2539 – 762 words
By Bill Sniffin, Columnist
We happily invite folks of all types of our mountains but the craziest group that I ever did see was the invasion of 2,000 hippies over July 4 way back in 1973.
Somewhere among my boxes of old stuff is a photo scrapbook that used to be R-rated. Today, it would barely be PG13-rated.
The first photo in it is of a slim 27-year-old editor (me) interviewing some men and women who are pretty much naked.
That occurred here in the mountains above Lander on July 2, 1973, when the infamous Rainbow Family of Living Light made their first trip to Wyoming.
Since their annual gathering is always around July 4, that initial Lander adventure seemed fraught with danger.
After all, Lander hosts the oldest paid rodeo on the planet over the 4th and the town is always swarming with cowboys.
Then-Sheriff PeeWee McDougall was very worried that some of the hippies would get beaten up. At the least, he figured partying cowboys would scalp a whole bunch of the longhaired visitors. It was a heck of dilemma.
First Site Was Bad Choice
Compounding the problem was that the Rainbows had picked the glorious St. Lawrence Basin as their site.
Bad choice.
This is an area sacred to the local Native Americans and is on tribal land in the mountains overlooking the Wind River Indian Reservation.
Tribal leaders told PeeWee if he thought the cowboys might be hard on the interlopers, well, the Indians would be way more ornery. “The term scalping might take on a whole different meaning,” I recall the salty PeeWee telling me. That comment did not make it into print until now.
After days of tense negotiations, PeeWee and then-District Forest Ranger Doc Smith came up with an alternative and it was incredibly ironic.
The Rainbows accepted Doc’s offer and decided to move to an area below Freak Mountain near South Pass.
The site required a two-mile hike to get into and was just far enough away from everything that Doc and PeeWee thought it just might eliminate the potential for violence. The coincidence of moving a bunch of freaks to Freak Mountain was the work of genius, I used to say to the modest Doc.
The year before, the first Rainbow gathering had attendance of over 30,000, so nobody had any idea how many would come to Wyoming.
It was estimated that only about 2,000 of these folks showed up for that gathering in Wyoming. It was the second one ever held by the group, said Barry “Plunker” Adams, who was its spokesman the previous year in Granby, CO.
My brother-in-law Roger Thomsen from Iowa happened to be visiting us that July. He enjoyed being my assistant as I made a couple of journalistic sojourns to cover the story first-hand. Our dedication drew hoots of derision from our wives however.
The Rainbow folks often start the day in a huge chanting circle waiting for the sun to rise. They do the same thing when the sun goes down.
And it is a really big deal when they see a rainbow, obviously. In Wyoming’s mountains in July, this is not an improbable occurrence, as it rains almost every afternoon.
And it should be said back then it seemed like a significant percentage of the people in the camps were running around pretty much nude.
Sunburned Parts Of Anatomy
We had to laugh as some of the guys – whose unique extensions of anatomy were sunburned. Ouch.
These folks just did not realize how close to the sun they could be in Wyoming’s tall mountains. And how thin the atmosphere can be. You can get sunburned really fast and in places that are not used to solar exposure.
They held their first one in 1972 in Colorado, so that Lander visit that I covered so diligently as a reporter-photographer was just their second gathering ever.
Nobody really knew who they were back then and local officials were driving blind.
There was some drug use and lots of music. When I interviewed them, well, it was like La-La Land of California from the 1960s. Peace and love. Enjoy nature. Life is good.
Fremont County was lucky to have two visionaries like PeeWee and Doc. They maintained the peace, and I think there was only one incident where a hippie rolled his van on a mountain turn.
The Highway Patrol turned out in force, and the governor even alerted the National Guard, as I recall.
When it was all over, Doc told me he was astounded at how well these folks treated the land. “Hard to believe, but I think it is better up there now than before they got there.”
Bill Sniffin can be reached at: Bill@CowboyStateDaily.com
