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

<title>Bonus Video 2: Friday, May 8, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Bonus Video 2: Friday, May 8, 2026

 Let's settle it for once and for all: who's better, the Beatles or the Stones?

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

Renée Jean

Wyoming Life

High on the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, a decaying log cabin that once anchored one of Wyoming’s old range-sheep operations was in danger of being lost after the Niland family’s long-held Forest Service arrangement ended.

Instead, the Little Snake River Museum, is working to turn it into a public window into the state’s historic sheep industry, which once moved thousands of animals — and dozens of wagons — through the high country every summer.

Lela Emmons is director of the Little Snake River Museum. The Divide Sheep Camp cabin she is working to save sits on a 40-acre permit area on the Medicine Bow-Routt. 

It served as the summer headquarters for the Divide Sheep Company, a mid-sized sheep operation owned by the Niland family and established in 1909, four years after the Forest Service itself was created. 

Emmons described the arrangement as a “100-year lease” and said the family’s ability to maintain the cabin was tied to continuous operation of the site. 

After Tom Niland’s death, the family was required to decide whether to remove, relocate, or donate the structure to an entity such as the Little Snake River Museum for preservation.

They chose the latter, to keep the cabin’s history intact.

“This is one of the few remaining summer cabins for the sheep industry,” Emmons said. “This infrastructure of corrals and cabins and even the sheepherder art on the trees is all going away. There will be nothing left if we don’t preserve this cabin.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Regional Significance"}]

The Niland cabin served as a collaborative hub for more than just the Niland family, which adds to the site’s historic significance.

“There would be like 50 wagons parked up there in the summer,” Emmons told Cowboy State Daily. “They would park all the wagons and then from this point on they would pack with horses. They’d have two or three pack horses and then they’d trail those up in the mountains and then they’d use little teepee tents.”

The tents had just enough room for a dry place to sleep, as well as little stoves to keep warm or cook food at night.

“They had little kitchen boxes, and they would spend the summer that way,” Emmons said. “They didn’t have wagons up in the mountains because it was too hard to get around in them.”

Many different operations used the Niland camp as a staging point. The camp had a centralized supply depot, as well as corrals and other workspaces where different operations could separate, count, brand, and dip their sheep for ticks.

“They didn’t have the spray-on stuff we have now, one shot gets rid of ticks,” Emmons said. “So they’d have to dip them. And before they’d come out, they had this tool where they’d dunk their head under and then pull them back up with the other.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Just In The Nick Of Time"}]

The Niland cabin looks, at first glance, like a hundred other weather-beaten log buildings in Wyoming’s high country. 

But many signs of its deeper history are still there, written on the walls and on the aspen trees that surround this little cabin in Carbon County.

Saving the cabin and all of its history has come just in the nick of time, too.

“This wall,” Emmons said, gesturing toward a newly built wall with pine logs on its face, “Wade (Golden) shored it up with things to hold the roof and then he gave (the wall) just one pound, and the whole thing just fell over. It was so rotten.”

Golden is part of a core restoration crew that also includes Mathias Kneeland and Rick Beck. 

Because of that, Emmons is sure that the cabin wouldn’t have survived one more winter without falling apart. 

The cabin’s restoration will remain true to its history, Emmons said, though a few changes are being made to help ensure it survives.

“We built this deck with removable panels here so that as the snow comes off in the winter, it can drop down there and won’t just sit and be heavy,” Emmons explained.

But they left the front room’s roof pitch the same as it ever was, deeming that too big a change for the preservation of history.

Inside the cabin, there’s treasure of another sort. Guests of the cabin, through the years, have written little messages on the wall. It was part of a tradition at the cabin, talking who had been there and what had taken place when at the cabin.

“We went swimming at the second (illegible). Got leeches and we caught fish,” reads one message written by someone named Teagan. 

“Marvelous Dinner + Company even better! Love Kate,” Reads another dated June 28, 1987. 

“First time 12 yrs, I’ll be back,” is signed 9-19-96 by Bill Niland. Below that is another message from Bill that says, “I’m back for good! 5-25-03.”

Emmons has been told some of the signatures on the wall may belong to former Los Angeles Dodgers players. She’s still trying to verify which signatures belong to them, and where they might be located.

“I’m kind of hoping people don’t keep doing that,” she added. 

While the older ones are a piece of history and part of tradition at the cabin, she said newer ones would no longer be adding to that tradition, given that the cabin’s use is changing and it is no longer a sheep operation.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Windows Into Time"}]

Emmons has taken photographs of life at the cabin and had them placed on metal signs. She plans to place the metal images strategically around the cabin. They’ll be a window into what might have been seen from that location during Wyoming’s sheep herding heyday.

While cattle ranching dominates Wyoming’s popular western image, Wyoming’s sheep herds and wool helped build the economies of communities across Carbon County and the state.

By 1910, the Cowboy State was grazing more than 5.5 million sheep, making it one of the leading wool and mutton producers in the United States. Carbon County, meanwhile, was once the top lamb-and-wool county in the nation. 

Wyoming is also where sheep wagons were invented in the 1880s. The covered wagons had a bed, a stove, a table, and a kitchen sink, as well as some storage. They acted as tiny mobile homes for sheep herders, especially during the winter.

The industry also brought a unique mix of cultures to Wyoming, including Basque, Scottish, and Irish herders. Many of their descendants still live in Wyoming.

The Niland cabin is surrounded by an aging aspen forest. Many of the trees have names and dates or other messages carved on them.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The landscape, though, is changing."}]

“All these trees are going to die,” Emmons said. “And then all the little ones will grow up again. So, all of a sudden, you’ll have these vistas through the trees you didn’t even know you had.”

It will be a scenic spot for a public access cabin, once completed. 

Emmons hopes the cabin will prove useful for Wyoming students, whether high school or college, to learn about the forest and a little of Wyoming’s sheep herding history. 

This fall, she’s hoping to finish installing a solar powered water system for the property, as well as a functioning toilet and fire-suppression capacity, thanks to a grant from the Wyoming Community Foundation. 

“I love it up here,” Emmons said. “I would get up here about 7 o’clock in the morning or 6:30. The sun is just rising and the kids wouldn’t have shown up yet, and it’s just so peaceful up here. It’s amazing.”

The cabin’s restoration will take a few years, Emmons said, but once it’s ready there will be a picnic or a party to celebrate.

“We don’t get anything done in a hurry,” she said with a chuckle, looking around at the new fence around the property built by youths with the Wyoming Conservation Corps and the new front for the cabin that’s recently been installed. “But we do get it done eventually.”

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<title>Leeches, Lambs And Log Walls: Race Is On To Save Medicine-Bow’s Niland Cabin | Cowboy State Daily</title>

High up in the Medicine Bow National Forest, a log cabin that once anchored one of Wyoming’s old range-sheep operations was in danger of being lost forever until the Little Snake River Museum stepped up. "There will be nothing left if we don’t preserve this cabin," they say.

Leeches, Lambs And Log Walls: Race Is On To Save Medicine-Bow’s Niland Cabin

Jake nichols 720

Jake Nichols

Around Wyoming

Harvard University once claimed to possess up to three books in its libraries that were bound in human skin.

Thanks to relatively new technology, two of the works in question have been debunked, but not without leaving one proven authentic and opening a rabbit hole filled with questions.

[{"type":"text","text":"First, books bound in the largest organ of humans are a thing. "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"In fact, the practice was once more popular than one might think. "}]

Second, in response to binding books in human skin, Wyoming history says, “Hold my beer.”

The Cowboy State has an ashtray, a medicine bag and a pair of shoes all made from the remains of a notorious outlaw who met his demise at the end of a rope.

[{"type":"text","text":"Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover"}]

Two decades ago, the internet was abuzz with hoax-or-real tales of literary works bound in human skin, particularly a few tomes reportedly owned by an Ivy League school.

It started in 2006 after an article appeared in the university publication “The Harvard Crimson.” 

Written by Samuel Jacobs, who was named editor-in-chief of Time Magazine three years ago, “The Skinny on Harvard’s Rare Book Collection” zeroed in on three unique books in the university’s 15 million-volume collection purportedly bound in human flesh.

Jacobs fleshes out the texts, ranging in content from medieval law to Roman poetry to French philosophy. A lawbook, for one, has been discredited in its claim to be skin-wrapped. It’s bound in flesh, but not human.

“Practicarum Quaestionum Circa Leges Regias Hispaniae” is a Spanish lawbook containing material dating back to 1605. It was bought for $42.50 from a New Orleans book dealer in 1946 and shelved in the Langdell Law Library at Harvard, according to the library’s curator, David Ferris.

Nothing about the book’s cover seems out of the ordinary, though it appears to have a hue suggestive of skin tone. It’s what is handwritten in purple ink on the book’s last page that sets one’s skin to crawling.

“[T]he bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632.”

DNA tests performed in 1992 proved inconclusive. The tanning process was partially to blame, but truthfully, technology just wasn’t up to the task until more recent scientific advancements in what is known as peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) made positive identification possible.

In-house testing performed by Harvard using the analytical technique for protein identification PMF proved conclusively that Wright’s remains do not bind the 400-year-old book, nor do any human’s. The cover is sheepskin.

Another book in question — a 1597 French translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses housed in the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine — also was proven to be sheepskin even though a small penciled annotation appearing on the inside cover reads: “Bound in human skin.”

[{"type":"text","text":"The Hide That Binds"}]

The myth busting leaves Harvard with one final volume touted as epically epidermically bound.

“Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinées de L’ame” is part of Harvard’s massive Houghton Library collection. The meditation on the soul and afterlife was gifted by the author to a friend, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, sometime in the mid-1880s.

Bouland, a noted medical doctor and prominent bibliophile, bound the book with the skin from an unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke. A note was found inserted in the book after it was donated to the university in 1954 by the widow of John B. Stetson Jr. (yes, that Stetson, son of John Sr., founder of the famed cowboy hat company).

The two-page note is handwritten in French by Dr. Bouland. It reads, in part:

“This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, you easily distinguish the pores of the skin. A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering: I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman.”

The same testing conducted in early 2014 that disproved Harvard’s two anthropodermic-bound books was able to confirm the binding of “Des Destinées de L’am” as most likely that of a human.

Other written works confirmed bound in human skin can be found at the John Hay Library at Brown University (four volumes) and the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (five books, including three of which came from the skin of the same woman).

Perhaps the most famous example of anthropodermic bibliopegy is a book gathering dust on a shelf at the Boston Athenaeum.

The Highwayman: Narrative of the Life of James Allen Alias George Walton

,” is a memoir of Walton’s. He narrated the autobiographical story to the warden of the Massachusetts State Prison while on his deathbed in 1837.

He insisted the book be bound in his own skin and given to a man, John A. Fenno Jr., who fiercely resisted Walton’s attempt to rob him. Fenno’s daughter reportedly gifted the work to Boston Athenaeum, but the library/museum has no written proof of that. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Literarily Interred"}]

OK, books bound in human skin sounds revolting. But the practice was once somewhat accepted, if not common.

Termed anthropodermic bibliopegy, the binding of books in human skin dates back to at least the 16th century, according to a study released in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 2014.

In the mid-1800s, anthropodermic binding was at its height. Historians cite several reasons for the macabre practice.

Confessions of criminals were sometimes bound in the skin of the convicted by court order. Doctors and scientists also helped popularize the gruesome fashion, sometimes binding medical journals and texts in epidermic. Family members were also sometimes literarily interred as a memorialization.

Since PMF made testing more accurate, dozens of suspected books have been analyzed. A team of scientists (Anthropodermic Book Project) comprised of anthropologists, bioanalytical chemists and the like, have tested more than 50 volumes to date, of which 18 were confirmed as human, 13 not human and 31 as yet undetermined.

One rare book considered by those in the antiquarian book trade to be the “Holy Grail” of skin-covered tomes tested false for human skin.

Notre Dame University’s Hesburgh Library alleged to possess an anthropodermic bibliopegy — a 1504 philosophy book once thought to be owned by Christopher Columbus and bound in the skin of a Moorish chieftain. It turned out to be pigskin.

[{"type":"text","text":"Outlaw Becomes A Pair of Shoes"}]

Well before it officially became a state, the rugged Wyoming Territory was a haven for highwaymen, cattle rustlers and cold-blooded killers.

George “Big Nose” Parrott was one such desperado, and he met a gruesome end. His hanging was only the beginning of his punishment.

Parrott was evil personified, what literary types refer to as the antagonist.

In Wyoming, outlaws like Parrott were simply known as “bad guys” and they were strung up quick as God-fearin’ men could find rope and reason.

Parrott was born in Montbéliard, France, in 1834. He arrived in Wyoming Territory in the late 1870s and immediately began robbing stagecoaches with his gang. Eventually, Parrott eyed larger scores — trains — and with bigger reward came bigger risk.

Parrott ended up killing a Union Pacific detective and a local lawman in a robbery gone wrong near Como Lake, midway between Medicine Bow and Hanna, Wyoming. Wanted posters went up everywhere and his capture was inevitable.

One by one his gang members were picked off as a $1,000 reward for Parrott was doubled when he robbed a wealthy Montana merchant, Morris Cahn, in July 1880.

[{"type":"text","text":"By August, Parrott was arrested in Montana."}]

Sheriff Robert Rankin feared angry Wyomingites would be waiting with a necktie party back in Carbon County and, sure enough, despite precautions, a masked posse of about 20 men grabbed Big Nose and drug him to the first telegraph pole they could find.

Up Parrot went by his neck, kicking and struggling. The mob urged the bandit to confess to the killings, promising they would cut him down if he did. Parrott spilled his guts and, true to their word, the angry mob turned him back over to Sheriff Rankin.

Parrott was convicted after a two-day trial and faced hanging. But Big Nose had been plotting his escape and did so, briefly, after jumping the sheriff and his wife Rosa one evening.

He didn’t get far. Townspeople in Rawlins anticipated such a break and surrounded him. This time they weren’t sparing the rope.

Parrott was hung then and there in downtown Rawlins on March 22, 1881, in front of some 200 people who gathered to watch the outlaw swing.

[{"type":"text","text":"Big Nose Is Parted Out"}]

Dr. John E. Osborne conducted the autopsy along with Dr. Thomas Maghee. They made a plaster of Paris cast of Parrott’s face, cut a large swath of skin from his chest and removed the dead man’s skull cap to examine the brain.

Dr. Maghee gave the skull cap to his 15-year-old assistant, Lillian Heath, who incidentally would go on to become Wyoming’s first female physician. For decades, she used the skull piece as an ashtray, a doorstop and flowerpot.

Dr. Osborne, meanwhile, sent Parrott’s skin to a tannery in Denver with instructions to fashion him a pair of shoes with the dead man’s nipples on each to prove they were footwear made from a human being. He also wanted a doctor’s bag if there was any of George’s skin leftover.

When Osborne received the shoes, he reportedly was miffed that the nipples were not included in the taxidermy. Still, rumor has it, Osborne wore the shoes to his inauguration ball when he was elected governor of the Wyoming in 1893.

For a time, the shoes, the death mask, a wanted poster and the skull cap were on display at the Rawlins Bank. They are now in the permanent collection of the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins.

[{"type":"text","text":"The medicine bag made from Big Nose George’s skin has never been found."}]

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<title>Yes, Skin From Wyoming Wild West Outlaw "Big Nose George" Was Used To Make Shoes | Cowboy State Daily</title>

This is the macabre story of a once-common practice of binding books with human skin — and how Wyoming did that one better by skinning notorious Wild West outlaw "Big Nose George" and making him into a pair of shoes. His skull was made into an ashtray.

Yes, Skin From Wyoming Wild West Outlaw "Big Nose George" Was Used To Make Shoes

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.

Jen Kocher - Headshot CSD

Jen Kocher

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.

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.

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