Wamsutter, Wyoming: A Dusty Blip On I-80 Where Everyone Knows Your Business

WAMSUTTER — It’s not surprising that even many Wyoming residents don’t know the first thing about this blink-and-you-miss-it dot on Interstate 80. After all, what could they be missing in a town with fewer than 200 permanent residents?  

More than you’d think.

Not unlike the truckers and travelers who undergird its economy, the people here have mostly blown in from elsewhere.

There are no native Wamsutterites serving on the town council. There is only one locally raised teacher at the K-8 Desert School.

Ask any of the town's staple employees — from the service stations to the trickle of rig workers who sometimes shoot pool at the otherwise vacant Desert Bar — and they’ll all tell you the same thing.

“No one in Wamsutter is actually from Wamsutter,” said a woman who goes by Sabre, who in May relocated here from Rock Springs for the third time in as many years for a job at Love’s Travel Stop, the town’s largest employer.

In ways, it resembles the setup for a reality television series: What happens when you lash a bunch of disparate people together in a small town in Wyoming? 

It’s the type of arrangement where folks are bound to know your business, and where boredom can drum up drama for its own sake.

“Everyone who works here is either in a relationship or married, and they all think that everyone else is trying to sleep with everyone’s boyfriend or husband, or girlfriend or wife,” said Sabre, describing the dramatics swirling among workers at Love's, many of whom live in the same company-owned apartment complex.

Love’s enforces a policy against romantic partners working same-shift schedules. Whether that dampens or spurs scuttlebutt is hard to say.

“Small town-type of behavior. There’s nothing going on, so they go and make up this rumor about you, and this rumor about him, because there’s got to be something going around in Wamsutter,” she said, speaking with Cowboy State Daily in a booth at the truck stop’s adjoining Subway restaurant.

Although different from the reality television genre, this place is not easy to pigeonhole, nor is Sabre.

She’s chosen to live in a town all but invisible to the rest of the world, but she strives to stand out. She colors her hair with an aquamarine dye, shaves slits in her eyebrows and wears myriad facial piercings. 

“I want to stand out and be my own person, be unique to everyone else. I really like the peace and quiet here, but I'm also an outgoing person,” she said, opening her mouth to show off a tongue stud. 

She gravitates to Wamsutter for its peace and quiet but nonetheless takes in stride a work environment that is distinctly chaotic, a reality on stark display as the summer travel season picks up steam.

‘It’s Not For Everybody’

Around the clock on the last Saturday in May, customers trampled through the doors like Black Friday. Checkout lines snaked down the candy aisles. Ad hoc queues formed at the fuel bays, and parking spots were claimed by one vehicle before fully vacated by the last. 

Amidst this rush, cross-trained workers like Sabre might be found scrubbing down showers, running the registers, prepping Subway sandwiches or stirring the fryer at Chester’s Fried Chicken, restaurants that adjoin the truck stop. 

She powers through on a steady drip of Red Bull and a gummy frog sugar high. It’s weary work, and some show it more than others.

Aaron, a shift manager, loped around the store with luggage under his eyes and a frizz of uncombed hair that lent the impression he’d been trying to yank it out, which would track considering he’s carrying the extra load of two employees who begged off work this day.

Clinking away at the register next, a bed-headed manager named Richard gave the appearance of a man who slept through his morning alarm and didn’t have time for a shower. The look in his eye seemed to say, “Just the facts, please.”

Their body language says it all: To survive the summer travel season at Love’s, you need versatility and a good dose of grit.

“It gets busy. It can be overwhelming,” Richard said dryly, going on to explain how their latest hire, who started on Memorial Day weekend, quit at the end of his first shift. “Many employees get flustered. It’s not for everybody.”

Like so many before him, Love’s one-and-done hire blew out of town as quickly as he’d blown in, leaving Wamsutter and a life that might have been in the rearview mirror.

The itinerant character of the truck stop runs parallel with the community as a whole. There’s a shared assumption among locals that everyone, one day or another, moves on from Wamsutter.

Yet against this assumption, there are residents who behave as if it's Wamsutter or nothing, even when they may intend to take an eventual leave. 

Larry “Chip” Roney is among them.

Fighting For Tomorrow

Roney is something of this town’s Leatherman, a multipurpose functionary in education, government and social fabric.

As the principal of Wamsutter’s K-8 Desert School, he wears more hats than a haberdasher. He cleans classrooms. He serves cafeteria lunches. He leads field trips. He teaches class.

He also busses high school students to a school 40 miles away in Rawlins.

He moved here from Tennessee in 2018, drawn by a passion for hunting and Wyoming’s comparatively superior treatment of educators, including perks like subsidized housing. That housing puts him and other educators side-by-side both during work hours and after. They all live on the same block in 12 district-owned homes.

Where some may prefer more work-life separation, Roney seems to revel in the close-knittedness, recalling a first-year college student thrilled to bunk up in a fraternity home.

“Desert School, we're like family. We spend more time with each other than we do anybody else. The district provides housing for teachers out here, so we all live together. We're all here. We're really, really tight,” he said, capping the comment with a laugh.

He has cropped, salt-and-pepper hair and an unblunted Nashville accent that makes his every word sound deeply sincere. He’s a guy who says things like “idle time is the devil’s playground” without a sense of idiom, but rather as an article of faith.

In his first year in Wyoming, the Desert School was asked to open its doors as an emergency shelter following a major interstate crash. In the name of anti-idleness, Roney played basketball at 3 a.m.

“I stayed there all night,” he said. “My staff came in for two-hour shifts. We had 42 guests that night, and several of those guys were playing basketball in the gym at 3 a.m. because they were just anxious and they couldn't sleep. I'm not gonna let them play basketball without me, so I played with them.”

Wearing Multiple Hats

Principal Roney is also Mayor Roney.

In a community this small, politics are dry, and the majority of public meetings are to hear complaints almost exclusively from the field crickets outside. 

“We don't have a lot of gripes. Public comment at our town council meetings, probably 75% of the time, is silence,” Roney said. “Which is good. No news is good news.”

Governing officials here are typically tasked with just the fundamental concerns, which in a place like Wamsutter means winter snow. 

“I made the stupid statement of saying I would like to know what 15 inches of snow in 24 hours looks like, until I seen what 15 inches of snow in 24 hours look like,” he said, explaining how he’d called in favors with local businesses to help keep roads open. “And OK, I got my fix. I never want to see that again, because that can put a town under duress. 

“We figured out we didn't have the equipment to move that much snow.” 

One of the places where tension has begun to pile up is with the town’s biggest industry — trucking — which can leave behind an ugly mark as an endless convoy of trucks moving through on I-80 stop at Wamsutter. Then they move on.

“The trucking community is filthy. Our biggest issues come from trucks. The WYDOT parking lot across from Love’s is a trash field,” he said. “They leave their mark, and unfortunately it’s kind of ugly.”

Nor is the issue exclusive to semitrailer drivers. 

One visitor was observed walking her large, Alaskan Husky dog around the Love’s parking lot, where it deposited a large, husky-sized bowel movement. Safe to assume that deposit hitched its own ride out of town in the tire tread of an unexpecting traveler. 

Roney takes his government work seriously, but his passion is education. He prides himself on being a principal who has personal relationships not just with his students, but their parents as well.

“I know all their names, absolutely. I know all their mamas’ and daddies’ names too,” he said.

Granted, that may not sound like a feat when you learn the size of his student body, which last week ended the school year with a grand total of 29 scholars. This is puny even by Wamsutter standards and marks a tenfold decrease from its peak in previous decades. 

Looking forward, this small student body could be the new baseline.

Future Of Wamsutter

Among the area’s primary economic drivers are the oil fields just outside Wamsutter, most of which are under the operation of the energy company Crowheart. As with energy towns everywhere, the population here rises and falls like a sine wave. 

Although over the long term, the crests and troughs of its population have both trended downward. 

Its high-water mark came in 1980 when the town had 681 permanent residents, according to the U.S. Census. It fell to 261 in 2000 and bounced back up to 461 in 2010. At the most recent 2020 census, it dropped to 203, and estimates put its population today at 193.

Residents here say the area's economics have changed little, and instead what’s behind population decline is a growing preference for the amenities of larger cities like Rock Springs and Rawlins, from which greater numbers of would-be Wamsutterites are willing to commute.

“The industry, oil fields, all that's still going good. But the town's kind of shrinking because it's nothing to travel 40 or 70 miles to [a bigger city] every day. So nobody lives here anymore,” said Wamsutter Town Councilman Dave Wolfe. 

In this way Wamsutter reflects a growing phenomenon across rural Wyoming, which is in the throes of a population decline feedback loop, as Cowboy State Daily has reported.

Low populations create difficulty staffing businesses needed for communities to thrive, and in turn undermine a town’s quality of life and make it harder still to attract a sufficient number of residents to sustain regional industries.

Such was the case for a short-lived Wamsutter grocer, which opened in 2013 but didn’t last long as it struggled for both workers and customers, said Wolfe, who also sees a similar dynamic at play with the Sweetwater County Memorial Hospital extension.

“There’s a [medical] clinic out here,” he said. “They build a fancy clinic and all that stuff, but they can't find somebody to run it all the time. They don't have enough people to go to it and support it. There’s a lot of work, a lot of industry out here, but not a lot of people living out here.”

In conversations with locals, Cowboy State Daily learned that what residents appreciate most about Wamsutter is the quiet and simple lifestyle it affords. 

They go to work, come home and then cook dinner and spend time with their animals — of which there many, as an informal survey reveals that cats and dogs outnumber humans here by an appreciable margin. 

But is there such a thing as too much peace and quiet? If trends continue, we’ll soon find out.

In September, Wolfe is retiring and moving away from the town of Wamsutter, the place he’s called home for the last 30 years. Even after all that time, in the end, just like the truckers and travelers tumbling through Love’s service station, Wamsutter was just another stop on his life’s journey.   

“It’s been home for a long time, but this is just the next step,” he said.

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.