Bill Sniffin: Summer Is Half Over – How Is Your Bucket List Coming Along?

“We live, we die, and the wheels on the bus go round and round.” -- Jack Nicholson, from the movie “The Bucket List.”

These days, it seems that I have a simple idea for time and life.

Most of my ideas are in the form of things I want to do before I die – I call this my bucket list.

Elsewhere in this weekend’s Cowboy State Daily, you can read some amazing stories by Outdoor Writer Mark Heinz. He talks about a trip last Tuesday visiting two incredible places in the Red Desert called Adobe Town and Skull Creek Rim. I was on that trip! Both have had been on my bucket list for years.

We finally got it done!

I had reached out to my old friend Paul Ng, an outstanding Rock Springs photographer, about setting up a trip. I mentioned to CSD Editor Jimmy Orr that I was going and he sent Mark along to do a first-rate story.

Ng lined up veteran desert rats John Vase and Kurt Hensley as our guides and the fun began.

Scratch those sites off my bucket list.

Looking ahead to the rest of 2024, we are hoping to visit Star Valley, Big Horn Canyon Reservoir, and Ayers Natural Bridge. Other wonderful places include the Devils Tower area, the Firehole Canyon near Rock Springs, Evanston’s Bear River, the Saratoga area, Casper’s lake country, Sheridan’s Big Horn Mountains, just about everything around Thermopolis, Park County, Battle Mountain in Carbon County, the Sunrise Mine, and more trips to the Red Desert. 

Plus, I will make my annual pilgrimage to Yellowstone National Park.

To all of you visiting Yellowstone, just remember the “Bill Sniffin 6-9 Rule.”  If you want to see animals and not see thousands of people go out from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 6 pm to 9 p.m. During those other times when the park is jam-packed, you can take a nap, go out for a meal, or play it cool. Heck, read a book!

Thinking About Time

I am at an age where thinking about time, or rather the lack of it is a dominating theme. I got philosophical recently and came up with a way to demonstrate how time works using the idea of Amazon boxes to represent each day of your life and a huge Amazon warehouse to represent the span of your life. It goes like this:

Life is like an endless number of box-shaped days stand before us when we were young. We peer into the giant warehouse of life and the piles of boxes stretch endlessly. Our lives appear to be never- ending.

Now, at a much older age, that warehouse looks a lot emptier. Instead of endless box-shaped days, we see dozens, maybe hundreds. Hopefully a few thousand.

After grabbing a box every day of your life up to now, your once endless supply is coming to an end.

That is how I view time and the effect time has on our lives.

We start out with endless amounts of time. But when we get to the end of our lives, the number of days are finite.

And if our days are numbered, what are we going to do with those limited days?

Why A Bucket List?

That is why the old idea of putting together a bucket list has always been so important to me. Despite forming lists all my life - my first official published bucket list was just 22 years ago, at the tender age of 56 - when is it time to write down a final list?

In recent years, I have been checking off places on my annual bucket list. I finally visited La Barge last year and that wonderful Fontenelle area. 

With summer half over, it is time to get busy. 

But again, why do we aspire to somehow “check things off?”

My friend, the late Pat Henderson, of Sheridan, really did not like the idea of compiling a bucket list of things you wanted to do before you died. He preferred to think of those items as wonderful life experiences. Just before he died at the young age of 62, he sent me a quote from President Ronald Reagan which described how he felt about life: “Live simply, love generously, care deeply, speak kindly, leave the rest to God.”

As I write this, I am thinking about a young friend, Mike Stotts, who just died unexpectedly in Cheyenne at the age of 62. I just heard about a young local gal who died in a mountain bike accident. Too many people dying. And at too young an age.

So, how long will we be allowed to live? It seems like the Grim Reaper might be hiding behind every bush.

The concept of figuring out those things that you want to do before you die was the theme of that popular 2008 movie called “The Bucket List” starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.

I found the movie inspiring and immediately started putting together my own personal bucket lists for Wyoming.

Now, my portfolio of places in the state already visited is terrific.  Readers of this column have shared vicariously some of their experiences, too.

Please email me your ideas of places I need to visit in the Cowboy State at bill@cowboystatedaily.com