Drinking Wyoming: At The Desert Bar In Wamsutter, You’re On Your Own

Cowboy State Daily’s 'Drinking Wyoming' is presented by Pine Bluffs Distilling.

WAMSUTTER — If you're looking for a fun place to grab drinks and mingle on a Saturday night in this south-central Wyoming town, population 193, here are two words for you: Good luck.

But if for some reason you find yourself in this outpost community at Exit 173 off Interstate 80 between Rock Springs and Rawlins — whose biggest employer is a truck stop, and whose own residents have all blown in from elsewhere — here are another two words for you: Desert Bar.

The exterior is cobbled together of sloppily mortared cinder block and paint-flaked paneling. The namesake sign is stenciled in mismatched fonts and beaten illegible by decades of weather. The entrance has all the charm of a walk-in tool shed. 

In other words, when you pull into the strip of dirt parking out front, you’ll know you’re here if your first thought is, “This can’t be it.”

Stationed atop the high prairie lands of Sweetwater County in a town billed as the “Gateway to the Red Desert,” the place is aptly named for more than its location. Step inside on a weekend evening, turn your head in every direction and, just like the desert, you’ll see no sign of human life, save one.

Alone at the far end of the bar, obscured by a ribbon of smoke, a woman named Audrey Kraft sits on a stool watching television with the bored body language of a person stuck in a hospital waiting room.

Ask her when you can expect the regular weekend crowd, and she looks you up and down with suspicious amusement.

“You’re looking at it. This is it,” she says, taking a slow drag of menthol.

The Saturday Night Rush

At first you think she’s making a wisecrack. 

Wamsutter is no metropolis, but it does have residents, and the thing about residents is that they’re known to patronize bars on Saturday nights, especially in Wyoming.

You pause for a punchline. It doesn’t come. Nervously you wait for her to at least qualify this information. Nothing. 

Instead, a thick silence builds in the space between you, and it becomes clear by the stoic look in her steely-blue eyes that she’s dead serious: You alone are the Desert Bar’s Saturday night rush. 

Suddenly, everything around you feels strange.

Stray beams of sunlight crash through the broken window blinds and light up a row of liquor bottles behind the bar, which you imagine have aged far longer on that shelf than they ever had in barrels.

At the other end of the shotgun structure, the back door is opened wide onto the desert steppe beyond. Dry grasses and shrubs dot off into the distance. A black bird swoops across the frame. You half expect a rattlesnake to slither in.

You pull out a stool, order a beer, then think to yourself, “Corona Extra has never tasted this postapocalyptic.”

For the next 10 minutes, you sit in silence beside Kraft and together watch “On Patrol Live.” It strikes you as meaningful that this woman who lives in a town with no police force cannot get enough of a show about cops.

Biden Killed The Bar

Kraft has been in Wamsutter 25 years, and her father was a former mayor. She lives alone with three cats in a mobile home 7o feet that-a-way. 

Just when you think her demeanor couldn’t be anymore level, the topic changes to the way it was before, and she lights up like a fuse. 

Kraft explains that it wasn’t long ago when the Desert Bar was “a happening place,” which almost sounds like a contradiction in terms for a town like Wamsutter. As far as she’s concerned, the bar’s downslide has one culprit, and his name alone enrages her.

“Back before Biden was president, this bar was standing room only. He is what shut us down. He shut this whole town down. He did all this. It's his fault,” she says angrily, rising from her stool as quick as the V-fold in a popup book.

Like the town generally, the fortunes here have run closely parallel to activity in the nearby Wamsutter oil patch. Companies like Crowheart, Williams and Amco for decades funneled thirsty workers to the Desert Bar, which could clear as much $4,000 on a strong day, said Kraft. 

In recent years, the best-day receipts are lucky to reach $400. 

“Now we have one rig running out there, and there’s a few guys that’ll come in off the rig every once in a while. But if they don’t come in, nobody comes in,” she said, adding that she hasn’t seen them in a long time.

The Other Customer

Others here theorize that local business is undercut largely because those who work near Wamsutter increasingly prefer to commute from bigger cities further away; motivated, perhaps, by access to a bigger bar scene.

But don’t tell that to Kraft.

In either case, whoever those formerly happening crowds were, their personalities in a small way still feel palpable in the collage of stickers across the bar back, which allude to a clientele that ranged from lightheartedly insensitive and politically incorrect to morally dubious and outright confederate.

Examples narrowly suited for reprint include:

• “For A Small Town, This One Sure Has A Lot Of Assholes”

• “Don’t Argue With Your Wife, Just Dicker”

• “Avoid Hangovers, Stay Drunk”

• “To All The Virgins Out There, Thanks For Nothing”

Without those crowds, a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts this night’s haul at around $50, which it wouldn’t have achieved were it not for another first-time customer who wandered in by happenstance after running out of hours driving truck from Portland to Omaha.

He doesn’t share his name, but if you were to guess you probably say he looks like a Gus.

He has a burly grey beard, a belly that rubs against the bar and a dark rim of gum recession above his teeth when he smiles. He says he’s 45, but he looks a good deal older, especially as he talks politics and his face reddens from the neck up like a rising thermometer. 

What his politics are, exactly, is hard to say. 

He manages to assert in the same rambling sentence his firm belief in climate change and his firm hatred of “leaf-licking, bunny-hugging, dirt-worshiping tree-lovers,” on whom he blames, amongst other things, his wife’s unsatisfactory teaching salary in Montana.

As for that wife, it’s apparently the only topic for which he’s tongue tied, and there is a conspicuously long pause before answers the question regarding his non-evident wedding ring. 

“It’s in the truck,” he said without making eye contact. 

Fair enough. As for the Desert Bar, he loves it because it reminds him of the small-town bars he grew up around in Montana. But he’s getting curious about when the others are coming. 

“I guess no one's off work yet,” he says.

“Yes they are,” Kraft says. 

“Oh, well, they’ll be in here later then,” he says. 

“No,” she says.  

At that moment, it feels like we're all pondering the same question. Can the Desert Bar survive?

If you take the impression of the Desert Bar’s proprietor, business will bounce back and it’ll all work out. Although, that proprietor might not be around when it does.

Rosemary Roe

It might surprise you that the owner of the Desert Bar is a sweet old lady. Well, to be more accurate, you’d need to say she’s a very old lady who can be sweet.

Rosemary Roe is 95 years old and walks to work at the Desert Bar every day. She lives in a mobile home a mere 12 steps eastward, but still – she’s 95 years old!

She’s every bit the hands-on owner she was when she bought the dive in 1977. Although now, even full immersion leaves her little to do.

She arrives at 7 a.m. and puts on a pot of Folgers coffee. She allows herself a single cup — black — and eats exactly two Honey Maid Graham Crackers. Then for the next few hours, she stares out the window.

“I just wait for customers to come in if they come,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “I sit in the bar and wait. I don’t watch television. When Coors delivers, or Budweiser or the liquor division, I put it all away. It aint hard, it ain't. I’m a little slower but I keep moving.”

She was born to an Italian mother and Danish father in the state of Colo-raw-duh. Her earliest memories include squashing grapes with her feet to make wine alongside her grandmother, who did her best to pass on the old country heritage in broken English.  

If you can get her to stand up straight, Roe is 5 feet, 5 inches tall. She has strong cheekbones, brown eyes and olive skin that in younger years gleamed like brass hardware from her love of the sun. She’s partial to casual clothing and is usually found at the bar in knee-length khaki shorts, cotton tops and leather thongs.

“I wear thongs, that’s all I’ve ever worn, summer or winter. I don’t like wearing shoes,” she said. “When I was a kid my mother had a heck of a time keeping shoes on me, so did the school teachers.”

Profanity Tax

She enforces an anti-profanity rule that feels quaintly at odds in a blue-collar dive bar.

“In the bar, you can never use that F’n word. If you use it, it costs you a quarter and if you keep using it you get 86’d,” she said, explaining how the puritanical tax was used to help fund an annual block party held every August for a decade.

She’s outlived her siblings, her two previous husbands and her only son, who passed away of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32. 

You get the sense that it's her personality, not her genetics, driving her longevity, as though propelled through healthy old age by nothing more than a fierce sense of self — a quality her husbands may have underestimated.

“I married twice. After the first one, I stayed single for 15 years, then like an idiot I got married again,” Roe said. “One night [my second husband] was supposed to have a family picnic with us and he said he didn’t want to go because he wanted to go have a drink with his friend, Everett. 

“I said, ‘If you go have a drink with Everett, you’re not going to be married when you come back.’” 

She meant it.

At most, she may have few locals come in; a woman named Carol comes in with her husband and they order a bag of peanuts, chips and a stick of jerky. First cup of coffee is always on the house. After the shift she returns home to watch television.

“I watch ‘Gunsmoke’ and Western movies until football starts. I watch the NFL. I want real football. I’m a 49ers fan,” she said.

Kraft drops off a dinner around 4 p.m., and by 6, with the summer sun still piercing through her lace window drapes, Roe is fast asleep.

“I’m enjoying my life,” she said.

Together, Roe and Kraft represent key qualities of Wyoming’s rural demographic.

They live simply, and with grit push through the good times and the bad. And most of all, they lean on one another for support. 

“I’d do anything for her,” Kraft said of Roe. “I really would.”

Contact Zakary Sonntag at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com

Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.