Rainbow Family invades Wyo

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

By Bill Sniffin

Somewhere among my boxes of old stuff is a photo scrapbook that used to be R-rated. Today it would barely be PG-13.

The first photo in it is of a slim 27-year-old editor interviewing some men and women who are pretty much naked.

That occurred here in the mountains above Lander on July 2, 1973, when the infamous Rainbow Family of Living Light made their first trip to Wyoming.

This week about 20,000 of them will gather in the Big Sandy area about 40 miles southwest from Lander, as the crow flies. And I intend to go back and see what all the fuss was about.

Since their annual gathering is always around July 4, that initial Lander adventure seemed fraught with danger.

After all, Lander hosts the oldest paid rodeo on the planet over July Fourth and the town is always swarming with cowboys.

Then-Sheriff C. A. “PeeWee” McDougall was very worried that some of the hippies would get beaten up. At the least, he figured partying cowboys would scalp a whole bunch of the longhaired visitors.

Compounding the problem was that the Rainbows had picked the glorious St. Lawrence Basin as their site.

Bad choice.

This is an area sacred to the local Native Americans and is on tribal land.
Tribal leaders told PeeWee if he thought the cowboys might be hard on the interlopers, well, the Indians would be much more ornery.

After days of tense negotiations, PeeWee and then-District Forest Ranger Doc Smith came up with an alternative, and it was incredibly ironic.
The Rainbows accepted Doc’s offer and decided to move to an area below Freak Mountain near South Pass.

The site required a two-mile hike to get into and was just far enough away from everything that Doc and PeeWee thought it just might eliminate the potential for violence. The coincidence of moving a bunch of freaks to Freak Mountain was the work of genius, I used to say to the modest Doc.

It was estimated that about 2,000 of these folks showed up for that first gathering in Wyoming. It was the second one ever held by the group, said Barry “Plunker” Adams, who was its spokesman the previous year in Granby, Colo. Plunker is orchestrating this year’s event at Big Sandy, 35 years later.

The Rainbow folks’ last trip to Wyoming was in 1994. Some 14,000 Rainbow folks made the annual trek near Big Piney back then.

Nobody really knew who they were back then and local officials were driving blind.
There was some drug use and lots of music. When I interviewed them, well, it was like California from the 1960s.

Fremont County was lucky to have two visionaries like PeeWee and Doc. They maintained the peace, and I think there was only one incident where a hippie rolled his van on a mountain turn.

The Highway Patrol turned out in force, and the governor even alerted the National Guard, is my recollection.

When it was all over, Doc told me he was astounded at how well these folks treated the land.

“Hard to believe, but I think it is better up there now then before they got there.”
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Rainbow Family invades Wyo | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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