- From Buffalo Bill Dam to a huge highway crossing for wildlife.

From a Big League baseball announcer to a man revolutionizing vertical farming.

And from the Army Sergeant who's also a two-time Miss Wyoming, to the remarkable 91-year-old man we call the Master of the Miniature.

"Wyoming Chronicle" has traveled the state in search of interesting people, places, and history.

This week, we'll wrap up the season with a half hour of highlights.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(bright upbeat music) - [Sponsor] Funding for Wyoming Chronicle is made possible in part by Wyoming Humanities, enhancing the Wyoming narrative to promote engaged communities and improve our quality of life.

And by the members of Wyoming PBS.

Thank you for your support.

- When Buffalo Bill Dam near Cody was completed in 1910, it was the tallest dam in the world.

It no longer has that stature, but it remains one of the most striking sites anyone in Wyoming will ever see.

In July, we attended the annual celebration called Great Dam Day at the Dam's Visitor Center, coinciding with the anniversary of adding 30 feet to the top of the dam in 1993.

And the 50th anniversary of the dam's placement on a national registry of construction and engineering achievements.

We met Beryl Churchill and Bill McCormick.

The two people who probably know more about the dam than anyone else.

Churchill, who has written two books about the dam, recalled learning of the original chief engineer.

He moved to a rustic home at the Mountainside Dam site with his wife and two children.

Their story led to her second book about Buffalo Bill titled, "Challenging the Canyon: A Family Man Builds a Dam."

Who was he and what lit your interest in him once you met him?

- D.W. Cole was the constructing engineer.

- [Steve] Cole, spell that for me.

- C-O-L-E. - [Steve] C-O-L-E. - And he came from Marietta, Georgia.

He had a high school education.

Before he retired, he had been involved in 15 of the major dams in the world, including India, and then one in South America.

Then, in 1986 when the dam was finished and Jean Cole Anderson came to see the dam her daddy built, and she was 80-some years old at that time.

Just a wonderful lady.

And in our conversation she told me that she had letters that her father wrote and her siblings wrote back and forth to each other during construction of the dam.

And they had never been published.

- And you thought, hmm, light bulb.

- Yes, we were going to collaborate.

And unfortunately she died before we did.

The family called me from Marietta, Georgia, said, "Come get these letters."

I took a briefcase.

I had to borrow a suitcase to bring these beautiful letters, not only written by D.W. Cole about the construction and day by day work at how difficult it was, but his daughters and his wife also wrote letters that were kept by this family.

One of the things that really fascinated me then, talking with Mrs. Anderson.

D.W. Cole brought his wife and three daughters to live with him at Buffalo Bill Dam when he was building it.

- [Steve] Is that so?

- Marietta, Georgia.

And they came- - So, like moving to a different planet almost.

- Yes, and they came from a fairly substantial family.

And Carolyn Cole was his wife.

She absolutely had more courage than I can imagine.

Bringing three little girls out here to live with her husband.

Right, well, pretty close to where the visitor center is now.

- [Steve] When it was time to add 30 feet to the height of the original dam, more than 80 years later, it fell to Bill McCormick to oversee that job, including finding a way to come up with nearly half a million tons of base construction material for the new tunnel and highway improvements that coincided with the dam project.

He said, "Finding enough rock for the road base required giving the mountain a haircut."

- In their planning, they had three dust abatement dikes and three miles of highway that they needed rip-rap for.

And when you asked the question, "Well, where are you going to get the rip-rap?"

"Well, from the spillway tunnel."

"And how much is that?"

"40,000 yards."

And I said, "We need 400,000."

And it will cost you $20 a yard at that time.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- To get it hauled in and processed in place.

And so they agreed.

We'll give this a haircut.

And we got enough rock off.

If you look at the old pictures, there was a, the road was a pain.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- There was three tunnels down below.

One of 'em fell by itself.

The other got a little nudge.

(chuckles) And then, other one we actually took out of there just for safety.

And upstream here where you, and there's another tunnel.

And they thought those were great in the '20s.

- Yeah.

The Dry Piney Wildlife Highway Crossing Project in Sublette County marked an important milestone for the state, both for Wyoming Wildlife and people.

Nate Brown runs the Wildlife Fund, a crucial organization helping bring state government officials and private donors together to fund the $15 million project.

We met Brown in June at the crossing near Pinedale where he said he's been touched personally by loss due on automobile collision with wildlife.

So, it's good for the wildlife because this is where they live.

They were here before us.

They know already they have to cross the road.

They have to get from there to there.

- Yeah.

- They can't help it.

- Yeah, and that's actually, it's ingrained- - Yeah.

- In their very existence.

They've been doing it for centuries.

- It's an instinct for them to go to where the food is at a particular time of year.

- [Nate] Yep.

- So now, we put this road in between and it's caused them a problem.

- Yeah.

- The animals.

It's caused the people a problem because there are thousands, I'm not sure people understand this.

Thousands of wildlife automobile collisions.

- [Nate] Yeah, wildlife vehicle collisions.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- Are very common in our state.

I think one of the earliest memories I have is a member of my own family when I was very young, was killed in a rollover vehicle accident.

- In the case of the person you mentioned, this was someone who had swerved to avoid?

- [Nate] Yep.

- A Pronghorn antelope on the road?

- Yeah, rolled the car, the spare tire killed my cousin.

And like I said, it's one of my earliest memories and I think that anyone in the state of Wyoming that's lived here very long, if they think about it, they probably know someone, Steve, that's been down that road or had a family member or friend lost to a vehicle collision with likely a large ungulate.

6,000 is is an average low end number that's basically a number of total animals retrieved from the highway crossing area where the actual right of way for Wydot occurs.

And so, there's a lot of animals that have been impacted by cars that get off of the right of way out into the sagebrush.

They're either killed by predators as a result of their injury, or they have a slow lingering death as a result of an injury.

Those animals are never counted.

There's estimates as high as four times the 6,000 average number that we go off of now.

So, nobody really knows because that's data that's hard to gather.

- I ask myself, what our future generation's gonna think about what did?

And too often I'm afraid the question they're gonna ask is, "Why in the world did you do that?"

Or "Why did you let that happen?"

Or "Why didn't you do this?"

I think this is something that future generations are gonna look at and be proud of what we did.

- Absolutely, Steve.

If you look up Trappers Point highway crossings online, you can watch in real time what these cameras are showing, wildlife, utilizing these resources.

So, it's so cool that we have technology to be able to shore up and back up the decisions we've made collectively as a group.

And I think another thing I'd love to showcase about these that, you know, it's kind of an afterthought.

We don't really have a lot of mortality or problems with people hitting small mammals, small predators, raccoons, badgers, all of those different things.

But one of the things that's immediately obvious when you look at these webcams is you have bears and mountain lions, bobcats, skunks, all sorts of wildlife that are utilizing these crossings that were built, not necessarily with them immediately in mind, but- - [Steve] They use it too.

- [Nate] But it is a secondary benefit.

- Beginning as a prize-winning student at the University of Wyoming, Nate's story combined testing, research and innovative thinking in ways that are transforming vertical farming.

At his test facility in Laramie, Storey has developed ideas that have led to construction of the two largest indoor vertical farms on earth.

One in California, the other in Virginia.

Now, he's attracted a billion dollars in investment capital for a process that controls light, temperature, water and soil.

Grows top quality, uniform produce without pesticides, which then is packaged for retail sales seconds after harvesting.

Amid global changes in climate, water availability and market economics, Storey says indoor vertical farming at industrial scale is both inevitable and necessary.

There's some technical advances that you have made and are making that are setting you apart in agricultural in general and in your field in particular.

- This business was founded on a lot of patents that were generated during my work at UW.

They're licensed from the university.

And the architecture that we use is fundamentally different than anyone else in this space.

We've got a spatially superior way of organizing plants in space, which sounds super boring, but at the end of the day, that's what makes you and breaks you in this industry is how efficient can you be on a square foot basis.

- And in the equivalent of one acre of vertical farm as you do it, you can get the amount of produce in a particular crop and you'll tell me which one it might be of 350 acres of traditional farmland.

Is that, is that?

- That's correct.

- The ratio is?

- That's correct.

So, if you're growing the crops that we're growing today, say in the Compton Farm, it would take almost 700 acres to grow what we're growing in the equivalent of two acres.

Two acres contains processing.

It contains a lot of other things that are non-productive spaces.

So, we have this massive multiplier effect by moving things indoors.

- It seems to me that harvesting the crop would be a harder thing or at least a different thing.

And I don't have a great idea of how that's done.

I mean, obviously you're working on those solutions and are finding them.

- With greens, everything is harvested automatically.

The tower comes in, the robot grabs it, lays it down flat, runs it through a series of blades, spinning blades that cut the product onto conveyors that take it off to be packaged.

- [Steve] So, I go to the store now, for example, and I see a bag of lettuce.

- [Nate] So, we cut the whole leaf off of the tower with a single pass.

- [Steve] But essentially getting it more or less package-ready right at that harvest.

- That's right.

So there's no, it doesn't go into crates, and then go on a truck and then travel for a hundred miles to a packing plant and then get washed, and then get packaged, and then get torn apart and repackaged from bulk to smaller sizes.

Like, there's none of that.

We minimize the handling and it shows in the quality and the flavor.

- Now there's much, much bigger money involved in the company.

We'll just put it that way.

You mentioned Walmart is a big customer.

I think anyone who wants to find out can look at some of the investors that you have.

But one thing amid all of that that you've insisted upon is maintaining a link to Wyoming.

- So, that's the result of a $25 million basically grant from the state.

You know, working closely with the city, with the LCBA to build a new research center here in Laramie.

So, today we're kind of split between two buildings.

We're going to be able to move all of our research into a single building and be able to do basically cutting edge, world class plant science in this indoor ag space here in Laramie.

- Am I right in saying the biggest vertical farm that plenty is operating now is in California?

- Correct.

- [Steve] And it's in the city of Compton?

- [Nate] Yep.

- I think the modern perception of Compton, California is not farm country.

- Right.

- But what you're saying is, with what you're trying to do, hoping to do and demonstrating now.

Anywhere could be farm country.

- That's right.

- Right?

- Parts of the globe where you see the most population growth, the most concentration of people, they're not in areas that are always the best farm lander, the most productive, especially after you've built a city on top of it.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- There's all sorts of interesting things that you can do when you're producing locally.

The other thing is we have complete control.

So, the product coming out is more like a, it's closer to when you think of like a manufactured good- - Yeah.

- Right.

- You're looking for everything to kind of be the same when it comes off the end of the line.

There's no variability.

Two heads of lettuce in the same field could have two totally different qualities depending on the time of day that they're picked.

And you as a consumer don't get to control that.

And so, what we really wanna do is produce the absolute top quality product, take it to market, sell it at the same price.

Today we're selling at this median organic.

You know, our main customer right now is actually Walmart.

So, that tells you kind of what we're capable of doing in terms of mass market.

Yeah, I mean, I view what we're doing is we're trying to de-risk ag, right?

So, there's a lot of business models that are very high risk.

You have a high risk industry and one way that you can help make that industry more sustainable, get better jobs, pay people better, do better things, is by coming in and de-risking it.

Saying how do we make the future more and more and more predictable?

In the field, some of the unpredictability arises around climate.

- Yeah.

- What's gonna happen?

Do we get rain or do we not get rain?

Is it gonna be early frost, late frost, drought?

You know, you don't know these things.

You can't control the weather.

We can control the weather in our farm.

There are inputs.

Will my water rights hold up?

You know, the Colorado River, the fight over the Colorado River right now is heating up.

There's a lot of people that rely on that water.

Will they have it next year?

I don't know.

The year after?

A little less, you know?

Five years, 10 years, 20 years from now.

Who knows?

And that raises the cost of production.

So, what we're doing is we're saying, "Hey listen, we can grow this stuff basically in a completely controlled, enclosed environment.

We use the theoretical minimum for the amount of water that we use in comparison to the fields around 1%."

- [Steve] Is that right?

- So, we're around 10%.

We're under 10% today.

And we're driving down towards that 1% mark, you know?

All of a sudden when you can grow the same amount of produce for 1% of the water, the fight over water is not the driver of risk in the future of your business, right?

All of a sudden, when you can control the heat, the humidity, the climate, the light, all these things, the drought next year, the rains, the frost, none of that becomes the risk driver in your business.

And so really, what we're doing is we're taking all of that risk out.

Now we're trading some inputs for others.

So, we use like a lot of electricity.

But what we're saying is there are external factors driving the cost of renewable power down, down, down.

That's predictable.

It's on a technology cost curve.

It's getting cheaper every day.

Water is the opposite.

It's getting more expensive every day.

The cost of the climate?

Getting more expensive every single day.

All of these other factors getting more unpredictable, riskier and more expensive every day.

- Is there a single crop that you're best at growing in plenty right now?

Or some crops that are better suited for it, at least here at the beginning than others?

- Yeah.

So, we've focused on greens.

So, we've got like 13 different kinds of greens that we have or are growing in our farms.

And that's kinda where we started because it's a relatively simple crop.

We're working on strawberries.

We're building a strawberry farm today in Virginia.

- [Steve] Really?

- And most likely we're gonna build a lot of strawberry farms 'cause people seem to really like strawberries that are non-seasonal and really high quality.

- The University of Wyoming stopped participating in NCAA college baseball more than 30 years ago.

But during more than half century of competition before that, Jeff Huson is remembered as one of the best cowboy baseball players ever.

He then played Major League baseball for more than a decade, and now is the lead analyst alongside play-by-play man Drew Goodman for the Colorado Rockies.

Huson grew up in Arizona.

Speaking with him in September, he told us it took a while to adjust to Wyoming's wintry weather, which often continued well into the baseball season.

- So, I grew up in Arizona and I was playing at junior college in the Phoenix area, and Wyoming came down to scrimmage some teams because the weather's- - Yes.

- Challenging here at times.

And so, they came down to play us and we played 'em in a doubleheader.

I ended up going six for eight against them that day.

And made some great plays in the field.

Immediately after that they asked me if I'd like to come on a recruiting visit.

And so I said, "Sure, why not?

Come up here."

And I came up here, had a great recruiting visit, it was about 75 degrees no wind, and it was a great day in May.

- Yeah.

- And so, it was really neat that they thought that much of me that they would invite me on a recruiting trip.

- What were your aspirations about playing at another level of baseball at that time?

Did this offer?

I mean you were in the right place at the right time, performed the right way at the right time.

Were you hoping something like this might happen?

- Well, yes and no.

Because I had to walk onto the junior college.

I was kind of a late bloomer.

- Yeah.

- So, there's only two schools that were really recruiting me and only one that gave me a full ride.

- Yeah.

- So I was like, "Hey, I'm coming here to help my parents out.

But also, I just love the vibe up here, and the players and yeah."

So, my aspirations were just to be able to play Division 1 baseball.

And then, hopefully we'll see where it goes from there.

- You recalling when you came to Laramie, that first winter that you were here.

- [Jeff] (chuckles) Yeah.

- You said, among other things you're an Arizona boy.

- Yes.

- You didn't even have a winter coat.

- Nope.

And I remember as I was driving up here with my Rand McNally map next to me, coming up the back way from Fort Collins, driving into Laramie, I left Arizona the day before, looking over to the left and seeing this mountain range.

I didn't know it was the Snowies at the time with snow on it.

And I thought to myself, "What the heck did I get myself into?"

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And you know, we go through fall ball, I fly home at Thanksgiving and I didn't wanna get on the plane to come back.

And my parents were like, "No, you committed to this, you're going back."

So I get back on the plane, come back for the last three weeks of school, go through finals, go home at Christmas.

And after about five days at home at Christmas, I was like, "I miss Laramie.

I need to get back.

I need to see my buddies.

I need to see my friends."

And from that point forward, I never looked back.

What month does the college baseball season typically start in?

- March.

- March?

- Yeah.

- So, March and Laramie.

- Yeah.

- It just, there's really no question- - No.

- Of ever having a home game for it.

- No, and you know, even going into mid-April, you could get some great days and it could be snowing.

I remember my Senior year we were playing the Air Force Academy on Mother's Day and it was snowing.

But I always tell people, to me, we call the cowboy character in the fact that as a team, it didn't matter how bad the weather was.

- Yeah.

- It didn't bother us.

We actually use it to our advantage.

And I really think it helped me in pro ball because you play in so many different climates.

So much uncertainty as far as weather goes for.

So for me, it was a place where I could go, "Hey, I've played in some worse weather, so this is fine."

I always say to people, "Sometimes you choose Wyoming and other times Wyoming chooses you."

And for me, Wyoming chose me and it was the best decision I ever made.

- In December, we met Jack Mease, a 91-year-old Fremont County resident we dubbed the Master of the Miniature.

He showed us around the shop where he's created dozens of precise, meticulously detailed miniatures of vehicles, tools, firearms, and a tiny, perfectly functioning steam engine.

One of his showpiece creations is this miniature Ranch Wagon, a 2,000-hour project that includes spare parts, tableware and painstakingly recreated hubs and brakes built to exact 19th century specifications, even though no visitor will ever see these complicated internal components.

- Every piece on here, the tires, I had to make the tires out of a piece of pipe and turn 'em to the size.

Same way with the bands on the hub.

I used old shock absorber tubes to make the different bands for the hubs.

And of course, I had to inlet all the hubs for the spokes.

And there's six felloes, that's the wooden pieces here.

There's six felloes in here and the head inlet and the spokes to go in.

Once I had the wheel shaped and ready, I put this tire on my wood stove and get as hot as I could get it, and I'd pound it onto the wheel, and then put it in water to cool it off right quick.

So, it's a kind of a shrink to fit.

On the right side of the wagon, that had a right hand thread, on the left hand side that had a left hand thread.

- And that's what you, that's what this one.

- And that's as it's going forward is trying to tighten the nut on it.

- I just continue to be impressed by the idea that if we're looking at that hub, no one was gonna know that you'd actually threaded it.

- Yeah.

- The way that the wagon maker would've.

- Yeah.

- But you knew.

You wanted to do it right.

- Yeah, yeah.

I'd get articles or whatever and what I needed to figure out how to make everything authentic.

I found books that explained it.

Had a guy tell me one time, "What I know I didn't learn from no dang book."

And I said, "Yeah, but how much do you know?"

I said, "I thought that's what they made books for is to teach us."

- Now also because you want, you're striving for authenticity.

You built and created things that the owner or the operator of this wagon would've had.

And I'm gonna show one of them here.

He had an ax, would've had one.

You made this.

- [Jack] Yes, yes.

- In fact, there's your name on it.

"Mease Made, Lander, Wyoming," it says.

It might have been a chuck wagon, they had to eat.

So, here's a little Dutch oven that you made as well with the handle, with the lid that comes off.

Beautiful, intricate stuff.

You made a set of skillets and a plate because that's what they would've had.

You made a coffee pot with a lid.

- [Jack] Eight cups of...

I've got the cup there and I measured it, it holds exactly eight cups.

- There's almost nothing you can't build.

Is that safe to say?

- Well, people say, "Is there anything you can't make?"

And I say, "Money."

- [Steve] Money?

(chuckles) And in February we met Beck Bridger, a US Army Sergeant who also happens to have been named Miss Wyoming twice.

The lifelong Sheridan resident told us about a fun time in her life when she competed on a nationally broadcast TV game show.

- When I was at Basic Leader course, I had the opportunity to audition for a Fox TV show.

And so I went up to my sergeant, I said, "Sergeant, I have this crazy opportunity."

He goes, "What, Sergeant?"

And I say, "I'm being auditioned for a Fox TV show.

Can I audition in my barracks room?"

And he goes, "I can't believe this!

What do you do?

What?

Who are you?"

And so I go, "I really need to audition.

I wanna really make it on the show."

And so long story short, I ended up getting cast in this, "Don't Forget The Lyrics!"

Fox TV show.

And the coolest part was that when I entered on stage, they flashed a photo of me in my dress uniform and a photo of me as Miss Wyoming.

So, that was really the catalyst of this storytelling.

And then, it was one month after that I competed for Miss Wyoming USA.

You basically get out on stage and you get the option of choosing karaoke songs based on the genre.

So the first song genre I chose, I believe was rock.

And the song flashes on the screen, you know, you're singing it, and then all of a sudden the words stop, and it's your job to fill the words in.

And then you basically climb up this money ladder.

So, I made it to $75,000 and then I forgot one lyric to song, so it dropped to $25,000.

So, I did get to take home 25K.

- No kidding.

No kidding.

- Yes.

And then, the biggest piece that I had prayed for was just that my story could be used to be a light for people all around the nation who tuned in.

So, you can actually tune into that episode now.

It's on Hulu.

It's called "The Battle-ready Beauty Queen."

- These highlights don't even cover half the shows we produce this season.

Traveling the state, corner to corner for "Wyoming Chronicle."

Keep watching over the summer for some of our best "Wyoming Chronicle" episodes of the past year.

Meanwhile, we've already started shooting new shows for the new season that starts in September.

My thanks to my consistent Chronicle partner, Matt Wright, who logged many a mile during the past year.

And also to two expert cameramen, BJ Klophaus and Steve McKnight, who also contributed to this season.

The production manager for Wyoming PBS is Kyle Nicholoff, and our CEO and general manager is Joanna Kail.

We'll see you in September and thanks for watching "Wyoming Chronicle" and Wyoming PBS.