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

Andrew Rossi

 petroglyph sites in North America is hidden away in a secret spot near Newcastle, Wyoming. The petroglyphs of Whoopup Canyon are among the oldest and most "realistic" known to exist.

Hundreds of images are carved into the sandstone walls across 150 known panels. They depict people, animals and even the technology used by some of the earliest Indigenous people in North America.

A lucky group of people got to visit this protected site July 25 as part of a tour coordinated by the Wyoming Historical Society and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Newcastle office.

The tour was led by Lucas Keeler, a BLM petroleum engineering technician who’s also one of the foremost authorities on Whoopup Canyon.

“It’s one of the largest and oldest petroglyph sites in North America, and it’s a love and passion of mine,” he told Cowboy State Daily.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"It’s Not Art"}]

At many petroglyph sites, it’s hard for most people to recognize what’s being depicted. Images are deliberately abstract or artistic, which some believe is attached to the spiritual significance of the people who made them.

At Whoopup Canyon, little is left to the imagination. The images, free of artistic embellishments, are easy to identify and interpret as what they are.

Ralph I. Olinger, a businessman, amateur archaeologist, and Wyoming House representative from Lusk, noted as much during the first scholarly assessment of the petroglyphs with University of Denver anthropology professor Etienne B. Renaud in the 1930s.

“The deer and elk are mostly pictured, but there are mountain goats, antelope, bison, and a few other animals,” he wrote. “There seems to be none of horses.”

Keeler noted that the realism of the petroglyphs is one of many unique attributes of Whoopup Canyon. That’s also why he emphasized that the images “are not art.”

“It wasn’t art to the people that created them,” he said. “It is a historical record with cultural and spiritual significance. A sacred link to the land. There’s nothing wrong with referring to petroglyphs as ‘rock art,’ but it’s deeper than that.”

That was the background Keeler provided to the tour group before they departed from Newcastle to reach the sandstone canyon. They hiked a mile through chest-high grass, under the shade of ancient cottonwoods, before stopping at the end of the canyon to get a closer look at the panels.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Life And Times"}]

As the group approached the canyon wall, careful not to touch anything, many images were easy to understand. The walls were covered with elk, deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, birds, and “Mister Bison,” the only bison depicted along the entire four-mile expanse.

Keeler noted that all the animals are extant, meaning 

 in Wyoming. No mammoths, lions, or other extinct animals 

There are also images recognizable as humans. They aren’t passive figures but are depicted as actively engaged with other figures in the same panel.

According to Keeler, most of the panels depict hunting scenes. It reveals how these nomadic tribes hunted and the tools they used to do it.

“We have a lot of hunting scenes,” he said. “It was a big deal to these people, because it took a lot of time and pride to make these panels. You can see different creators with different techniques.”

Many panels depict human figures wielding atlatls, one of the oldest weapons in human history, as they pursue pronghorn and deer.

Many of those same panels also have a repeating pattern of half-circles along a long horizontal line. Instead of an artistic flourish, this is believed to be another accurately depicted tool.

“We think these are large game nets,” Keeler said. “It was some sort of netting used to capture animals. We'll see a lot of that netting (pattern) with a bunch of animals running up to it.”

Keeler explained that many indigenous tribes set up nets and drove herds of animals toward them. An individual isolated at the point where several nets met would be much easier to kill.

“They would bring this antelope into a three-sided catch, and somebody at the end, the game caller, would whack it on the head,” he said. “It’s well-documented. Lewis and Clark witnessed the Cheyenne using these antelope traps, and they continued to use them up to the 1870s.”

“The game caller” is also a common figure in these rock panels. It’s a humanoid figure wielding a large object, like a club, over their head.

Keeler also noted another intriguing animal depicted alongside the human figures. The best explanation for these four-legged, pointed-ear creatures is that they’re images of domesticated dogs.

“You can see where the dogs were being used, running after the other animals,” he said. “Dogs were domesticated over 10,000 years ago, so that tracks.”

That’s where the age of Whoopup Canyon’s petroglyphs gets interesting.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Oldest Or 'Oldest?'"}]

Whoopup Canyon is believed to be one of the oldest petroglyph sites in North America. However, age can be a tricky thing to determine.

Keeler referenced “Mister Bison” as a textbook example of accurate dating based on the patina of iron oxide and manganese covering the image, contrasted with a nearby elk.

“The elk is pretty cream-colored without much black on it, while the bison is completely black,” he said. “That means the image has to be older than the stuff covering it.”

The iron oxide-manganese patina can be dated using Carbon-14 and cation-ratio dating, and many of the panels have been.

Based on previous dating of the patina, “Mister Bison” is believed to be over 8,000 years old.

That might not even be the oldest image in the canyon. Samples from other panels have been dated from 2,500 years to 10,500 years old.

Today, dating is more difficult due to the mistakes of well-intentioned amateurs.

In 1942, historian and farmer Charles Haas of Rapid City, South Dakota, did an extensive photographic documentation of Whoopup Canyon. To make the images more visible in his black-and-white photos, he traced the images with white chalk.

“The chalking left residue which interferes with dating methods,” Keeler said. “It is estimated that nearly 97% of the glyphs at Whoopup have been chalked.”

Nevertheless, the panels in Whoopup Canyon are still considered among the oldest in North America, and certainly in Wyoming. They’re so old that even today’s tribes have trouble interpreting them.

“We have tribal consultations with various Plains Native American tribes that we periodically bring out to get opinions on the images,” Keeler said. “It can be very eye-opening because (images) go so much further back than the tribes that we know of today.”

Keeler has guided members of the Lakota, Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Shoshone, and Arapaho tribes to Whoopup Canyon. While spiritually and culturally significant to all of the tribes, the petroglyphs are not ascribed to any of them, because they’re so much older.

“There were no Lakota, Cheyenne, or Arapahoe when these were made,” he said. “These were nomadic tribes, wandering and following game. It was a whole different world back then.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Standouts"}]

Amid the plentiful images of elk, pronghorn, and people, there are a few images that Keeler found particularly noteworthy.

One, at the far end of the canyon, depicted several people standing close together. Instead of being simple stick figures, each figure has depth and dimension.

“It looks like a family,” Keeler said. “They’re not holding hands, but they’re close together. That whole cliff face had so much going on that’s unlike anything else in the canyon.”

Keeler mentioned that he’s asked about that panel during the tribal consultations.

[{"type":"text","text":"“They all say something different,” he said."}]

A nearby figure, wielding an atlatl, is almost three-dimensional. He has clear proportions that were intentionally carved into the rock.

“He’s about the only person out here that's got any meat on him,” Keeler said.

There are several images and panels that Keeler can’t explain. They include a line of pronghorn, end to end, and something he referred to as “the Unicorn.”

But there’s one panel, on the opposite end of the canyon from the family, that defies explanation.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Skin-Changer?"}]

One of the more unique panels is four humanoid figures close together. They’re unlike anything else in Whoopup Canyon and, to Keeler’s knowledge, any other petroglyph site.

[{"type":"text","text":"He introduced it as “the one the tribes don’t like.”"}]

“There’s nothing else like it here, that’s for sure,” he said. “It's hard to know what was going through their head when they did that.”

The images appear to be part of the same sequence. One of the figures appears to be stretching their head and upper body, while the final figure is holding an object that resembles a torch.

Keeler has no definitive explanation, but he’s wary of one that’s been proposed: the panel depicts the transformation of the Deer Woman.

Many Indigenous American tribes have stories of spirits or “witches” that can turn into animals to disguise themselves and deceive others. The Navajo have “yee naaldlooshii,” “the skin-walker,” and many tribes, including the Sioux, have “the Deer Woman.”

Historically, these spirits have been malicious and duplicitous entities in tribal mythology. That would make a depiction of one on a petroglyph panel unique and unusual.

“A lot of cultures across the world have that story of a bad shapeshifter,” Keeler said. “I don’t know if that’s what’s depicted on the panel, or what it’s trying to symbolize, but there’s a lot going on.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Exclusive Access"}]

Many of Wyoming’s petroglyph sites are open to the public. Whoopup Canyon is not one of them.

While the canyon itself is on BLM land, the only way to access it is by roads going through private ranches. That has given the site some added protection, as it has been vandalized in many ways over the last century.

In 1997, the U.S. Department of the Interior called for an emergency closure of Whoopup Canyon. That closure remains in effect, keeping the canyon 

 to all activity except scientific, educational, and sociocultural projects.

The easiest way to see Whoopup Canyon is to be an elementary school-aged student in Newcastle or Upton.

“The Upton Science Kids come out for one day in June, and I take the Newcastle Elementary School fourth graders doing Wyoming history out in October,” Keeler said. “Those are the only two groups I do every year.”

The June 25 excursion with the Wyoming Historical Society was the first tour of its kind in several years. The group worked with the BLM to get permission from the private landowners to access the site.

“It’s illegal to access without their permission, and it’s still an area of critical environmental concern for the Interior Department, so it’s closed to the public,” Keeler said.

That said, Keeler hopes there might be an opportunity to offer future tours of Whoopup Canyon, perhaps one a year, so more people can experience the canyon and its history.

While the petroglyphs are most closely associated with today’s Native American tribes, Keeler believes anyone can find a connection to the images in the sandstone. The history depicted in the petroglyph panels of Whoopup Canyon is universal.

“For me, the petroglyphs are telling the same story of everyone’s history,” he said. “Wherever we came from, we all go back to these nomadic-type peoples. So many different cultures can relate to these things, because this is our origin story. It’s the roots of so many different people.”

Whoop Up Canyon IMG 1106 8 2 26

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

<title>Whoopup Canyon Has One Of The Oldest And Largest Petroglyph Sites In North America | Cowboy State Daily</title>

One of the most extraordinary petroglyph sites in North America is hidden away in a secret spot near Newcastle, Wyoming. The petroglyphs of Whoopup Canyon depicted in 150 sandstone panels are between 3,000 and 10,500 years old. Access is extremely limited.

Whoopup Canyon Has One Of The Oldest And Largest Petroglyph Sites In North America

Jen Kocher - Headshot CSD

Jen Kocher

Crime & Courts

The initial pass missed it completely. The drone touched down almost directly in front of it — that close, but still they didn’t see it.

It wasn’t until days after the search, combing through video frame by frame, that Bill Dohse and his team found what they were looking for last month: A metal barrel can wedged on its side at the bottom of Fremont Lake, obscured beneath a swirling veil of sediment and algae more than 430 feet deep.

Dohse, president of the nonprofit Organized Search and Rescue (O-SAR), couldn’t believe his eyes.

“I was like, ‘Holy crap, how did we miss it?’” he told Cowboy State Daily.

Then the weight of it hit him. Had they just found the final piece of a decades-old murder mystery?

[{"type":"text","text":"The pieces were falling into place."}]

along with a barrel spotted two weeks earlier from the same lakebed —

 might finally shed light on what Gerald Uden did with the bodies of his ex-wife and his two adopted sons.

Uden has already confessed to the killings. In 2013, he told Wyoming investigators he shot Virginia Uden and the boys — Richard, 11, and Regan, 10 — in September 1980, luring them out under the pretense of a hunting trip. Their bodies have never been found.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"At The Bottom Of The Lake"}]

Uden told authorities he initially concealed the bodies in a nearby mine before discarding them in receptacles in the lake. He said he put Virginia in a sealed 55-gallon steel drum, into which he had either shot or drilled holes to help it sink. The boys were put together in a 35-gallon steel garbage can and sunk alongside it.

The problem, until now, was that nobody could find either the barrel or can.

Searches in 2013 and 2014 turned up nothing — including one in which Uden himself accompanied Sublette County Tip Top Search and Rescue (TTSAR), which scoured the lake with their side-scan sonars, thermal-imaging drone and other underwater search equipment. 

That fact, combined with Uden’s shifting stories — he initially claimed to have dumped the bodies in the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon Coast — had long cast doubt on his credibility.

But his account has remained consistent in the years since, and authorities now have good reason to believe the two found objects are no coincidence.

“It’s a fantastic feeling,” Dohse said. “After 45 years, the families of Virginia, Richard and Reagan Uden may finally be close to the closure they deserve.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Letters From Prison"}]

None of it would be possible without new information that arose from an unlikely pen-pal relationship between a private citizen and Uden, Dohse said.

president of the Gillette-based missing person nonprofit 

, began writing to Uden four months ago after learning about Virginia and the boys as part of her 

nonprofit’s coffee sleeve campaign launched this spring

 featuring the faces of Wyoming’s missing.

She and her volunteers have assisted in a half-dozen missing-person cases over the past four years, of which this reporter has taken part, 

including the search for a missing Kenyan nursing student in Gillette

Koester’s group offers a host of free services for families and loved ones of the missing, including poster sharing, media, investigative help, support with funeral expenses, and searches and recoveries, all with the sign-off of law enforcement.

She’s tried a lot of techniques for garnering information but never attempted writing to a convicted murderer in prison for his help, but figured it was worth a try.

“It’s part of our determination to bring home the missing, which led to our working on cold cases,” Koester said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Bringing Them Home"}]

Uden, now 84, is serving three life sentences at the medium correctional facility in Torrington.

This is where Koester found him after writing in May to ask if he’d killed them and, if so, specifically in the lake where he dumped the bodies.

[{"type":"text","text":"Koester explained that was her primary purpose."}]

“I was 100% honest with Gerald from my very first letter that my goal was to bring Virginia, Richard and Reagan to a proper rest and burial,” Koester said.

 before the Wyoming Supreme Court in which he recanted those earlier confessions, claiming they were made under coercion.

But he eventually opened up to Koester in his second letter, admitting to their murders and repeating his story about putting them in Fremont Lake, in the foothills of the Wind River Range just north of Pinedale.

He had since picked up painting in prison, he wrote, and wanted her help in selling those paintings, with all proceeds going to his stepdaughter.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Two Maps"}]

Koester sensed a bargaining chip and pressed Uden for a specific location in Fremont Lake. She further appealed to his conscience, sharing her remorse that the two boys – with their lives already unfairly cut short – were left in a watery grave without a proper burial.

She implored Uden to tell the truth about where he stashed their bodies. When he repeated they were in Fremont Lake, she sent him two maps.

Both he marked in roughly the place where he put in his boat and about where in the lake he dropped the bodies.

It turned out the spot now marked by Uden was outside the perimeter of the original search area.

Koester believed Uden was telling the truth. She took the letters and maps to Dohse and his team, and shared the information with Ryan Cox, commander and head of cold cases with the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI).

Dohse, after much deliberation with the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office, DCI, local search and rescue groups and his O-SAR partner, Eric Butt of 

information was worth launching a new search

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Infamous Enough"}]

Uden knows about the discovery of the barrel and told Koester he has mixed feelings about their bodies being recovered.

[{"type":"text","text":"He’s already “famous\/infamous” enough, he told her.  "}]

“I really do not need any more attention,” Uden wrote. “I do understand why any of their family would want recovery, but that does not concern me.”

Koester had further reason to believe Uden would now truthfully confess after the death of his wife, Alice, who he told Koester was the love of his life.

She, too, had been serving a life sentence, in a separate and unrelated case, for the 1974 murder of her third husband, Ronald Holtz, who was 25 at the time. She claimed he was abusive and she killed him in self-defense.

The case went cold for nearly four decades until 2013, when her son came forward and turned her in. His body was recovered from a mineshaft on a ranch property where she’d once been lived as a caregiver. 

It was Alice’s arrest that prompted Uden’s confession.

Uden, then 71 and living with Alice in Missouri, had no knowledge of her arrest. When state and federal authorities flew out to question him, he cooperated fully — confessing to the killings under the mistaken belief Alice had been implicated in the deaths of Virginia and the boys, wanting to make clear she had played no part.

He changed his tune, however, upon her death from health complications on June 12, 2019, at which point he said Alice was complicit in both the crime and coverup.

He also shared this with Koester. Not only did Alice approve of the murders, Uden told Koester, but she helped him dump the bodies.

It had been their fourth anniversary, Nov. 5, 1980. he said, when the couple went out to the lake in a 16-foot StarCraft aluminum boat with a 55-horse motor to dump the bodies in the dead of night.

His reasons for the killings, Uden told authorities, according to court documents, were that Virginia and the boys were causing problems in his marriage with Alice. He had adopted the boys and paid child support after his roughly two-year marriage to Virginia; he married Alice shortly after the divorce.

In letters, he told Koester he didn’t want to kill the boys but likened it to a Godfather situation in which he didn’t want to be constantly looking over his shoulder for them to turn him in for killing their mother.

He loved the boys, he said. When he first met Virginia, they were “walking problems,” Uden said.

They were picky eaters who didn’t want to go to bed at night and were also poorly disciplined. But he’d really wanted a family, so he’d taken them on and mostly had the problems under control, he said.

Koester said she believes Alice’s death has finally freed Uden’s conscience to lead searchers in the right direction.

“Alice was the true love of Gerald’s life,” Koester said. “Now that she is dead, I was confident that he was now telling me the truth.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Outside Perimeter"}]

Dohse agrees. Though initially skeptical like the other searchers, he thought the search was worth the risk and now is even more confident they are on the right track.

For starters, he’s consulted with experts who believe the second object found is a metal trash can – complete with tapered bottom and shiny exterior in keeping with the quality of galvanized trashcans from that era.

“We never expected to see a trash can in one piece, but the stuff back then is way better than it is today,” Dohse said, noting that the 40-degree water temperature and lack of oxygen at that depth would help in the preservation.

Both the barrel and trash can were discovered in relatively close proximity, Dohse said, and were found outside of the original search perimeter provided by Uden.

This was a hunch by a member of their search team, Dohse said, who believed Uden would have set off from the dock at a 45-degree angle– not at a 90-degree angle as originally believed in the initial search – to keep sight of it with his flashlight or the headlights on his vehicle, depending on what he used for light.

“He would have needed good light to make it back to the dock,” Dohse explained, estimating that the two objects were found in the middle of the lake, about a half-mile out of the roughly mile-wide lake that stretches for 12-miles at an altitude of 7,421 feet.

The landscape today also looks much different than it did in 1980, Dohse noted, adding that there are now much fancier docks and taller trees.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Recovery Mission Underway"}]

Both Koester and Dohse remain confident they’ve finally located the missing bodies. Phase two of the recovery is underway.

O-SAR is working with the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation and the FBI in a mission that’s been dubbed, “Operation Cold Current.”

Dohse is keeping those details close to the vest for now, only to say the next phase will require specialized equipment and trained rescuers to navigate both the depth and cold waters of the state’s deepest mountain lake.

O-SAR’s action plan is being reviewed by the partner agencies and will be conducted by the Deep Trekker and QYSEA teams. They will deploy their remotely operated vehicle (ROV) robots equipped with specialized recovery systems capable of lifting the objects off the bottom of the lake.

Once recovered, they will be turned over to state and federal law enforcement for processing.

“Every phase of the recovery will be documented under strict forensic chain-of-custody protocol with the Wyoming DCI special agent on-scene serving as the evidence authority,” Dohse said.

 Dohse declined to share additional details only that a plan is in the works to recover the objects and he thanked all the partners involved. 

Fremont Lake search and mugs 8 2 26

<title>Searchers Optimistic They'll Find Uden Bodies In Barrels At Bottom Of Fremont Lake | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Searchers are optimistic that the barrel and a trash can they found two weeks ago at the bottom of Fremont Lake contain the bodies of a young mother and her two sons murdered by notorious killer Gerald Uden. Their next step is to recover the barrels.

Searchers Optimistic They'll Find Uden Bodies In Barrels At Bottom Of Fremont Lake

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's managing editor, Greg Johnson.

Greg Johnson

Outdoors

Public Lands

UPDATE 11 a.m.: This story has been updated to reflect progress made on gaining an upper hand on the Left Creek Fire, along with a witness account and more details on the suspected origin of the wildfire. It also addresses when officials will re-evaluate the national monument’s closure.

Devils Tower National Monument continues to be closed as a wildfire burning just southwest of the monument’s boundary has so far consumed an estimated 282 acres without containment.

The Left Creek Fire, discovered at about 10:40 a.m. Saturday, grew quickly in hot and dry conditions in northeast Wyoming, with temperatures hitting 99 degrees Saturday, the National Weather Service reports.

Believed to have been caused by lightning, Wyoming state Sen. Ogden Driskill said the wildfire was on the fenceline of his land and another ranch owner — and he was struck with fear when he first saw the smoke.

“It was really scary, because that’s some of the grass we depend on in the fall and winter,” he told Cowboy State Daily on Saturday morning while meeting with state and National Park Service officials.

“In my opinion, it without a doubt could’ve been a 5,000-acre-plus fire — or more,” Driskill said, adding that quick and precise work from the more than 100 firefighters on the scene have kept the wildfire in check.

“We literally watched helicopters put out crown fires all day long,” he said. “They kept it in the original line all day long (Saturday), and the ground crews kept it from spreading on the ground.”

That work Saturday has kept the fire at an estimated 282 acres, said Dick Terry, said district forester for Wyoming State Forestry.

While he wouldn’t say the fire is contained, he said he’s confident it’s basically under control.

“We’ve got fire line around most of it, but it’s indirect,” he said. “It’s still small and not contained just because we’ve got the east side with a shaky line until we get a little bit of a handle on that.”

The fire has so far also stayed outside the boundary of the national monument, Terry said.

“I would assume it’s lightning,” he added about the suspected cause of the fire. “But, I haven’t seen the start of it yet. But it’s 99% sure it’s lightning.”

No structures are in the area and he put his confidence at “about 80%” that the monument could reopen sometime Sunday.

“It’s still closed until re re-evaluate it again at about 3 o’clock today,” Terry said.

National Park Service Powder River Group Superintendent Dustin Sene agrees, while also praising the work of local agencies and landowners for helping keep the fire small and relatively in check.

“They did a great job getting ahead and getting the park evacuated,’ he said. “It’s an incredible interagency effort, as well as the local community here.

“Everybody worked well together and we’re starting conversations about when the park will get opened again.”

He also thanked the local KOA campground, which is just outside the monument’s boundary and remains open, for feeding firefighters over the weekend.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Kink In The Plans"}]

The fire and Devils Tower closure have also put a kink into the vacation plans of weekend visitors and bikers starting to make their way to the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

“Some travel moments write themselves, and some are actively on fire,” posted John and Jenny of the “No Rules Just Roam” travel platform. “The whole scene looking like something out of a movie.”

“We are staying near Devils Tower National Monument and found out at the entrance that a Level 3 wildfire had closed he entire monument and evacuated everyone, including the staff, due to imminent danger,” the couple reported. “This is genuinely serious and we hope everyone got out safely.”

While reporting updates on the fire, they also posted a video of a camper walking through the campground with Devils Tower and smoke from the fire rising eerily in the background.

“Scrolling — Not the news. Not the fire updates,” John and Jenny posted, adding the woman was watching “reels” like nothing was happening.

“I looked at the fire. I looked at her. I looked at the fire again,” the report continues. “She did not look up.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"150 Firefighters"}]

Meanwhile, wildfire resources have quickly been marshalled to battle the fire, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reports.

Devils Tower National Monument continues to be closed as a wildfire burning just southwest of the monument’s boundary has so far consumed nearly 300 acres without containment. “This is genuinely serious,” observed a nearby camper.

Douglas L. Deppey, 84