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• Biography of Doug Roberts Policeman to be and Partier always. by Travis Hart Doug Roberts has lived in Wyoming for twenty three years. He is an extremely colorful character with a seemingly endless supply of anecdotes and hilarious remarks. Added to this is the fact that his ability to come up with a new and interesting story any time he wants is unfathomable. Unfortunately, part of the interview was lost due to a taping error. Among the lost stories was his story of enrollment in the police academy and all of the interesting happenings at that institution. Also lost was an extremely amusing story of his favorite camping trip, which literally had me rolling on the floor laughing. Although I rescheduled the interview with Doug, I could not convince him to repeat the previous stories. Still, the second collection of stories, although not completely covering his life,are interesting and amusing. The length of the biography dissapoints me, but the content was great. I hope you get as much of a kick out of it as I have. ~- - · As I looked across the desk at one of my best friends in college one of the comments that you get used to after you spend enough time around him floated out of his mouth. "Take it from a young bucks point of view. all we do is drink, get drunk and fall down." A moment later, I started the tape expecting an interesting hour of interviewing, and it went like this ... T-So you've been in Wyoming twenty three years now right? D-I've been in Wyoming twenty three years, I was born and raised in Kemerer Wyoming, fifty miles away from anything and once you get to anything, there's nothin there. I tell you it's true. T- So what all have you done in those twenty three years of living in nowhere? D-Well, lots of things ... Lots of fishin, huntin,causin trouble, raising hell, typical things we do. T-Yes ... Any major things that kind of stick out? D-Well, not really, my senior year I really didn't do much of anything, just uhh ... Well my senior year of high school if you wanted to get ahold of me you just left a message at Seven Eleven. I was always gettin gas, or gettin ... copenhagen so ... they new me, so that's where people left messages for me, cuz I was just beboppin up in the mountains. T-So they were kind of like your answering service? D-Mm hmm, kinda, they were like that and see I graduated in 86 so they were my answering service for one ... two ... probably three and a half years, cuz I'd just come into town, fill up with gas, grab a twelve pack or case of beer and go up into the mountains again. I'd go back around up there until I got stuck then I'd get myself out, then come back, get more gas and go try again. T-And more copenhagen? D-More copenhagen, okay, saw some interesting country though. My friend ... A friend of mine told me once, he was always up in the rocks too,except he was an idiot, he always got stuck. He says he was never worried about him gettin stuck up in the mountains cuz he knew that if he just waited long enough, pretty soon, Roberts would find him. He said that he'd been stuck at least six or seven times that he could remember, that he was stuck and couldn't think of any other way to get out, and hear a truck comin', and over the hill here'd come Doug in 01' Pepe, his little mule. An old black dodge would come up over the hill and yank him out. I had to do it six ... No eight or nine times. T-Well, like what's some of the most memorable stuff you've ever done? D-Oh, one time me and a friend took the truck, and uh ... we just grabbed some beer and headed up in the mountains for a ride. Well we got down this road that neither of us had ever been on, and we got to the bottom of this big canyon, and the road kinda dissapeared, but on the other side of the canyon we could see a fairly good road goin up the other side, and it looked better than the one we'd just come down, but the only way to get to it was to cross a creek. We tried to go upstream and got stuck, so we got out, tried to go downstream and got stuck, and we poked a hole in the radiator with a tree ... that we ran over. The beaver dam, the water was kind of murky and muddy from the last time we'd tried to cross already and we didn't wanna put that in there, so we put in a couple beers into the radiator and two full fifths of whiskey that we had with us. And then we drove across the beaver dam. Got stuck across the beaver dam. Right in the middle of th~ beaver dam, we're stuck. And we're in his bronco, and I thought oh jeez, I know I'm never gonna get out cuz my dodge won't come up over the hill, it ain't here. So we got on the C.B., I didn't think it would work. Got on the C.B. and started tellin everybody where we were, ya' know, and how to get to us. Bout an hour and a half later, my buddy comes down the road in his truck, got a winch on the front of his truck. He said , shit he said we were eighteen miles north of town, up in the mountains, and he said he was in Kemerer, just leaving his sisters driveway when he heard us. He said he called and called us, but we could never hear him, he said he could hear us plain as day. And he winched us out of there and we drove eight miles out of that canyon and all the way to the marina with whiskey in the radiator. Made it to the marina, and that's where we parked the bronco. Went and got all sorts of shitfaced. And the senior parties were always fun too. My senior party started on monday and it ended the following monday. We had four kegs of beer each night, and the cops, they knew where the party was, so they set up roadblocks to catch everybody goin from the parties. Well that's all fine and dandy except my grandpas cabin just happened to be a mile away from where are party was, so I knew that area like the back of my hand. I was makin anywhere from sixty to seventy five bucks a night runnin people into town so they could get around the police blockade, it was fun. Then one time we were up there at the class of eighty sevens senior party, and they had it at the top of this mountain called sheep mountain, and down on the side was where all the cabins were ... my grandpas cabin. But the road to get from the cabins, up to the party, its a two track jeep trail up a steep, rocky hill. But we got drunk and took a volkswagen from the party down that road to the cabins. We got stuck several times, but we'd just pick up the car and • put it back on the road and drive off, and we made it through with a volkswagen. T-That's pretty much everything everybody does in Kemerer for fun? D-Yeah, they tore down our only movie theatre to build a parking lot. And the uh, we had uh, oh what do you call'em? An arcade in town and it went out of business. Of course the guy who ran it was kind of a dink anyway, he put all of his money from profits, instead of puttin it back into the business, he'd put it into his pocket, so that kinda went under. So now all everybody does is party. T-Party and go out in the hills. D-Yep. T-Okay, so are there mines and stuff outside of kemerer? D-Kemerer is chock full of old mines, that's what founded Kemerer. T-Did you ever run around and play in those? D-Well alot of them are closed up because they mined so far and hit gas, or not so far and they hit gas and the mine exploded ... and they're all abandoned mines. You can get to some of them, you can walk into'em so far, to where they closed'em down. Then uh, there's one spot up on Oyster ridge, just outside of Kemerer, we was screwin around up there and there's this natural hole in this rock, and we climbed in it, and it's a natural airway down into the mine shaft. So we went back in there as far as we could, and we got in there , I don't know, as far as we could, and you could feel the heat from the coal that's already ... that's still down there burnin, so we didn't go much further. Cuz there's been uh ... there's one guy, his name is Warnoth. He was ridin his motorcycle up on the ridge, and he hit a jump and landed and the ground gave way beneath him, and he fell into a burnin mine shaft.

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