The people I met while living in the mountains.
The people we met at the Out Post.
During the last 3 years we were at the Out Post we got to open a very small store, When we were care taking the hunting lodge they let us run a small store rather than pay us. In the store we sold worms, night crawlers, fishing tackle, candy and pop. The store was only open in the summer come winter it was sometimes hard to find where the store was actually due to snow drifts. Visitors were few and far between more than a month would go by with out seeing anyone.
In the summer though the tourists came out of the wood work because of the lake above us was the second largest natural lake in the state, it also had 30 pound lake trout in it. It was also close to the head waters of the North Platte River, it was mostly beaver ponds (the Platte was very big here). In these beaver pounds you could catch 18 to 24 inch trout because the trout came up out of the Platte to spawn in the streams above the beaver ponds. This and the hiking trails brought in a variety of people.
Sue was working in the store one day when a woman came in demanding to use our phone. Sue told we don’t have a phone. The woman screamed of course you have a phone everybody has a phone, Sue replied "we don’t". Then the woman told Sue that we certainly had a phone and we just wouldn’t let her use it. By now Sue was getting mad and a mad Sue was impressive at 6 feet tall,
She asked the woman if she had seen any telephone poles or wires outside as she was beginning to turn a slight shad of red. The woman went and looked out the door, turning to look at Sue, Sue told her “the reason you don’t see any poles or wires is there aren’t any, we don’t have a phone or electricity.
She asked where the closest phone was, she was told the closet telephone was 30 miles away at the General Store in Cowdrey and all but the last 5 miles were dirt road. That woman just couldn’t believe that we lived without a phone.
Next were the Soap Opera Stars that showed up. Sue and I were standing behind the counter when these 3 guys came in looking like they weren’t from around these parts.
Sue waited on them after they had paid for the items they had purchased asked her if she “if she knew who they were?” Then they asked me if I knew who they were and we said we didn’t know who they were (didn’t care either).
We were informed that they were the stars on one of the most popular Soap Operas on TV, surely we had seen them. No we hadn’t, we told them we didn’t have a TV or the electricity to run one either. This really burst their bubble here they thought we would be all excited to met they even asked if we wanted their autograph which we didn’t. I guess we ruined their whole day for them.
These are just a couple of the people we met during the summers at the Out Post. There was the Army Colonel who fished with hand grenades, the guy with the body guards that we weren’t supposed to ask any questions, the editor from the Denver Post who was at the outpost while everybody in Colorado was looking for him because of Cocaine charges and other miss deeds. We got a real variety of the under world there because it was the middle of nowhere with no communication with the outside world.
These people I will elaborate more on in the book I have been writing forever.
