Wyoming
Sam's Field Notes: Catch a wave … in Wyoming? | Coastal Review
Editor’s Note: After Sam Bland retired from his position as superintendent at Hammocks Beach State Park, he joined the staff of the North Carolina Coastal Federation. During his time as a coastal specialist in the 2010s, he would periodically write about his time in the field for Coastal Review. Now traveling the country, Bland drops a line every once in a while to share a new adventure with his readers, such as the following:
In northwestern Wyoming, just south of the town of Jackson, a 20-mile stretch of road makes its way through the mountains down to the town of Alpine.
It’s a gorgeous drive any time of year with towering mountain hills covered in pine, fir, cottonwood and aspen trees. Identified as the Snake River Canyon, Grand Canyon of the Snake or Alpine Canyon, the river slithers right beside the road.
The upper part of the river runs slow enough in the canyon that beavers dam off braids of the river, forming placid ponds and wetlands beneficial to all wildlife. Gradually, the grade of the river begins to drop and the velocity of the water picks up the pace.
During our travels out west into Wyoming, Idaho and Utah, my wife, Bright, and I have driven this road many times.
We look for the beavers and otters swimming in the ponds, the moose in the willows, elk in the meadows and mountain goats high on the steep cliffs. Much of the landscape on both sides of the road are public lands, part of the Bridger-Teton National Forest.
Every few miles, there are access areas for hiking, camping, fishing and picnicking. One access area sign caught our eye, but we would always drive past. The sign simply stated, “Lunch Counter” with the word “Kahuna” underneath it.
The use of the word “kahuna” on a national forest sign in Wyoming was quite intriguing. A Hawaiian word, kahuna is used to signify a professional expert, such as a doctor.
During my years of surfing the North Carolina coast, I would occasionally hear the word being called out as a big swell began to roll in. In late spring, fascinated by the sign, we drove down to the Lunch Counter to see what was cooking.
Arriving in the parking lot, we saw a man in a full wetsuit with a surfboard tucked under his arm disappear down a wooded trail towards the river. Wait, what? This looked so out of place in cowboy country. We dashed down the trail, and from an overlook we could see the Class III rapids of the Snake River.
The serene beaver pond waters of the upper river were now a raging whitewater serpent. In the mist of the aquatic chaos was a lone surfer riding the face of a large, standing wave. We now understood, the Lunch Counter and Kahuna referred to the rapids.
The Snake River Canyon was formed millions of years ago with tectonic plates butting heads, creating thrust-fold belts along with glacial gouging and erosion by the river itself.
At some point, geologic forces created a flat shelf with a large boulder lodged against it in the riverbed. Perhaps a massive flood rolled the boulder into just the right place. Prior to reaching the Kahuna and Lunch Counter rapids, the width of the river narrows with small granite walls on each side. It is here that the water shoots through like a firehose against the rocks creating the standing wave.
The wave is seasonal though, peaking in late spring and early summer due to melting snowpack. North of the Snake River Canyon, the flow is controlled by the Jackson Lake dam in Grand Teton National Park.
In early spring, the gates of the dam are cracked open to keep downstream reservoirs topped off for agricultural irrigation. Snowmelt from streams and creeks below the dam spills into the Snake River, causing the river to gush a high flow rate of 14,000 cubic feet per second.
Water flowing over the Lunch Counter at 7,000 to 13,000 cubic feet per second creates a wave tempting enough to lure a surfer into the maelstrom. Dam control, snowpack and daily temperatures dictate when and for how long this river surfbreak will last.
The flow can be variable. Thus, the wave may last for a month, a few days or not at all.
The Lunch Counter was first named in the 1960s by David Hansen, a local whitewater rafting guide. Out on his raft, with the undulating walls of waves looming ahead, he has been quoted as saying “if we are going to eat our lunch, it’s going to be right here.” The unique quote has become the identity of the Lunch Counter ever since.
It wasn’t until 1978 when a trio of brave whitewater rafting guides eyed the wave with envy, scrounged up a surfboard without an ocean in sight, and gave it a try. Surfing on the Snake was born. Like a siren, the wave continues to taunt, tempt and seduce surfers today.
Bright and I made our way down the worn gravel trail to a water-smoothed granite shelf along the river. Almost a dozen wetsuit-clad surfers were scattered about. Adorned with booties, gloves and a 5/4mm taped wetsuit, they were protected from the frigid 40- to 50-degree snowmelt.
One surfer was on the wave while another was drifting downstream after being bucked off the watery horse. Six surfers were sitting in a lineup on a rocky bench waiting for their turn on the curl as if kids patiently waiting for the music of an ice cream truck.
Watching the surfers, the first thing that hit me was that the power of the water is coming at you, not from behind like an ocean wave. What an adjustment for the mind and body for an ocean surfer.
Just to get to the wave was an endeavor in itself. First, you must jump off a rocky cliff with the surfboard underneath you, landing into a lower trough of water created by the uneven stream bottom. This trough, what the surfers called “the seam,” would then drift them into position below the standing wave.
Here, the current would pull them up and into the wave. Paddle, paddle, paddle in the whiteout of foamy madness before you are chewed up and spit out. Most of the surfers would quickly find the sweet spot at the base of the wave where they would lay on the board, adjusting their balance to keep the board forward on the wave. Then they would pop up, and if the surf gods are willing, ride a river wave.
Some surfers would just chill in the pocket of the wave, occasionally drifting up the face and back down. Off to the right of the wave, the pulsing waters would create a bit of a swell that allowed some surfers to drift to the right with a quick rip to the left, fanning the water up like a rooster tail.
Unlike ocean waves, some of these rides lasted for minutes. The more experienced riders would, at times, voluntarily bail on the wave, granting others a chance to catch the Snake. But more often than not, surfers were victims of a cold face-plant due to wandering concentration. Wipe out here and you are treated to another ride, rag-dolling down the rapids and tossed like a salad.
Here, the surfers are on high alert, keeping an eye out for hazards such as a tree branch hurling toward them like a water javelin. They also have to share the break with the hundreds of kayakers and rafting boats charging into the wave seeking their own thrill.
Whitewater kayakers in their short, stubby boats would back into the wave as well. Paddling to stay in the curl, they would dance on the wave, spinning circles much to the delight of the cheering surfers. A train of rafts might come along, aiming straight for wave.
Like a powerful bronco, the wave would try to throw them out of the boat under a shower of cold river rain.
We watched about a dozen surfers of various skill levels ride the standing wave. A few were still learning this break, but, for the most part, all the riders were solid.
One in particular, Amanda Studdard, originally of Portland, Oregon, was one with the wave.
Studdard’s movements on the wave were smooth and sure, taming the current surging under her board. She was calm and at peace on the wave while the chaos off the river surrounded her — a true soul surfer. At times, she would break away from the Zen of it all. Drifting higher and to her right on the wave, she would then make a slashing left turn gouging the wave with her stick. A wall of spray in her wake added to the watery mayhem.
A lover of river surfing, Studdard was on her lunchbreak, sneaking in a few rides. An appropriate thing to do while at the Lunch Counter. She has been hooked on river surfing ever since she dropped in on a wave at a human-made break in a waterpark in Bend, Oregon. Her occupation allows her flexibility to work remotely and drift down to the Lunch Counter each year — an idyllic life shared with her two dogs Loki and Laska along with her playful kitten, Violet. Her feel and connection with the wave were obvious, what she describes simply as “magical.”
Studdard was joined by her friend, Natalie Catania. After tasting the wave four years ago, she has returned each spring to get her fill. Catania, without hesitation, leaps off the bank, drifts the seam perfectly into the face of the wave and springs onto the deck of the board, making it look so easy. After learning to surf on river waves, she prefers them to ocean swells. Even her board is designed for river surfing.
She explained that with the evolution of river surfing, board shapers are now designing specifically for the river waves. An ocean board will do, but a board carved to meet the distinctive aspects of the river will provide better performance. Freshwater is less buoyant than saltwater, thus, a river board needs to be thicker to provide better lift. They are also wider and shorter, 4.5 to 6 feet in length. Different river waves might also require a uniquely shaped board, resulting in a surfer having a number of boards in their quiver.
Having ridden a number of other river waves, the Lunch Counter always coaxes Catania back to Wyoming. “It’s a raw experience,” she said. “Even though it is intense, you find a state of bliss.”
When I think of some of the famous surf breaks, places like Mavericks, Pe’ahi (Jaws), Banzai Pipeline, Teahupo’o, and Nazare come to mind. Now, I will need to add the Lunch Counter to the list.
River surfing is gaining popularity throughout the world with breaks in Germany, Austria, Norway, New Zealand and Canada. The Lunch Counter is thought to be one of, if not the, best natural river surf break in the United States.
Surfer Today has listed it as one of the best river surfing waves in the world. American Surf Magazine has it on the top of their list of best river surfing destinations in the U.S.
You would think with such a heady reputation that the surfers would be territorial. Quite the contrary. The vibe is peaceful, welcoming, encouraging and supportive. Compared to ocean lineups where I have seen punches thrown, this was a breath of fresh mountain air. Even the few youngsters who were cutting their teeth on this river wave were given the same respect and opportunity as the adults. And these grommets could shred.
While the melting of the snowpack diminishes and the gates of the reservoir dams are cranked down, the wave will subside as if a low tide. By mid-July, the wave will retreat into the riverbed, hibernating, waiting to roar again next spring.
As the wave-creating snow blankets the mountains this coming winter, the surfers will grow hungry — hungry with an appetite that can only be satisfied by a seasonal special found only at the Lunch Counter.
CHEYENNE — Wyoming knows it has a huge housing problem.
Builders, city and county administrators, state officials, business and community leaders — it doesn’t matter which of them you ask, most will agree the state is short tens of thousands of homes.
Scott Hoversland, who heads up the Wyoming Community Development Authority, puts the number of homes the state needs somewhere between 28,000 to 38,000 by 2030 — roughly 2,070 to 3,680 homes annually to keep up with population growth and aging infrastructure.
On paper, Southeast Wyoming Builders Association’s Joe Killpack acknowledges that sounds like it should be a developer’s dream.
But the reality is a lot more complicated, Killpack told Cowboy State Daily. It’s a tangled knot of economics and investment risk, criss-crossed with infrastructure costs and policy decisions that make houses more costly and time-consuming to build.
“This is a macro problem, not a micro problem,” Killpack added. “It’s not like we’re going to be able to pinpoint one issue. There are several issues. We’re talking about labor costs. We’re talking about commodity costs. We’re talking about development costs.”
Those make homes too expensive for Wyoming’s middle class to afford.
The Middle Class Squeeze
If Wyoming’s housing crisis has a face, it’s the middle-class worker earning median wages.
Once, that would have signaled a solid, respectable income. Today, it increasingly falls short as wages continue to lose ground against persistent inflation.
In Wyoming, median household income was $75,500 in 2024, 7.4% below the U.S. median.
Year over year, incomes rose just 1.3% while inflation climbed 2.9% — a clear decline in real purchasing power for the typical Wyoming family.
Over the long term, the trend remains problematic.
Wages have stayed relatively flat since at least 2010, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. For much of that time, inflation was modest, hovering between 1% and 2%. But that changed in 2021, when it surged 4.2%, before peaking at 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest level since 1981.
The result has been a widening gap between what workers earn and what it costs to live.
Regardless of the causes, the stark reality is wages have not kept pace with living expenses for most Wyomingites.
That marks a fundamental shift for the state’s middle class.
Median incomes that once reliably supported homeownership — a cornerstone of financial stability for many families — no longer stretch as far. Increasingly, the workers who power local economies are priced out of the communities they serve.
The strain shows up in everyday decisions. Longer commutes. Delayed home purchases. And, in some cases, leaving the state altogether.
Wyoming loses roughly 70% of its residents by the time they reach age 30, state officials have said. Housing costs are frequently cited as a key factor in that outmigration, which has led to a statewide hiring crunch.
The Math Problem
The problem, as Killpack sees it, isn’t that developers can’t see the demand. It’s that the basic math of putting up homes, especially ones that regular families can afford, no longer works.
On the cost side, labor, commodities, tariffs and fuel have all climbed, pushing construction budgets higher even before projects hit city hall for approval.
After that, fees and regulations are adding as much as $10,000 to the cost of homes, along with code changes like thicker exterior walls or new sprinkler requirements.
“Every time a new code is adopted the costs go up,” he said. “We’re doing these new codes to protect the health and the safety of our people who are living in these homes, which, hey, I can’t disagree with. But that doesn’t mean that costs go down. They only go up.”
Codes requiring particular types of insulation, for example, have meant using two-by-six-inch lumber in exterior walls, which adds to the cost versus a two-by-four.
“In Laramie, we have to do a draft stop in the basement,” he said. “So most are doing sprinkler systems and everybody thinks that’s wonderful, right? Because it truly is. If there’s a fire, it’s great. It’ll stop a fire. But the costs still go up, every single time.”
Meanwhile, waiting times for permit approvals stretch to as long as 18 months or more. In some cases, during which time interest rates, prices, and demand are all shifting.
“I’m involved in a project right now where we were going to build some apartments,” he said. “And this project originally started three years ago. They have had to stop, because the market changed.”
What The Median Buys V. What Developers Can Build
The gap comes into sharp focus when median income is translated into buying power.
A median salary of $75,500 supports up to $2,097 for a monthly mortgage, assuming a borrower with minimal debt and strong credit. On a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 6.47%, that maximum mortgage payment tracks back to a maximum loan amount of $332,842.
Homes in the low $300,000 range no longer pencil out for developers, Killpack said.
“A single-family home under $400,000 is almost impossible,” he said.
Builder margins, he added, are much lower than people think.
“Most people think it’s like 15, 20%,” he said. “It’s actually very minimal. I mean, you’re anywhere between 3-6% and that’s it.”
Which means developers themselves don’t have much wiggle room when it comes to their budgets.
Given that kind of margin, when you look at a city like Cheyenne where 5,000 homes are needed, the kind of investment it takes doesn’t feel like it’s worth the risk, Killpack said.
“(Let’s) talk about building 1,250 homes in a year in Cheyenne just to meet the minimum of what we’re projecting,” he said. “And let’s just say $400,000 homes … you’d need a $500 million investment annually.”
For that kind of money, Killpack said developers look at what’s known as the absorption rate, which measures how fast homes sell in a given market. They’re asking themselves where they can get the fastest return on investment.
Wyoming’s absorption rate needs to be higher to attract investment, Killpack said.
Now, developers can find many markets with both less risk and faster absorption rates, like those in Texas, Utah, and the Denver metro area, all of which have larger populations to spread risk around.
Wyoming’s lack of population, Killpack added, has many investors turning up their noses at Wyoming projects, deeming them too risky.
That doesn’t mean no one wants to invest in Wyoming, Killpack added.
“But it takes more than just people in Wyoming to make Wyoming grow,” he said. “Capital that’s being infused into our economy doesn’t only come from our local regional banks. It comes from other people, too, and they have to be willing to invest in Wyoming.”
Boom-Towns With Nowhere To Live
On paper, the city of Douglas seems like the classic Wyoming success story.
Oil and gas jobs form the bedrock of its economy, but more than 300 businesses in health care, education and retail round things out. Hotels are packed with energy workers — the kind of activity that ought to be pumping money into every cash register in town.
But there’s a catch.
“Our population is 6,512 based on our community snapshot, and 50% of our workers live in the city,” Interim City Administrator Michele Carter told Cowboy State Daily. “About 42% live in Casper. So, we have about half our workforce living in Douglas, just under half.”
The rest are headed to Casper or other areas around Douglas, like Glenrock.
The reason, Carter said, is directly related to a lack of affordable housing.
“A lot of our housing that has been built over the last few years is in that $400,000 to $500,000 range,” she said. “Which doesn’t fit your local businesses, your teachers, your nurses who are coming in to fill those spots in our school district and our hospital here.”
Many of the oil and gas workers who do live in Douglas, meanwhile, are staying in campers and at the fairgrounds because of a lack of rental properties.
Fixing that has proven difficult, Carter said.
Development costs, which include building out new sewer and water services, exceed what most people can afford to pay.
It’s taken a $5.7 million grant for water and sewer lines to help get things moving on a 30-acre site on the edge of town that will include a 94-apartment complex, plus several acres of single-family housing and new commercial space.
“The grant is really to put the infrastructure in,” Carter said. “Developers couldn’t make the numbers work if they have to eat all of those water, sewer and utility costs on top of everything else.”
Even with a grant, no one is pretending this is a silver bullet that will fix everything.
The apartments and homes the development unlocks will also take years to build, and the demand from mid-level workers is already far ahead of what’s on the drawing board.
Douglas isn’t Alone
Infrastructure is a significant barrier for communities across the Cowboy State, Hoversland told Cowboy State Daily, but it’s particularly acute for communities with fewer than 5,000 people.
Water lines, sewer, roads and power are required before even a single house can be built in a new area. For small towns with a thin tax base, fronting the money for that is typically next to impossible.
“Some of the bigger cities, Casper and Cheyenne especially, have more items they can do and have infrastructure built out,” he said. “But our cities under 5,000 population in Wyoming, that doesn’t give the numbers to draw developers in.
“So, infrastructure funding is another one of those things that I think is a big holdup. It really restricts a lot of developers coming in, because they have to pay for the infrastructure to say 25-to-50-home development, and that’s a lot of upfront cost and a lot of risk on the developer.”
Experiments Underway In Wyoming
Wyoming isn’t alone in facing such problems.
Nationally, the Harvard University State of the Nation’s Housing report released Thursday shows that construction is down across the nation amid rising costs and an ever-widening gap between what median households can afford and what median homes cost.
There’s a growing wave of state and local experiments on the ground — ranging from tax abatements, zoning changes, and new financing tools — all aimed at getting more units on the ground across the nation.
Wyoming is part of the melting pot of state ideas.
Hoversland points to a statewide housing strategic action plan that has 27 items that may help, including fast-track permitting, infrastructure funding tools, and support for manufactured and prefabricated homes, as well as tweaks to how federal housing dollars are used to stretch them further.
Jason Mincer, executive director of Wyoming Neighbors for Housing, is pushing public-private partnerships, community land trusts, and even a state-level investment fund to help shoulder upfront risk for workforce housing, along with streamlined approvals to cut months off project timelines.
Communities like Cheyenne, meanwhile, are rewriting their own rule books, streamlining zoning codes and getting rid of standards that may have been nice to have once upon a time, but don’t really impact safety and add significantly to costs.
Cheyenne has even created a “cottage lot” development option that lets builders cluster very small homes closer together with shared open space, which has already attracted some developers.
All of those ideas help at the margins. But Wyoming has to find ways to make it routine, rather than remarkable, to build homes in the price ranges that teachers, nurses, and sheriff’s deputies can afford.
Otherwise, nothing changes with the overriding trend where a large number of Wyoming households are maxed out in the low $300,000 range, and builders can’t drop below $400,000.
Until that gap can be routinely bridged, builders will remain cautious, and the state will continue to lose many of its young people to areas where the wages are a better match to prevailing home prices.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
Wyoming
How Investors May Respond To Black Hills (BKH) Customer‑Funded Wyoming Data Center Infrastructure Plan
- Black Hills Corp. recently reported continued progress on its proposed 1.8‑gigawatt data center project in Cheyenne, Wyoming, including equipment procurement, over US$200,000,000 in refundable customer construction contributions, and regulatory filings to support new substation infrastructure.
- An interesting aspect is that the prospective large-load customer is directly funding long lead-time generation milestones and substation development, signaling strong commitment to this long-horizon Wyoming data center build.
- We’ll now examine how this customer-backed generation plan for the Wyoming data center could reshape Black Hills’ investment narrative and risk profile.
This technology could replace computers: discover 31 stocks that are working to make quantum computing a reality.
Black Hills Investment Narrative Recap
To own Black Hills, you need to be comfortable with a regulated utility that is leaning into large, concentrated data center load as a key growth driver, while managing heavy capital needs and regulatory scrutiny. The Wyoming data center update, with over US$200,000,000 in refundable construction contributions and long lead-time equipment secured, supports the near term catalyst around data center backed growth, but it does not remove the core risks tied to execution, regulation, and load concentration.
The most relevant recent announcement is the pending all stock merger with NorthWestern Energy, which aims to create a larger, more diversified regulated utility platform and broaden infrastructure investment opportunities. For investors watching the Wyoming data center project, this potential combination could interact with the same catalyst of tech driven load growth while also reshaping how capital, regulatory exposure, and project risk are shared across a bigger footprint.
Yet behind this growth story, investors still need to be aware that the heavy capital expenditure burden and timing of regulatory recovery could…
Read the full narrative on Black Hills (it’s free!)
Black Hills’ narrative projects $3.6 billion revenue and $578.3 million earnings by 2029. This requires 16.8% yearly revenue growth and about a $290 million earnings increase from $288.3 million today.
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Exploring Other Perspectives
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A stoned Vietnam War lieutenant’s inside joke slipped right past Army brass and straight into history.
The lieutenant, Joe McCarthy, slyly christened his improvised gun truck “Uncle Meat,” his favorite track on the 1969 rock album by Mothers of Invention.
“He used to listen to that while he was stoned,” National Museum of Military Vehicles owner Dan Starks told Cowboy State Daily. “It was his little secret act of rebellion to name his gun truck after a stoner album, and the Army didn’t pick up on it and never objected to the name.”
Today, the lieutenant’s inside joke lives on in a serious place.
A replica of the gun truck is the latest new artifact at the National Museum of Military Vehicles near Dubois, which boasts the world’s largest private collection of military vehicles, with more than 500 that are fully restored or operational.
“To be clear, the truck is a reproduction,” Starks said. “Gun trucks were all unauthorized weapons, improvised in Vietnam. None of them came from the United States and only one of them was ever brought back.”
The one surviving original gun truck is called “Eve of Destruction.” It’s displayed at the Army Transportation Museum in Fort Eustis, Virginia.
The rest of the gun trucks were all destroyed or left in Vietnam.
The Road Called Ambush Alley
Gun trucks tell a particularly poignant story about Vietnam.
At the time, there was essentially one road between the deep-water port of Qhi Nhon and the strategically important Central Highlands — Highway 19.
It might have been called a highway, but it was more like a rough two-track. Just picture 110 miles of unpaved, mountain-hugging, jungle-choked dirt road with no shoulders, hairpin curves and 1-foot-deep potholes.
This was the only route available to supply American combat forces in the Highlands.
“There was a lot of strategic significance to our being able to maintain a presence in the Central Highlands and keep the enemy from using it as a safe haven to launch attacks into other parts of Vietnam,” Starks said. “So, what the enemy figured out is, here we (had) all these combat troops (in the) Central Highlands and they realized, ‘Hey, we don’t need to fight all these combat troops. All we’ve got to do is cut the road.”
America’s convoys, meanwhile, were not set up to face intense combat, which made them sitting ducks.
“We’re sending 19- and 20-year-old truck drivers down Ambush Alley literally every day, and sometimes twice a day, on a 220-mile round trip,” Starks said.
A Gun Truck Is Born
One day, the enemy decided to close the route. That day was Sept. 2, 1967. In a particularly brutal attack, Vietnamese fighters waylaid a 39-truck convoy, destroying 34 and killing many young Americans.
“The colonel in charge of convoys had to send trucks right back down that same road the next day, and the next day, and the next day,” Starks said. “The Army doctrine was the security for truck convoys is a matter for military police.”
There weren’t enough military police, however, which meant the truck drivers were usually on their own.
So the colonel took it upon himself to defy army protocols. He ordered some of the truck drivers to turn their convoy trucks into weapons.
“He went to truck drivers and said, ‘Hey, truck driver, you are now a machine gunner’,” Starks said. “They had no training. He just said you are now a machine gunner.”
But saying it wasn’t enough to make it happen.
“The Army wouldn’t issue him any machine guns, because it was outside of regulations,” Starks said. “So they had to steal them. They had to trade whiskey for them. They had to take them off of downed helicopters. And they had to make them out of spare parts.”
They also had to figure out how to create gun boxes on the trucks to protect those machine gunners, who would now become prime targets.
“They took these gun trucks and sprinkled them through the length of the convoy,” Starks said.
When the enemy next ambushed the convoy, it was they who were surprised.
The new strategy had gun trucks racing into the heart of the ambush as fast as they could go to drive the enemy away. Everyone else was to drive out of the killing zone and get away.
Built By A Survivor
The museum’s replica was built by a Vietnam veteran who was among the 19- to 20-year-old men who served on the original Uncle Meat. Werth’s service was in 1970/71. For Werth, building the replica was a way to remember his buddies and make sure their story didn’t disappear.
“Logan lost a bunch of buddies in the truck ambushes back there in Vietnam,” Starks said. “And he was lucky to survive himself.
“He came back to the United States 100% disabled and in the years he was working to recover from his Vietnam War experience he decided to create this reproduction of the truck he served in.”
Three friends were killed in ambushes that Werth survived, so he put their names on the truck. They were Michael Hunter, Richard Frazier and Robert Thorne.
“He used the truck to keep alive the story of these teenagers, making up their own weapons to try and stay alive,” Starks said. “And he wanted it preserved forever.”
Werth was approached many times by people who wanted to buy Uncle Meat, but he was never willing to sell it — not for any amount of money.
After his death, he charged a friend with finding someone who would preserve it, and that’s how it has come to Dubois.
A Rolling Fortress
Werth’s attention to detail and the story behind it he worked so meticulously to preserve make the reproduction one of the best in existence, Starks said.
“This shows you exactly what a gun truck looked like back then,” Starks said. “And I’ve got a lot of history on this from people who were there and commented to him about how perfect this reproduction was and giving him little tidbits of information to make sure he would get it exactly right.”
Uncle Meat was outfitted with four M2 .50-caliber machine guns — one on each side and a twin-.50 setup mounted at the rear.
There were additional hand-held machine guns so that the gunners could hit targets that were too close or too low for the M2s to hit.
The gun box was double-steel armor, with a space between the plates that could be filled with sandbags. The cab was double-armored, too, and included ballistic glass windshields.
The driver had an M79 grenade launcher, with his own set of rounds, which included smoke to mark positions for support. The truck also carried rations, extra tires, tools and stretchers — because Uncle Meat doubled as both gun truck and rolling service truck for the convoys it protected.
Not Just A Relic
Uncle Meat won’t be part of the museum’s regular display. It will be a rolling exhibit instead, for parades and touch-a-tank events where people are invited to climb into military vehicles or take rides.
“We’ll keep it in our parade building so it will be well-protected,” Starks said. “And we’re going to drive it in the Fourth of July parade this year.”
The day before July 4 will also be an America 250 celebration at the museum, with free vehicle rides, as well as tank demonstrations, speakers, and other activities.
Telling the story of Uncle Meat has never been more important than it is now, Starks added. Vietnam veterans are in their 70s and 80s. They came home to a country where many did not honor their service. They were spat upon and called names such as “baby killer.”
“I know a lot of these truck drivers and a bunch of them ended up dying of Agent Orange and nobody knows their story,” he said. “They lived through all of this and it’s still haunting them.”
Starks wants as many of them as possible to know before they die what they did has not only been seen, it’s going to be remembered and honored.
What began as a stoned lieutenant’s inside joke has outlived the war — and many of the young men who rode in it — and found a lasting place in history.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
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