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Jake Nichols

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It's the Cowboy State Daily Morning Show With Jake. Weekday mornings 6 - 10 a.m.

[{"type":"text","text":"Catch up with the show on your favorite podcast platform!"}]

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

<title>Cowboy State Daily Show with Jake - Monday, June 1, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Jake in the 307. Weekday mornings 6-10 a.m.

Cowboy State Daily Show with Jake - Monday, June 1, 2026

Part 1  Part 2 It's the Cowboy State Daily Morning Show With Jake. Weekday mornings 6 - 10 a.m. Catch up with the show on your favorite podcast platform!

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Wyoming Life

Around Wyoming

Perched atop a rocky knoll along the Snowy Range Scenic Byway in the Medicine Bow Mountains of southern Wyoming, the Libby Flats Observation Area rises nearly 11,000 feet above sea level.

Its weathered stone wall, turret facade and steep wooden staircase lead to a platform where visitors can look out at the Snowy Range to the north and the Laramie Valley to the south.

It looks more like what’s left of the ruins of a Medieval castle than a modern attraction.

For Laramie photographer David Peel, it's been a source of fascination for much of the last half-century.

"It's like an old ancient structure," Peel said. "Your mind kind of starts making up some fancy histories about it.”

Peel said its weathered stone and isolated perch above the tree line remind him of places far from Wyoming — Ireland, old European ruins and the kinds of structures that are much older than the observatory.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Mystery Of The Tower"}]

The site is managed by the Medicine Bow National Forest and was approved in 2024 as a $5-per-vehicle day-use recreation site.

It’s also not ancient. It was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s, according to F.E. Warren Air Force Base.

Aaron Voos, public affairs specialist for the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest and Thunder Basin National Grassland, said U.S. Forest Service maps mark the location as an "observation point" as early as 1956 in its records.

Engineering blueprints from 1959 show plans for a parking area, footpath, restroom and the stone observation tower visitors see today, said Voos. 

The overlook typically opens with the Snowy Range Scenic Byway each spring and remains accessible through the summer and fall before winter snow closes the road.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Where The Stars Take Over"}]

Peel said he has spent countless nights at Libby Flats photographing the Milky Way, auroras, and sunrises.

The high elevation and lack of light pollution create some of the darkest skies in Wyoming for photographers.  

"Up in the Snowies, it's nearly pristine," Peel said, adding that the tower is one of his favorite places to take photos. 

On moonless nights, the Milky Way stretches across the sky with a clarity that's difficult to appreciate until you're standing beneath it, he continued. 

Illuminated by starlight, Peel says the structure resembles a watchtower guarding the edge of the continent. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'The Flats Of Libby' "}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Peel has lived in Laramie for nearly 47 years."}]

He's hiked the Snowies, camped beside alpine lakes and brought his children into the mountains when they were young.

[{"type":"text","text":"The observation tower remains one of the places they always returned to."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"His children thought it looked like a castle."}]

After decades of hiking, camping and photographing the Snowies, Peel found himself writing about them too.

One of his Irish compositions, "The Flats of Libby," borrowed its name from the windswept landscape surrounding the overlook .

More than 60 years after it first appeared on Forest Service maps, and nearly a century since the CCC built it, the overlook remains one of the most recognizable stops in the Snowy Range, drawing everyone from road-trippers and hikers to photographers chasing the stars.

Libby Flats Observation Tower Pat and Chuck Blackley via Alamy 5 30 26

<title>What The Heck … Is That Medieval Castle-Looking Thing On The Snowy Range Byway? | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The observation deck that looks like a Medieval castle ruin has turned heads for decades in the Medicine Bow range. For Laramie photographer David Peel, the 11,000-foot elevation and lack of light pollution make it a great place for astrophotography.

What The Heck … Is That Medieval Castle-Looking Thing On The Snowy Range Byway?

Heinz mark

Mark Heinz

Outdoors

Wildlife

A rare all-white pronghorn made a brief appearance in Goshen County, much to the delight of a couple of local wildlife watcher. But whether the animal is an actual albino remains a mystery.

Matthew Pancake and his wife, Maricela, make a regular habit of taking walks to admire wildlife, including small local herds of pronghorn, commonly called antelope.

“We’re old people, we like to get our exercise by walking,” he quipped during a telephone interview with Cowboy State Daily.

They were out on Memorial Day when they spotted a buck pronghorn with two does, and one of the does was completely white.

“I said, ‘That sucker’s white. Is that an albino?’” he said.

Albinism occurs in humans and numerous animal species. It’s essentially a complete lack of pigmentation, wildlife biologist Rich Guenzel told Cowboy State Daily.

In some animals, including pronghorn, a recessive gene can also cause a few rare individuals to have all-white hair or fur. But they’re not actual albinos, said Guenzel, who worked for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department from 1986-2011 and has a special interest in pronghorn.

It’s most likely that the Goshen County doe has the recessive gene, but isn’t an albino, he said.

Pancake said the antelope in his area seem to be a bit sparse. He wonders if herds are still trying to recover from an especially harsh winter a few years ago.

The white doe he saw on Memorial Day and the other two antelope with her all looked lively and healthy, Pancake said.

“She looked at us for a little while and then started running,” typical of what antelope do when humans are near, he said.

He’d never seen the white doe before. On Wednesday, he said he hasn’t seen her since.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Answer Is In The Eyes"}]

True albino animals have strange-looking eyes. In pronghorn, an albino’s eyes will be “reddish-pinkish,” Guenzel said.

Pancake said he "didn’t get close enough to see the eyeballs of that antelope,” so he can’t be sure whether she had that tell-tale feature.

Pronghorn rely heavily upon their vision, and albinism not only makes the eyes strange colors, it can sometimes affect an animal’s vision.

That’s more reason to think that the Goshen County doe is a recessive gene white specimen, he said.

“That’s an adult that’s survived at least one winter,” Pancake said.

He added that he’s seen only “one specimen” of an albino pronghorn, but has never seen such an animal in the wild.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Air Force Base Buck"}]

Guenzel has seen white, nonalbino pronghorn in a few places in Wyoming, including in the Shirley Basin and the Buffalo area.

“They’re neat to see, they’re a rare animal,” he said.

In the early 2000s, an all-white pronghorn buck that hung out around F.E. Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne became something of a local wildlife celebrity, Guenzel said.

Sadly, that buck was struck and killed by a vehicle, he said.

The recessive gene that causes all-white fur apparently doesn’t directly manifest from one generation to the next, Guenzel said.

So, if the Goshen County doe ever has fawns, odds are good they’ll have normal-colored fur, white in the belly area, and tannish on the back and flanks, he said.

That pattern has served pronghorn well over the ages, causing them to “blend in” with the landscapes they inhabit.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Evading Predators"}]

An all-white pronghorn might be easier for predators to spot. But since she’s a full-grown doe, good luck catching her, Guenzel said.

Pronghorn fawns might be vulnerable. The adults can run at roughly 55 miles per hour for extended periods. They developed that speediness ages ago, when their ancestors had to evade 

But those lightning-fast cats, which weren’t actually cheetahs, are long since extinct. And nothing else alive today with teeth, claws and a taste for meat can keep up with pronghorn.

And pronghorn also have exceptional vision, said to be about as good as a human looking through a powerful set of binoculars.

Pronghorn are designed to deal with predation. Once they get to be a yearling or above, their survival rate is pretty good, because they can out-run everything and out-see everything, Guenzel said.

All-white bison are also head-turners, and are regarded as sacred by Native Americans.

 born in Yellowstone in June 2024 caused a stir as many visitors rushed to catch a glimpse of the rare animal.

Albino antelope 1 5 31 26

<title>‘Extremely Rare’ All-White Antelope Captured On Video In Goshen County | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wildlife watchers in Goshen County got a rare treat on Memorial Day — a brief encounter captured on video of an all-white pronghorn. Such animals are “extremely rare," but usually not actual albinos, a biologist said.

‘Extremely Rare’ All-White Antelope Captured On Video In Goshen County

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

Renée Jean

EVANSTON — One of the first times Jim Davis walked into the city’s historic Roundhouse and Railyards decades ago, it was like a scene from a movie. 

There was the crumbling railroad roundhouse, with its broken windows and pigeon feathers floating on the air, spinning as his footsteps stirred little puffs of dirt.

The rusted tracks disappeared into darkness. The roof was leaking, and the smell of that decay was everywhere. 

But there were rays of sunlight shining down into that darkness, and he had the sudden sense that all was not lost here. 

This was something special, something worth saving. 

Saving Evanston’s roundhouse has taken $28 million in private money and grants, as well as decades of volunteer time and effort, Davis said. 

But that’s given Evanston something few communities in America have — a completely functioning, fully intact roundhouse that he believes could be a tourism powerhouse, if Evanston ever decides to lean into promoting it. 

Everyone he has ever taken to see the building, without fail, has the same reaction, Davis told Cowboy State Daily. 

“Every single time I open the doors and walk into the roundhouse …. the first words out of their mouth are, ‘Oh my God,’” Davis said. “Their reaction was it was so phenomenal to see that space the way we were able to fix it up.”

 is a 63,000-square-foot, 96-foot-deep curved brick-and-mortar behemoth built around a post-and-beam interior.

The walls are lined with huge banks of wood-framed windows to provide natural light. It has a two-level terraced roof, and the face of the terrace is covered with windows to provide additional natural light. 

Davis likes to go up to the mezzanine level, where there’s a small kitchen area and space for parties.

“It’s just a beautiful space,” he said. “And I really enjoy taking people up there. It’s really well-thought of and the architects were so good to work with.”

Keeping it a roundhouse, Davis believes, is key to its intrigue. 

To think that inside that cavernous, multistory space lit by sunlight still that huge train cars were driven inside on tracks and then rotated by the gigantic round wheel inside to one of 28 stalls is awe-inspiring. 

All the historical photos, meanwhile, help tell a timeless legend of how America was built.

A Roundhouse Corridor That Built Southern Wyoming

Once upon a time, there were dozens of roundhouses like Evanston’s in towns across Wyoming and the West, Davis said. 

They were positioned all along the tracks, about every 100 miles. That’s about how long trains could go in the beginning without having to stop to refuel and repair. 

Over time, they became more and more efficient and roundhouses began to close. Evanston’s was slated for closure in 1926, putting at least 100 people out of work.

“We were the first roundhouse in the state to close,” Davis said. “Engines had become more efficient and they could run from Green River to Ogden without stopping in Evanston.”

It seemed unfortunate at the time, but it set off a series of events that would ultimately help save the facility.

“The city leaders thought we need those jobs now,” Davis said. “So they got on a train to Omaha, which is the headquarters, and begged them to keep the buildings open.”

Union Pacific ultimately did listen, and reopened the roundhouse and rail yard the following year as a reclamation plant, which added 200 jobs to the former 100, making for a total of 300.

“That saved those buildings,” Davis said. “They fixed all kinds of equipment for Union Pacific.”

Other roundhouses in Wyoming shut down: Laramie, Rock Springs, Rawlins, and even Cheyenne.

But Evanston’s, as a reclamation facility, kept going until 1971, after which Union Tank leased the facility from Union Pacific, and then Union Pacific quit-claimed the 21-acre property — depot, roundhouse, machine shop, yard, and related buildings — to Evanston in 1973.

For decades after that, almost nothing was done to maintain it. 

Windows broke and stayed that way. Boards were put up to block most of the rain, but roofs leaked and kept on leaking. 

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

Saving the roundhouse from decades of neglect wasn’t a straightforward process.

What came first was actually saving an entirely different structure, the depot.

Davis had been hired as executive director of Evanston’s Urban Renewal Agency in 1987, charged with revitalizing the town’s central business district. That included not just Evanston’s great historic downtown, but Depot Square as well.

The space, he found, was structurally sound, even if plaster was falling off the walls and years of neglect were etched upon all of its dust-covered surfaces.

What to do about it, how to preserve it, weren’t part of his expertise.

“I had a business degree in general business administration from Arizona State,” Davis said with a chuckle. “I worked in the corporate world until 1984 when I came back to Evanston.”

A chance encounter helped him with that problem. Soon after joining a national economic development board, he found himself standing in the lunch line beside an architect whose family was from Evanston.

The friendship was instant. Better still, Davis’ new friend knew exactly how to proceed with preserving the depot: assuming Davis could overcome his two biggest hurdles — community buy-in and money.

“There were a lot of naysayers,” Davis said.

Not too far in, though, Evanston was gripped by an oil and gas boom that brought big corporate players to town like Amoco and Chevron.

A planner was hired to help the city, who put together a plan for downtown.

“It wasn’t real specific,” Davis said. “But there was one paragraph, about three sentences long, about how the roundhouse could be a key element in diversifying and revitalizing our downtown.”

There was a vision, Davis realized, that could win people over, starting with the Depot.

Fixing the Depot took years, Davis said, but when it was finished, he’d built a core group of people who believed in historic preservation in Evanston. 

“That gave us the springboard to do the roundhouse,” Davis said. “When we finished the depot, we said, ‘Let’s look at the historic value of all those buildings.' And a citizen’s group was formed that wanted to save them because they saw the historic value, the uniqueness of them. 

"There aren’t many roundhouses left in the country, and, in Wyoming, Evanston had the only one still standing. Cheyenne has one section of a roundhouse, but Evanston has the full semicircle, still standing the way it was built in 1912.”

Megan Stanfill, executive director of the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, confirmed the rarity. 

Of roughly 3,000 roundhouses built in America, only 200 survive. Of those, perhaps a dozen are fully intact like the one in Evanston. 

That makes Evanston’s roundhouse a significant piece of history on a national scale.

“It’s one of the most intact roundhouses along the Union Pacific railroad,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “This one still has the working mechanisms in it as well, so it’s a very intact, contextual example of a roundhouse in Wyoming.”

Davis and the citizen’s group decided to start by defining the complex not just as a cluster of old buildings, but as the physical heart of a much larger American story. 

Davis secured a Brownfields Grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to test for contaminants and ensure the project wasn’t a hopeless Superfund site. 

That found asbestos and lead, tough and expensive to remediate, but not impossible.

Around the same time, they landed a grant to re-roof the machine shop.

“That was the first major maintenance that had been done there for years,” Davis said. “That was probably in 1998.”

One year later, Union Tank decided to leave the dilapidated roundhouse to build a new, better site. 

Now the question wasn’t just if Evanston’s Roundhouse and Railyards could be saved, it was how anyone could possibly afford to do it.

Fortunately, Davis was about to meet another person who would become instrumental to the story of saving the roundhouse.

“I had heard of this organization called the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Denver,” Davis said. “And so Bonnie and I went to Denver every six months to market our retail gift store.”

In 1999, after Union Tank had left the roundhouse, Davis made an appointment to talk to someone there about options for saving the roundhouse. 

“I met this lady by the name of Mary Humstone,” Davis said. “And so I told her what we were trying to do. They didn’t have money to do it, but they knew how to do historic preservation.”

Humstone recognized how unique the story in southwestern Wyoming was to American history.

“Our populations in southern Wyoming all came to be due to the railroad,” Davis said. “Because the railroad came through in 1868, and lo and behold, every 100 miles, they needed a roundhouse.”

Wyoming towns grew up around these roundhouses, creating a line of cities that still exist today, from Evanston in the West, to Cheyenne in the East, with Green River, Rock Springs, Rawlins, and Laramie in between.

In all of those communities, the same magic happened. Engines would pull in, turn on great circular turntables for maintenance, then head back out onto the High Plains.

Working with Humstone and others, Davis held forums in Evanston for all of the communities along southern Wyoming’s railroad corridor, bringing representatives from all the roundhouse communities together. 

Out of that meeting, a new organization was formed called Tracks Across Wyoming, devoted to highlighting the state’s shared heritage of railroads, migration routes, and early highways across the state. 

That made the roundhouse more than just a local project. It was the flagship in a statewide vision.

In the midst of that, Davis was tapped by then Gov. Dave Freudenthal to join the Wyoming Business Council (WBC). At the same time, Evanston’s roundhouse made the list for a $3 million grant to tackle restoring Section One of the roundhouse — a portion that today hosts citywide meetings, conventions, and celebrations. 

The WBC grant joined a growing list of support that was pouring in to saving the roundhouse: federal grants, state money, and countless local donations, all braided together by relentless advocacy and careful planning.

More important than just money, though, was getting community buy-in, Davis realized, a point that was driven home by a Halloween spook house put on to raise a little money for the project.

Hundreds of people flocked to the event, eager to see the inside of a space everyone was familiar with, but few had seen in years. 

They paid $1 each for the thrill, Davis recalled. And the curiosity that unlocked would prove instrumental in building community support for saving it.

The spook fest helped show Davis the power of the community’s enthusiasm, but he quickly realized that $1 tickets weren’t going to do much in the grand scheme of saving a building that needed millions of dollars of work.

So the community came up with a concept they called the Renewal Ball, an annual June fundraiser that became a legend of its own. 

In its prime, it drew 300 people to an event that cleared upward of $100,000 in a single night. That funding became crucial local match money for grants. 

“Governors would come to it, and senators and representatives,” Davis said. “And that’s how we built consensus to put money into that project.”

Keeping The Beating Heart Of A Railroad Town Alive

Progress has come in phases, Davis said. First, a common roof to stop water damage, and then windows to finish weatherproofing.

Then the machine shop, roughly 20,000 square feet of space, that was turned into something Evanston didn’t have yet — a convention center, complete with radiant floor heating and towering windows. 

With sun pouring through the glass and warmth radiating from beneath the floor, it feelslike an atrium and an oasis from winter, Davis said.

Conferences, weddings, funerals, statewide gatherings (like for the Lincoln Highway Association) began filling up its calendar. 

Every meeting brought more supporters and more ammunition to use in persuading skeptics that the building was worth saving.

Today the roundhouse hosts dozens of events every year, ranging from weddings to statewide meetings and conferences.

By the time Davis retired from city service in 2014, investments into the roundhouse restoration was around $28 million by his estimate, with roughly 40% from grants and private fundraising. 

Davis, who was this year’s winner of the Mary Humstone Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alliance for Historic Wyoming, continues to bring people to the roundhouse for the very first time. 

He said it never gets old watching their shock and awe when they first enter this building, which once housed the Goliath engines of America’s railroad era.

Today, the semicircle of stalls still curve around the turntable. The machine shop is still warm like a sunroom in winter. And events now spill out into big, open spaces between restored doors and brick walls decorated with photos that tell the history of the space. 

The fight for continued investment and thoughtful use of this unique space will never be over, Davis said. Future challenges remain — including questions about long-term funding and community support. 

But for now, Evanston is home to one of roughly a dozen fully intact roundhouses left in the nation. 

That means it’s not just the beating heart of a railroad town’s story. It’s among the last intact reminders of how the great American West was built.

Evanston Roundhouse Visit Evanston 5 31 26

<title>Evanston Has Spent Decades, And $28M, Restoring Its Historic Railroad Roundhouse | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A century after Union Pacific stopped using it, decades of work has saved and restored Evanston’s historic Roundhouse and Railyards. The $28 million spent so far has made it one of the rare roundhouses in the U.S. that’s still completely operational. 

Evanston Has Spent Decades, And $28M, Restoring Its Historic Railroad Roundhouse

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Public Lands

[{"type":"text","text":"Wyoming’s winds are so strong, they actually move Devils Tower."}]

The nation’s first national monument has been swaying back and forth for millions of years — and it’s moving right now.

 published by the Geological Society of America has revealed that Wyoming’s iconic Devils Tower is constantly moving. 

An international team of geologists studied the massive monolith and determined that it's perpetually and ever-so-slightly swaying, twisting, and turning in the wind.

“It’s not only a static rock structure, millions of years in the making,” said Jeffrey Moore, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah and lead author of the new study. “It is moving on human timescales. It's constantly in motion.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Solid As A Rock"}]

Devils Tower is a giant, eroded plug of volcanic rock. It was an intrusive body of magma that cooled under the surface and was gradually exposed by millions of years of erosion.

When most people see Devils Tower, they assume it’s as solid as a rock. Moore’s research shows that it isn’t entirely true.

“It’s lively with vibrational energy,” Moore said. “You can't see it, feel it, hear it, or anything, but it's nonetheless very real. It’s happened right this very second.”

Moore and his colleagues studied Devils Tower using ambient vibration modal analysis techniques. 

It’s a way of analyzing the ambient vibrations moving through solid rock forms, identifying the mode of those vibrations, and determining the extent and nature of movement they cause.

“It’s similar to playing a note on a piano,” Moore said. “If you looked at the sound wave of that, it wouldn't look like much, but if you looked at the frequency, it would tell you quite a lot about the frequencies of what you’re hearing. That’s what we did at Devils Tower.”

To conduct the study, the team placed two sensors at the base of Devils Tower and a seismometer at its 867-foot summit.

New research published by the Geological Society of America has revealed that Devils Tower is constantly moving. An international team of geologists determined that it's perpetually and ever-so-slightly swaying, twisting, and turning in the wind.

Cowboy State Daily Show with Jake - Monday, June 1, 2026

Catch up with the show on your favorite podcast platform!

In case you missed it

Jake Nichols

Features Reporter

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Cowboy State Daily Show with Jake - Monday, June 1, 2026

Catch up with the show on your favorite podcast platform!

In case you missed it

Authors

Jake Nichols

Features Reporter

More in Radio

Cowboy State Daily Show with Jeff - Saturday, May 30, 2026

Cowboy State Daily Show with Jake - Friday, May 29, 2026

Cowboy State Daily Show with Jake - Thursday, May 28, 2026

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