Loneliest Mail Carrier In The Nation: Tebra Morris' Daily 300-Mile Remote Wyoming Route

 

Following Story by Jack Nicholos - Cowboy State Daily

"The unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service proclaims: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

The line is lifted from a Charles W. Eliot poem, which in turn references the writings of Greek historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago on the courier service in the ancient Persian Empire.

Even so, the average Persian postal carrier in 500 B.C. had more people on his route than Tebra Morris does today.

And the snow and gloom those carriers of ancient Persia faced ain’t got nothing on Wyoming.

To be fair, the royal road of Darius the Great was a sandal-pounder. Ancient western Asia couriers running decrees and other parcels between Susa and Sardis had to cover 1,677 miles. The trip took nine days by horseback, or 90 on foot.

Tebra Morris has a rural mail route that exceeds 300 miles every day, (Tebra Morris)

First-Class Delivery

Fast-forward to the Americas in 2023.

Morris, a native of tiny Bairoil, Wyoming, runs one of the longest mail routes in the nation. The typical mail carrier in the United States covers about 8-10 miles driving, half that if walking. It’s a six- to eight-hour day for most.

Then there are those like Morris, called rural route carriers. They’re hired by the USPS as independent contractors to cover more remote areas out in the sticks. Many use their own vehicles and are paid a flat rate determined by bid every year.

The average rural route carrier in the United States covers 45 miles a day.

Morris drives that far between mailboxes.

Her route is just shy of 300 miles, and she drives it six days a week, rain, shine or — more commonly in Wyoming winters — blizzard.

“Quite a winter!” Morris said of covering her route this past winter. “If you think I-80 was bad, [Highway] 287 North was closed more.

“I spent seven nights total stuck overnight in Lander. I ran nine days on closed roads with permission. In the month of February, I was able to complete my route — Rawlins to Lander and back — only 12 times. I've been doing this 11 years and I’ve never had a winter like that.”

Mail Call

Morris runs mail between Rawlins, where she is now based, and Lander every day but Sunday.

Her stops are roadside ranch drops where solidly built steel boxes are built to withstand thermonuclear war or the unrelenting Wyoming wind, whichever is worse at the time.

Morris’ beat includes mere placenames that appear on map software only when zoomed in to the max. Crossroads too tiny to even be called hamlets; like Lamont, which Google Maps calls a “a very small populated place.”

Morris hits stops like Muddy Gap, Split Rock and Ice Slough, all little more than forlorn mailbox clusters gravitated near a geographic oddity in the otherwise endless miles of featureless landscape along Highway 287.

Unnamed dirt roads known only to locals spider off into countless rutted two-tracks and slink out of sight toward a forgotten homestead, a pumpjack, a livestock water tank. Or nowhere.

This is not country you hurry in.

Growing Up Small

Few could probably handle the isolation of Morris’ job, but this Wyoming woman hardly knows anything else.

Born in Rawlins, her family moved to booming Bairoil when she entered the fourth grade.

“There were 400 people in town then. Basketball was a big deal. We played Wamsutter, Rawlins — everybody came out for those games,” Morris remembered.

Like many small Wyoming towns, the school was the community center where everyone from the region gathered to celebrate and catch up. When it closed in 2013, the four students still attending the school were bussed to Sinclair, 42 miles away.

Bairoil is located on the northeast edge of the Great Divide Basin in Sweetwater County. It’s parked at the end of a 4-mile “driveway” known as Route 73. Heading north on 287 toward Lander, just hang a Louie at Lamont.

The town was founded by sheep rancher Charles M. Bair around 1916. He was the first to drill for oil in the area, thus the name.

A post office was established in 1924 and the town was eventually incorporated in 1980.

A church in Jeffrey City, Wyoming is half buried in snow this past winter along Tebra Morris' rural mail route. (Courtesy Tebra Morris)

Tiny And Tenacious

Bairoil might be small, but it is home to a couple of noteworthy things beginning with oil production.

Amplify Energy used a then-experimental procedure of forced water injection in 1988. Fracking, as it is known today, is now a common practice of breaking free trapped oil and gas deposits from subterranean rock using water and other liquids. The process at Bairoil was the first of its kind in Wyoming at the time.

Also, the hang gliding world record for distance was set from a launch in Bairoil. Kevin Christopherson stepped off Whiskey Peak (9,225 feet in elevation) just north of town on Aug. 3, 1989, and rode an updraft more than six hours all the way to Kyle, South Dakota, 287 miles away.

Today, Bairoil is down to about 100 full-time residents. It’s the kind of place where time moves too slow for some. Teens can’t wait to get out, but some never do. They live their lives there.

“There is a lot of people, percentage-wise, who have been there all their life. It’s the kind of place where even if people don't like each other, they help each other,” Morris said. “They have to.”

Mayor Lowell Clawson still holds town council meetings twice monthly on Wednesday nights. Call out to town clerk, treasurer and general do-it-all wonder Ashley Hopkin. She keeps faithful minutes of the meetings that usually wrap in under a half-hour. After all, not much goes on in the 82322.

How Small Is Bairoil?

It lost its one and only police officer years ago and hasn’t been too bothered about not being able to find another. Under “Things to See & Do” on the town’s website there are three photos of the same steel building — an indoor riding arena that hasn’t been opened to the public in some time because it’s fallen out of repair.

The town is tiny and shrinking, but not ready to go gently into any good night. Its people are “can-do” Wyomingites who enjoy a more bucolic lifestyle with intentionality.

“They wanted to close the post office in Bairoil not long ago. They decided to have a meeting about it,” Morris said. “People from all over came and packed that cafeteria.

“One by one they told stories about Jeffrey City losing its post office. ‘We didn’t stand up for it then and we lost it,’ they warned.”

For now, the post office remains in Morris’ hometown. She visits once a day on her 300-mile route and says she would hate to see it return to sagebrush.

“You’ve already lost the school; lose the post office and you might as well roll up the streets,” she said.

Jake Nichols can be reached at: Jake@CowboyStateDaily.com

What’s Brilliant About the New Superman Movie

 

The newest take on the caped hero wisely embraces his corniness.

By David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.

"In most Superman movies (and there’ve been a fair few of them over the decades), no one else like Superman exists. The blue-and-red-costumed Kryptonian is typically unique in our world—an alien god plopped into an unfamiliar society, inspiring both reverence and fear. Not so in this latest iteration, the character’s first solo movie in 12 years. Directed by James Gunn, the new Superman both reintroduces the character and relaunches the on-screen DC Universe, following Zack Snyder’s grim and operatic take on the franchise. Gunn’s bright and bouncy film conceives of the hero as just one of Earth’s many gifted do-gooders. The busy energy this storytelling choice brings to the movie is crucial: Surrounding Superman with his peers helps define why he stands out in the first place.

Making the case for Superman’s exceptionality is something many cinematic adaptations of the character have struggled with. Christopher Reeve’s straightforwardly charming portrayal, which he debuted in 1978, remains culturally pervasive; Brandon Routh’s performance in 2006’s Superman Returns was a broad homage to it. Henry Cavill’s work in the Snyder-verse, meanwhile, was an intentional but depressing swerve, portraying the Man of Steel as distant and alienated from human society. To follow Cavill, Gunn has selected the relatively unknown David Corenswet, who has the traditional look (square jaw, broad shoulders) but gives a performance that underlines the hero’s regular-guy sensibility. This Superman jokes, he grouses, he bickers with his girlfriend—and he does his best to save the planet on a daily basis, because that’s what he believes he’s on Earth to do.

Gunn appears to be making a pointed effort to shift the hectic world of comic-book films in a new direction. It’s a genre that, as a director, he’s occupied exclusively since the release of his first Marvel movie, 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy; he’s since switched over to DC, serving as a co-head of that studio’s cinematic enterprise. Gunn’s work at Marvel was known for its blaring needle drops and an off-color snark that lined up with the franchise’s self-aware comedic stylings. But Superman lacks these trademarks. Instead, it’s a consciously sincere work, evoking the lighthearted fun of Saturday-morning cartoons on a grander scale. If Guardians sometimes seemed designed to reassure the broadest viewing audiences that superhero movies can be as edgy as they are silly, Superman is very happy with being just silly—and it wants you to be happy with its silliness too.

How else to describe a film in which Superman’s mortal enemy, the prominent eggheaded businessman Lex Luthor (played by Nicholas Hoult), hires an army of chimpanzees to write mean social-media posts about the hero he’s so jealous of? Where Supes clocks an evil lackey straight in the jaw so hard that his teeth hit the camera lens? In which Superman’s poorly trained, hyper-powered dog named Krypto enjoys trashing his owner’s Antarctic fortress of solitude, upsetting the fleet of mellifluous butler robots milling around? For as expensive and action-packed as it is, this Superman is also stuffed with whimsical concepts and ridiculous side characters.

ome viewers may find the teeming landscape of established metahumans off-putting. It’s a worthwhile gamble by Gunn, however, who seems to understand that many theatergoers are sick of origin stories and mythological spectacle. Superman begins with the protagonist already operating out of the city of Metropolis, where he’s lived for about three years. When disguised as his alter ego, Clark Kent, he works at the Daily Planet as a reporter alongside his girlfriend, the firecracker Lois Lane. Meanwhile, as Superman, he’s facing media scrutiny for a recent choice of derring-do, in which he inserted himself in the middle of a war brewing abroad, and vicious envy from Luthor, who has no special powers of his own. The twist is that even Superman’s loved ones, such as Lois, and his fellow costumed acquaintances—namely the corporate super-team known as the Justice Gang—look at him askance, as if to question whether anyone could really be that altruistic.

Their skepticism is what’s brilliant about Gunn’s take: Contemporary audiences may also see the story of Superman, an alien adopted by Kansan farmers who raised him to use his powers for unambiguous good, as corny. So the director builds our modern discomfort with sincerity into his interpretation—an approach that meshes with the film’s sunny politics, which are loudly obvious from the jump. Whether it’s Luthor seething in his skyscraper over his rival’s popularity or Lois springing an impromptu interview on her boyfriend, the characters keep prodding our hero on what his deal is and whether they can trust him. This Superman is, more than anything, concerned with our society’s struggle to accept the possibility of inherent goodness.

he result is an optimistic movie, one that sees a hopeful way forward for both Superman and the world’s other caped men and women. This goes even for the raging egotists (Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, a B-list version of Green Lantern) and the fussy, closed-off brainiacs (a very droll Edi Gathegi as the tech-powered hero Mister Terrific). But putting Superman in context with the many beings like him makes clear that the disarming purity of his life’s mission, not his array of powers, is what makes him special. Gunn’s obvious disdain for the self-professed “geniuses” who make news in real life is nakedly on display; Hoult is a wonderful foil as Luthor, infuriated by Superman’s kindness while couching his disdain in intellectual gobbledygook. Superman’scounterattack is to have us root for the ultimate nice guy—it’s a wild fantasy, of course, but a pretty blissful one to take in."

TAKE OFF THE MASK, ICE

 The federal government should prohibit the wearing of masks by ICE agents and require them to properly identify themselves.

By Brandon del Pozo

From 2011 to 2013, I commanded the New York City Police Department’s 6th Precinct, which covers Greenwich Village. We had a team of plainclothes officers who went out looking for serious crimes in progress. Sometimes they worked out of a dilapidated unmarked van that looked like the one driven by the villain in The Silence of the Lambs. When things were slow, the team would arrest people who had slunk off from Bleecker Street to smoke weed on Minetta Lane. The sergeant who led these officers had come down from the Bronx, and he thought there was a certain justice in holding the Village’s nightlife crowd to the same standard we held Black teenagers in Kingsbridge Heights.

One evening in 2012, the team noticed a woman smoking in the shadows and decided to make an arrest. The officers placed her in handcuffs, led her to the van, and opened its back doors. At the other end of the cargo bay, a burly man sat on a milk crate in the dark, waiting. The woman went weak in the knees, her eyes filled with panic, and she groaned. At that point the sergeant realized that the prisoner had no idea who these officers were. She was helpless and she was terrified.

Something like this scene has been playing out across America lately. Under orders from Donald Trump’s White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is aiming to deport 1 million immigrants a year, and to make 3,000 arrests a day. Agents have detained farmhands and meat processors;garment and construction workers; graduate students; the mayor of Newark, New Jersey; and people who turn out to be completely innocent. But if immigration enforcement is more aggressive and visible than in the past, it is also more anonymous: ICE allows its agents to conduct operations in plain clothes and to cover their faces. Social media is flooded with images of masked men forcing people into unmarked cars.

This approach looks scary. It is scary. And it’s a grave mistake. In keeping with the values of the local police, the federal government should prohibit the wearing of masks by its officers and require them to properly identify themselves. These are the minimal requirements of policing a free state—regardless of how you feel about the administration’s stance on immigration. You can support ambitious deportation targets without sanctioning anonymous policing.

The main reason federal agents give for wearing masks is their fear of doxxing: the practice of sharing a person’s identity and contact information with the malicious intent of targeting them for harassment, threats, and possibly violence. Federal agents and their families deserve privacy and safety, but the government already has a means of protecting them: It can enforce the laws against harassment and threats, online or in person. Or Congress could pass an existing bill that explicitly makes doxxing federal law-enforcement agents illegal.

At any rate, everyone in government today is vulnerable to doxxing, including countless public servants who have no option to hide their identity as they work. Should a pool of judges issue anonymous verdicts? Should legislators pass bills by secret ballot? The answers are obvious. Wearing a badge is thought to require, and should require, more bravery than serving on a state assembly. Our police should be the (literal) face of the nation’s courage, unafraid to show the public who they are.

Perhaps most important, wearing masks could expose federal agents, local police, and the public to physical dangers that make the risks of doxxing seem minor in comparison. Armed, masked men appear sinister, even predatory. Beyond obscuring the facial expressions we use for cues about whether a person is a threat, masks are a marker of criminals looking to intimidate their prey while avoiding identification. This is why the ski mask is a cultural trope of the armed robber or terrorist. It is also why masked protesters undermine their own causes; the masks arouse deep suspicion, as bystanders may assume the protesters are just waiting for an opportune moment to break the law. Nor is that a baseless assumption: In my experience, masked protesters sometimes are opportunistic lawbreakers.

As ICE agents rack up arrests on the road to 1 million deportations, someone will inevitably, instinctively fight back against the masked men forcing them into a car, not because they want to escape law enforcement but because they don’t know whom they are trying to escape from in the first place, and they legitimately fear for their safety. As a former police officer, I can tell you that my first reaction to unidentified men in masks converging on me or someone nearby would be to take cover and prepare to fight.

Another possible hazard is that masked, unidentified ICE agents could be mistaken by local police for armed felons committing a robbery or an abduction. Misidentified police officers taking enforcement action in plain clothes or off duty have been killed by fellow officers with a tragic regularity. Perhaps most dangerous of all, as ICE normalizes mask wearing, it creates the conditions for violent criminals to pass as police while escaping identification. In fact, criminals have already started to impersonate ICE agents.

Many people on the left, perennially skeptical of how our nation is policed, think masking by federal agents is wrong. But so does the right-libertarian CATO Institute, which recently published an argument critical of mask wearing. It asked, “At what point will we as a nation find ourselves with a secret police?” A former FBI agent and a former Department of Homeland Security attorney have also spoken up against masking.

Police departments throughout the country understand these risks and require their officers to be clearly identifiable by face, name, and agency. Until earlier this century, the NYPD restricted its officers’ winter headwear to an archaic mouton hat and earmuffs. In a nod to modernity, the NYPD relaxed this rule, allowing officers to wear a balaclava on patrol if the temperature was expected to drop below freezing. But the accompanying regulations clearly state that the balaclava must fully expose the officer’s face; with exceptions for the protective equipment worn by emergency-service officers during tactical operations, as well as for the use of gas masks, the NYPD has never permitted officers to obscure their face. In the same vein, except during undercover operations, all NYPD officers are required to “courteously and clearly” provide their name, rank, and shield number to anyone who requests it, either verbally or via a preprinted card with the information.

The driving principle here is obvious: In a free society, people should know who is policing them. To codify this sentiment in the law, New Yorklegislators have proposed a ban on mask wearing by ICE agents, andCalifornia legislators have put forward a bill that would ban federal, state, and local police from wearing masks when interacting with the public. (The California bill exempts members of SWAT teams conducting tactical operations if a mask could reduce exposure to heat, fire, chemicals, and contaminants.) The legislation addresses a crucial issue, but it exemplifies the overkill of our times: We shouldn’t need a law to ensure a basic feature of transparent policing. Federal agencies should adopt this policy as a matter of course.

As a person who served as a police officer for 23 years, I never doubted that I practiced a noble profession. It is noble work in part because officers willingly take real risks for the sake of the greater good. When my boys were young, I used to tell them that I couldn’t guarantee that I would come home safe at the end of a shift—only that, if I were injured, it would be for a reason they could forever be proud of.

Hiding your face from the public as a federal agent undermines the legitimacy of our nation’s police, and can be mistaken for cowardice. Although the risks of showing your face as you police America’s streets are not negligible, they’re worth taking, because the consequences of concealment are more dire. This is why the hazards of policing are morally different from those of being, say, a lumberjack, even though felling trees is statistically more dangerous than making arrests. In policing a free society, some of the risks arise from protecting freedom itself, so even if you can reduce those risks, you often shouldn’t.

Descending on a person in public, laying hands on them, and taking them to a distant prison is a naked expression of state power. For it to be tolerated in a democracy committed to an inalienable right to liberty, it must be just that: naked. It cannot be done by shadowy, masked agents. That evening in Greenwich Village, in the quest for a weed arrest, my plainclothes sergeant would have been within his rights to haul off his prisoner in an unmarked van. But he also knew that much more was at issue than his prerogative to enforce the law. “We’re the NYPD,” he told the woman in handcuffs. “We’ll wait here until I call a marked car to the scene. Uniformed officers will explain who we are, and what’s going to happen. You’re safe with us.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brandon del Pozo

Brandon del Pozo is an assistant professor of medicine and health policy at Brown University. He served as a police officer in the NYPD for 19 years, and for four years as the chief of police in Burlington, Vermont.

Homage to My Non Human Person Pals

 If you want to take a little mental break take a look at a video I constructed last night in praise of all critters - big and small. You'll see a lot of our morning pals after all the wild ones. AND - you get a mellow bit of Mozart. 

Enjoy 

This Land is Our Land!!

Happy weekend. 

We had a conversation at this mornings coffee on what song should replace the Stars Spangled Banner. 

I made this video choosing a Cocker song. 

4 July 2025

Seattle's Coyotes are Mighty Friendly!!!

 Yep, they even drop by for dinner!!

CaliforniaMayor on Trump’s immigration raids: ‘It is a campaign of domestic terror’

Former Marine Arturo Flores condemns ‘a level of psychological warfare I’ve only seen in theaters of war’ 

Dani Anguiano - The Guardian 01 July

"As a United States marine, Arturo Flores served in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he worked as a military police officer and trained dogs to find roadside bombs.

It’s his experience in the military that has made what he’s seen on the streets of southern California in recent weeks all the more disturbing to him, Flores said.

Flores is the mayor of Huntington Park, in south LA county.

Like in other parts of LA, many Huntington residents have been terrified amid reports of masked federal agents detaining immigrants, or those that look like immigrants, on the street, in parking lots, at swap meets or large stores and soldiers deployed into the city against the wishes of local officials and the governor.

“It is a campaign of domestic terror that is being imposed on our residents on a daily basis,” Flores said. “It is a level of psychological warfare that I’ve only seen in theaters of war. It’s terrifying seeing it being displayed here in my city.”

A third of all LA residents were born outside of the United States, and nearly half of the region’s residents are Latino. An estimated 1 million of LA county’s 10 million residents are undocumented.

About 97% of residents in Huntington Park are Latino, and the city has been the site of numerous raids by US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (Ice) in recent weeks. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, attended an operation in the city on 12 June.

The Trump administration’s crackdown has sent fear through immigrant and Latino communities in the city, for citizens and non-citizens alike, Flores said.

Video captured of federal operations in the region this week showed apparent immigration agents arresting a US citizen while her family cried for help nearby, and officers surrounding a street vendor as she clung to a tree.

In Huntington Park, Flores said, federal officers are not communicating with local agencies and driving through neighborhoods at high speed, jumping curbs and chasing people. Residents report people seemingly being targeted based on their skin color or perceived ethnicity, he said.

Arturo Flores, the mayor of Huntington Park.Photograph: Linda Vanessa Leyva/Courtesy of Arturo Flores

“Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically false,” the DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “These types of smears are designed to demonize and villainize our brave Ice law enforcement.”

McLaughlin also said “this kind of garbage has led to a 500% increase in the assaults on Ice officers”, though she did not explain the underlying data or what period the rise was documented in.

“DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence,” she said. “We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement is trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.”

The operations have had a dramatic impact on the community. Businesses have closed, Flores said, as people who would normally be out shopping stay indoors. Only four families came to a recent city-organized movie night in the park.

“It’s a very real fear of being physically assaulted when you’re just walking on the street, trying to grocery shop or trying to pick up your granddaughter,” Flores said.

Flores has said the way federal officials are conducting operations, with agents in masks and unmarked vehicles, is dangerous. This week, Huntington Park police arrested someone they believed was impersonating a federal agent.

He has been outspoken about his opposition to the operations in the city, and to the deployment of national guard soldiers and marines to Los Angelesin recent weeks. During a press conference with LA area mayors ahead of the arrival of soldiers in the city earlier this month, Flores urged servicemembers to defend the constitution.

“When we lifted our hands and we swore the oath to defend the constitution and to defend the country, that oath was to the American people,” he said at the time. “It was not to a dictator. It was not to a tyrant. It was not to a president. It was to the American people.”

The events that have unfolded in the area in recent weeks have been surreal, he said. “You never imagine seeing this domestically in areas and streets that you grew up on … but we’re seeing as some of these streets are being transformed into battlegrounds.”

Huntington Park is having conversations about joining a class-action lawsuit with other cities against the Trump administration, Flores said, and is looking to start emergency funds for constitutional rights education, legal aid and emergency food delivery. As operations continue to unfold, he is urging residents to stay united.

“It is very dangerous time,” he said. “[But] there’s gonna come a time where Donald Trump will not be president and the individuals that were perpetrating these injustices are going to be held accountable.”