A small Wyoming town is a haven for fossil fans

Author: By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, April 7, 1996

Page: B1

Section: Travel

With maybe 3,000 residents, Kemmerer is laconic, laid-back and low-key. They've even shortened the name of the town locally. ``Kemer'' has enough syllables for Wyoming residents.

The major attraction is dead fish. Fortunately, they're 40-million-year-old fish, the same ones that you see for sale at Nature Company outlets and the even fancier ones at Geo Classics in Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The town boasts a half-dozen fossil fish emporiums and places where visitors can try their hand at excavating their own souvenirs. And just west of town, at Fossil Butte National Monument, there's a wonderful, truly wonder-making, museum in a little jewel box of modern architecture.

Kemmerer wouldn't survive without another extractive industry. The towns (contiguous Kemmerer, Diamondville and Frontier) sit on top of old hard-rock coal mines. Nearby, the Pittsburg and Midway Co. operates the largest open pit mine in North America (a full mile long and nearly as wide), and the associated generator turns out 700 megawatts of surprisingly clean electricity: All you see is steam; no fly ash or haze obscures the blue big sky of summer.

Besides fossil fish and fossil fuel, including a small oil and gas field northeast of town, Kemmerer lives off the Oregon Short Line section of the Union Pacific Railroad, a cutoff from the main line heading west to Portland, Ore. Railroads and mines make it a real Western town, not a tourist catch basin like Jackson, Wyo., (or Wall's Drug Store), and after a few nights you start to relax and go with the local flow.

At the Energy Inn, the town's newest motel and a product of the 1980s when the ``oil patch'' came to Kemmerer, each room has a topless cardboard beer case near the door for, as the hand-printed sign invites: ``Your oil field boots, please.'' There's no mud quite like oil field mud. Even tourists like to kick off their boots and relax.

Halfway between downtown Kemmerer and Fossil Butte Monument, high on a hillside, well marked by large and homemade billboards, a winding gravel road leads up to Karl and Shirley Ulrich's Fossil Gallery. They have as good a sample of prepared fossils as anyone in town, and at fair prices. But if you plan ahead, they also have the handiest quarry for finding your own ancient fish.

Three huge, shallow, fresh-water lakes covered the countryside 40 million years ago, and the buttes surrounding Kemmerer show cliffs of precipitated limestone wherever you look. For amateurs, the easiest fossils to find are at exposed edges of the old lake bottom, where the weathered limestone splits easily. When you find your fossil, you usually get a pair, half the fish on one side of the split, half on the other. It is these ``splits'' that make up the bulk of the inexpensive fossils sold at retail.

At 9 a.m., from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the Ulrichs bounce you uphill in a Chevy Suburban to the beds, hand you a 24-inch-square pallet, which, when covered, is your quota of splits for the trip, all this for $55 a fossil hunter. They also loan tools and give aid and advice at splitting the stone. By noon, you're back at the shop. They'll trim your splits into squares and rectangles and help you pack it up for the trip home. They also sell ``splits'' for $20 each or less, in case you're not in the mood to get your hands dirty and pick up a little extra sun on the back of your neck while bent over a hot rock. Twenty-four square inches of done-yourself fossils (most of the fish are 5 or 6 inches long) is a bargain as well as an outing.

The better fossils, sold throughout Kemmerer and on display in profusion at the national monument, come from a much harder, whiter, limestone layer that requires extreme patience, caution and perseverance to prepare. Shirley Ulrich, who does the framing for her husband's prepared fish and for many of the region's landscape painters and photographers, has ``no patience for preparation. I've tried, I can't stand it,'' she said. She also doesn't think children will be able to enjoy the activity; it just takes too much concentration. ``I have grandchildren, and, of course, they're the best children in the world, but I wouldn't give them a do-it-yourself fossil kit.'' Even visits to the ``splits'' quarry are limited to children 9 and older.

Kemmerer's true glory days, when the town's name was on many a man's lips out West, were from 1921 to 1933. When alcohol was prohibited across the United States, Kemmerer swung into high gear. Like many towns along the Union Pacific, Kemmerer had a large proportion of Italian immigrants, drawn by construction and coal mining, and, to a family, they knew how to make wine. Well, you make a little wine, you build a little copper still, you have grappa. At the height of production of ``Kemmerer Moon,'' the Union Pacific would pull into town with a hundred freight cars of California grapes that disappeared instantly into every home and business in town, emerging a few weeks later in barrels and bottles.

At the Fossil Country Museum downtown, there are stills and presses and other artifacts of the moonshine trade, and a photograph of the local coppersmith who made the equipment. He is standing on Main Street with his arms around the mayor on one side and the sheriff on the other, one of those worth-a-thousand-word pictures that explain how Kemmerer became the liquor capital of the interior West.

One of the great charms of any small-town museum is the unexpected fact. You cannot miss seeing a mannequin dressed in impossibly tattered cloths. The cowboy hat on the model's head is shredded neatly, as though someone had taken scissors to it and tried to make a giant felt sunflower. A battered jacket is split down the lapels, and one sleeve looks as if it had encountered a Cuisinart. A pants leg is blown apart, and a boot is leather spaghetti.

These were the clothes worn by Bert Sandberg, who was minding his own business back there in 1928, just riding his horse along the Ham's Fork River when he was struck by lightning. The horse died instantly, Sandberg survived, although rather badly burned and shocked. The caption for the exhibit notes that ``Mr. Sandberg lived another thirty-six years in good health, but . . . was reported to be very nervous during lightning storms.'' No doubt.

Kemmerer has other attractions. The Ham's Fork River and the nearby Green River have excellent and underappreciated trout fishing. As a matter of fact, it's so unheralded that there isn't even a tackle shop in town, there isn't one for a hundred miles. For basic information, the local Chamber of Commerce can talk up fishing on the Ham's Fork, almost all on private property with either payment or written permission required. An hour's drive away, where the Green River runs through the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge, access is easy but the fishing is extremely tricky. Local guides are available. Van Beacham (800-748-1707), from Taos, N.M., guides during the high summer on the upper Green, surely one of the few good Western rivers left where you may not see another angler for miles.

Eating out, if you want to get past the fast-food chains, is an experience. The best restaurant in town is Luigi's, located behind the used-car section of E. & L. (as in Ernesto and Luigi) Motors in Diamondville. (The town is so small that E. & L. is the GMC, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Ford, Toyota and Mercury dealer.) Opening up the restaurant Wednesday through Saturday only, Vincenze Tommassi leaves his desk job at E. & L. Motors, walks across the lot and hand-cuts his own fresh pasta and otherwise organizes the kitchen. Vince learned how to cook, he explained, when his father was running a grocery market. ``I didn't like working in the store,'' he said, ``so I volunteered to go home and cook dinner for the family.''

Over in Frontier, across the Ham's Fork, the Frontier Restaurant has good food seven nights a week and the best, huge, Gay Nineties Budweiser-built mahogany and mirror bar in Wyoming. South of town is the other gourmet spot, the Bon Rico, closed Tuesdays, a roadhouse on Wyoming 189 that has food you wouldn't expect in the middle of all that sagebrush.

The town's other main attraction is the original store of J. (for James) C. (for Cash) Penney, still a thriving retail outlet with local athletic team sweaters, sensible clothing and ``white'' goods. J.C.'s home, across the town square, is open as a museum; you can examine his early ledgers, many written in code. Visiting the square puts you right at Sagebrush Sue's restaurant, where the elite meet to have breakfast, and a few hang around for lunch and dinner.

Kemmerer will never be a destination resort. It's too real. But if you like geology, paleontology, trout-fishing, spectacular high-desert scenery and fettucini Alfredo at the Geo dealer's, it's waiting, it won't go away.