in that gathering storm. He also gained a new appreciation for the 1860s couriers who wrote of learning to read the landscape in between blinding pulses of lightning strikes.

“I learned that the Pony Express as a mail service was a really impressive display of American entrepreneurship,” he said. “There’s no other country in the world that could have done the same thing given the same environmental parameters. There were no horses out there. There was no infrastructure on which to set up a fast horse mail relay over 2,000 miles to deliver a letter in 10 days.”

There were wild horses, and they were a huge danger to a lone rider managing two horses. Grant writes about that in his book, how careful he was to avoid either inciting an attack or losing his horses to that stallion’s wild harem.

The Mongols and the Romans and the Persians did have ancient horse relays to quickly traverse their kingdoms. But these were created in already civilized areas that their empires controlled, and those relays were fed and maintained by the full resources and might of those empires. 

America’s Pony Express was a business venture started completely from scratch, with no empire behind it at all, traversing a vast and empty land that was openly hostile. There were no resources from a surrounding empire to help them through all the places that lacked food, water and shelter. 

Pony Express riders didn’t wait for perfect conditions, though. They rode in all kinds of weather, making a 2,000-mile trip in a just 10 days. 

Grant took his time, compared to them. His journey lasted 142 nights.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Modern-Day Station Masters"}]

He also had something else the original 1860s riders didn’t. Wyoming ranchers — many of them descended from original homesteaders — who helped him all along the way, as did members of the modern-day Pony Express riders. The ranchers, in particular, were an informal network of modern-day station masters, ready and willing to help him all along the way.

Time and again, just as weather threatened to overwhelm him and his small string of horses, Grant would ride up on a private gate to find it already opened to him. The rancher before had let the next farm know he was on the way and to watch out for him.

These ranchers didn’t just grant him passage through their land. They would actively pull him out of a storm, offering secure pasture space and protection from the elements. There were often hot meals and a dry bunkhouse were included, as well as their stories.

“The traveling horseman still finds a lot of hospitality in Wyoming, I’ll tell you that,” Grant said. “People were good to me. Opening pasture gates, no worries. Really good people all along the way.”

There was the time a well-meaning rancher tried to talk him into taking an ornery mule with him … 

But warm hospitality and cheerful dinners and storytelling were more common. It was a powerful reminder that while the physical shelters of the 1860s may have crumbled, the human infrastructure of mutual aid remains intact across the Wyoming plains. It’s been actively kept alive behind the closed gates of modern cattle ranchers, many of whom are still living by the unwritten code of the West, handed down from one generation to the next.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Write What You Know"}]

Grant’s Pony Express ride wasn’t just a history fascination for him. He found in the ride a perfect intersection for the two halves of his life.

“I’m a journalist, and I mostly have been writing for magazines,” he said. “What I really wanted to do is write a book. The Pony Express emerged as a topic that I thought I could shed some light on because I worked as a horse trainer and a cowboy.”

Grant, born and raised in Littleton, Colorado, spent his summers cowboying on a ranch between Chugwater and LaGrange in Wyoming, studying under a foreman named Tim Sussex.

“Those were good years for me because Tim really showed me how to handle horses in a lot of different ways, but really how to be quiet with a horse,” he said. “That is the best thing you can do, get a ranch hand job on the wide open prairies of Wyoming.”

His first degree program was forestry and geology in Tennessee, after which he went back to horses, breaking colts in Larkspur, Colorado, then working for a ranch in Texas. 

In 2008, he went back to school to study journalism at University of Montana School of Journalism.

“I needed it,” he said. “I’d been training horses and doing ranch work for like eight years. I had to use a different part of my brain.”

When he went hunting for a book idea, the old writer’s advice — write what you know — stuck.

“I saw the Pony Express as a way to overlap my expertise with horses and write what you know,” he said. “I decided to dive into the Pony Express and I thought, ‘Well, obviously, I’m gonna have to just ride it. Travel it by horseback.’”

That, he added, was the “best summer of my life.” 

Even if it was the summer of 2019 — not the summer of ’69.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Trail Logic And Life"}]

Spending five months on the back of a horse gave him new perspectives on hardships and life. 

Cowboy and journalist Will Grant rode all 2,000 miles of the Pony Express trail on horseback. He said the trip gave him a newfound respect for Wyoming weather. Mosquitoes in Jeffrey City are bad, while South Pass can be freezing cold even in July. 

Daily Darwin: Sunday, September 8, 2024

In case you missed it

More in Daily Darwin

Daily Darwin: Monday, August 10, 2026

Daily Darwin: Sunday, August 9, 2026

Daily Darwin: Saturday, August 8, 2026

Daily Darwin: Friday, August 7, 2026

Most read