Drinking Wyoming: Glenrock’s Smoky Deer Creek Lounge A Down-And-Dirty Dive

GLENROCK — It’s a hot August afternoon at the Deer Creek Lounge in Glenrock, and a man named Nile is reflecting proudly on the time he clocked his 84-year-old brother in the mouth.

Boys will be boys, even when they’re octogenarians.

It was a restaurant parking lot. Things were said. He reached his limit, then whacked the brother in the face with a cane. False teeth scattered across the lot. 

The brother went to the hospital. Nile, at the time 81 and recovering from a hip replacement, hobbled into jail on a crutch. 

It happened back in 2023, which means he’s had time to reflect on his actions.

“I should have hit him a second time,” he said. 

In some respects, Nile is exactly the sort of character you can expect to find at Deer Creek Lounge: dangerous enough to keep things interesting and loaded with good stories, even if most of what he says isn't fit for print.

This bar offers a lens into Glenrock itself, a historic ranching and energy town and one of Wyoming’s oldest settlements.

Here, the politics are blood red, the conversations are delightfully profane, and the people are not the type of folk you want to cross.

“Right about here is where it got him. I swung it like a baseball bat,” Nile said, wiping down the sweet spot of his cane.

The memory appears to bring him considerable satisfaction.

At 84, he’s got a fuller head of hair than most 20-year-olds, silver though it is. He’s wearing a distressed jean shirt, dark pants and those two-strap Velcro shoes that have become ironically fashionable with hipster types in cities like Denver. 

But his similarity with liberal hipsters ends there. 

“He went down like a rock,” Nile said of his brother. “Then I put my foot on the side of his head and said, ‘Lay there, 'cause if you get up, I'm gonna kill you.’”

Nile only captures part of the Deer Creek story. Toughness is common here. So is mischief and irreverent humor. 

‘Sporter Model’

A week later, you find yourself next to a woman named Deb. She’s 71, mildly buzzed, and doing a bawdy bit with an heirloom squash that’s on her person for unknown reasons.

The zucchini has a phallic resemblance, and you could see the joke coming from a mile off.

“This one’s called the Sporter Model,” Deb said, alluding in no uncertain terms to a sex toy.

You don’t need to ask what she means, but from the look on your face, she feels obliged to clarify that it’s a joke. 

“Honestly, I eat them. I don't do that with them. We’re all kidding here,” she said.

They kid a lot.

From across the bar comes a wisecrack on what the town’s controversial Flock cameras are destined to discover unfolding in Deb’s automobile.

In this way, Deer Creek mirrors dive bars everywhere, in which comedic innuendo is like a local dialect. 

Although in other ways, this joint goes against the grain. 

‘Non‑smoking bar? Stay in Casper!’

Institutions across Wyoming have slowly trended toward indoor smoking bans. 

Not Deer Creek. 

All down the bar top lay packs of Sonoma-brand cigarettes, which this bunch prefers for a simple reason. 

“Because they're the cheapest,” said Deb.

As though to punctuate the topic, she began to cough. 

Hers is a deep, whole-body, decades-long smokers cough that’s so deliberate it could pass for a kind of performance art. It raises in stages, and it makes the sound of a two-stroke diesel on its way to cruising speed.

To be fair, not every mile on her lungs came from cigarettes. Deb spent 25 years as a volunteer firefighter. Still, Glenrockians like Deb take their indoor smoking seriously, and local businesses have learned to respect it.

A number of years ago at a nearby restaurant-bar called 4 Aces, ownership experimented with an indoor smoking ban. The businesses took a hair cut; the experiment lasted one month, according to Alma Harvey, former 4 Aces employee who now tends bar at Deer Creek.

“They lost a lot of customers. They all went somewhere else,” Harvey said, explaining management’s decision to revert back to indoor smoking.

The notion surfaced again last January, when a 4 Aces employee posted to Facebook to gauge how the customer base would feel about some additional indoor smoking restrictions. 

Once again, it didn’t go over well.

“People want a non‑smoking bar? Stay in Casper!” said Vernon Velasquez, a 58‑year‑old regular and retired boilermaker, speaking with Cowboy State Daily in January.

The idea fizzled fast. That particular employee no longer works at 4 Aces. 

They do draw some lines on smoking. In recent times, a patron sparked a hemp joint indoors at Deer Creek. 

“They raised hell about it,” said one local, though not hell enough to kick the guy out.

This place has a reputation for other vices, too.

‘Got in a fight. The guy bit it off.’

Deer Creek was known to bring out the town’s rough-and-tumble, according to Velasquez, who’s got a battle wound to prove it.

During a bar brawl here in the early 2000s, a man bit off the top corner of Velasquez’s left ear, which he treated thereafter like a cold french fry. 

He tossed it in the trash bin.

“I threw it away and went home,” he said, adding that he never bothered to get medical treatment. “What are they gonna do? It’s cartilage.”

Locals say the joint’s wilder years are mostly behind it. But there’s still a few ornery hot-heads running around. 

Here comes one now.

“He says, ‘How about I kick your ass?’ and I say, ‘How about you try it?’” said Nile, leaning on the cane that made him famous, recounting once more the fabled fight with his older brother.

Nile is a self-proclaimed man of tradition. As evidence, he notes that he was married to two women named Shirley and briefly engaged to a third.

But he’s also broken with tradition in important ways.

His father died by suicide when Nile was 9. He never got along with his mother or older brother and left home at 14.

But he’s worked in adulthood to build close relationships with his three children, he said, and now counts his 10-year-old twin grandsons as his best friends. The boys can occasionally be spotted sitting politely at a table inside Deer Creek Lounge.

"They're the best behaved boys you've ever seen," Nile said. "And they're the best friends I've ever had, really, those kids. I'm a lucky grandpa."

Nile speaks about Glenrock with a similar quality of affection.

Born in Michigan, he served in the Navy, lived overseas and worked his way through a string of American cities and blue-collar jobs before eventually settling in Glenrock a decade ago to be near his grandsons.

"I've lived in Atlanta. I've lived in Tennessee," he said. "I've lived in El Paso, Texas, and I can't think of any place else I want to live in other than this town."

As with many Glenrockians, what Nile likes best about the town is the buffer it provides against city types. Sitting a few miles off Interstate 25, it’s removed enough that most travelers pass it by.

But he also likes new faces, because good storytellers like a fresh audience.

As for the story of what makes Glenrock his ideal town, the simple version is that it's a place where a man can live with rough edges but doesn't feel the need to sharpen them.

"I get along with everybody here," Nile said. "I don't feel like I'm gonna get in a fight every time I turn around, you know?"

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