A trip to Perry & Connie Binnings house is an adventure full of spine-tingling roads and stories of growing up in Pinedale’s earlier days.  Connie Skorcz was raised in Farson and Perry Binning was raised in Pinedale.  Perry’s parents were Rheo ‘Bill’ and Loretta.  They died in a plane crash in 1979.  Perry’s grandfather was Henry Binning whose wife died & left him with 7 children.  Henry had to give up the family ranch & move to Utah to keep the family together.   Henry’s wife had been a Westfall and her sister Viola married Gottfried Rahm.  Gottfried had a cabin out towards the Murdock Ranch.  Perry said, “Gottfried always had a big roll of baloney and made us (Perry and his best friend, Fred) sandwiches when we went by.  He’d use a dipper to get us a cold glass of water from his well.  One time I looked in and saw dead mice in the well.  No more water for us.”

After Connie’s older sister, Margaret, married Jim Noble, her next older sister Barbara began dating Fred Boyce.  Fred liked to drag his best friend, Perry, with him on the long drive to Farson to court Barbara.  As Perry tells it, “One time when we drove to Farson, there was this girl throwing hay bales and I thought that was a pretty good deal.”  Connie laughs and says, “Well, that’s his story.  When I first met him, I didn’t like him.  He was so full of himself.”   Barbara told about the time she & Fred went to a dance & took Connie & Perry along:  “They were in the back seat discussing the price of the dance.  It cost $1.50 each or $2.50 as ‘a couple’.   They wanted to save that quarter each and decided to go ‘as a couple’.   They’ve been a couple ever since.”  Fred married Barbara in 1958 (he passed away 6 months before their 50^th anniversary).  Connie & Perry were married in June of 1962. 

 Perry & Connie have 2 children: Holly and Darin who are both married & live in Pinedale and  7 grandchildren.  Connie & Perry now live in the Upper Green on top of a steep, isolated, forested mountain.  They hit a spring of good water at 100 feet while the people in the valley near Green River Lakes Road have poor water at 300 ft.  They have also seen several Grizzly bears on & near their property. 

They are gracious hosts and casually lent us their 4-wheeler & Rhino to drive – hanging on for dear life - so they could show us the remains of cabins that dot their hillside. These cabins are from the Tie Hacks of the 1860s and the Sawyers of the 1890s.  Looking around at one of the sites, Perry said, “Maybe we’ll run into these people someday, up there.”  Trees in the area have been cut with 6-10 foot stumps and Perry explained that that was the depth of the snow in the late 1800s when the lodgepole pines were sawn down.

The state received some stimulus money to cut timber and offered to cut on the Binning’s land.  It sounded good until the agents came in and marked every tree – dead or alive – to be cut.  That was the end of that arrangement, at least on private land.  The USFS is, however, clear cutting 400 acres in other areas of the mountain.  They are not harvesting.  Everything that is cut is piled up to be burned.  Perry said, “Nothing’s free”.

In the center of Perry & Connie’s living room is a humongous lodgepole pine with a burl that it would take 2 or 3 people to reach around.  When they spied it out in the forest, it was just outside their woodcutting permit area.  Connie said, “We went in and asked the USFS if we could harvest it.  The Forest Service said ‘No’, so Perry said, ‘It’d be a lot easier in the daytime than at night.’  They gave us the permit, for just that one tree.”

Three sides of their living room are lined with shelves holding Swede Gurney’s horse & wagon carvings.  Perry said, “Swede was my uncle and we just kept buying them.”  They have a complete set of all the different styles Swede made.  The one with 4 teams, 3 freight wagons and a saddle horse in back is a one-of-a-kind.  Perry himself makes exquisite lamps from aromatic juniper.  They make special trips to Oregon just to purchase the wood.

A wooden plaque hangs in their open, upstairs grandkid room.  A map of the Mt Osborn-Faler Lake area surrounded by pictures is carved on it.  Perry said, “A few years ago I took all the grandkids on my sheep hunt.  We had a wonderful trip.  I saw a bighorn the first day but I wasn’t about to shoot it & end the trip!”  He also saw one on the last day but it was smaller than one he already had, so he let it go.

In the 1960s there were several unnamed features in the Wind River Mountains.  The US Geological Survey asked mountaineer Finis Mitchell to name some.  Perry & Connie were his friends and he wanted to honor Connie by putting her name on a glacier, but nothing can be named for a living person.  So Finis named it Connie Glacier and told the USGS that it was for the pika who lived in the nearby talus & whose nickname is ‘Coney’.  Finis just changed the spelling to ‘Connie’.  Connie Glacier is located in T38N/R107W.   Connie was the only woman guide that Ann Zwinger had ever heard of when she documented their trip down the Green River in “Run, River, Run”.  Connie &/or Perry were her guides from the headwaters of the Green to the Gates of Lodore.

Perry has many stories about growing up and adventures with his best buddy, Fred Boyce.  They grew up together on the west side of Pine Creek in Pinedale and played in the willow fields by their homes.  One time they were playing King of the Hill.  Fred was defending the top of the mound and Perry took a willow stick to get him down.  The stick went clear through under the bridge of Fred’s nose.  Fred headed home and Perry went into the willows to hide.  The stick blocked most of Fred’s vision & they had to get Doctor Lauzer to remove it.  The boys had a fort in a secret location in the willows.  Even after he was married & the willow field was gone, Fred kept his notes & clues to finding the fort.

Another time while playing in the willows, Fred bent over for some reason.  Just as he did so, something hot creased the back of his skull.  Someone was out shooting & would have killed him if he hadn’t stooped over.

Fred’s Grandpa Hardy was the last of the Arizona Rangers and taught the boys to shoot.  They became so proficient that they could shoot a can down the road while walking along..…flipping the pistol back & forth between them!  One time they walked into Fred’s house, flipping the pistol to each other and without thinking, shot a hole in Fred’s mom’s stove.  Perry took off for the willows.

Another time, Grandpa Hardy was driving home when he turned the corner, blacked out and smashed into a parked, black Cadillac.  Fred & Perry heard the noise, ran out, put Grandpa’s car into the garage and shut the door.  Then they did the body work on the car.  When they went to buy blue paint at the local hardware store, the clerk said, “The sheriff has been asking if anyone has bought any blue paint lately.”  They went to Rock Springs to buy the paint.  In appreciation for getting him out of the jam, Grandpa made scabbards for their pistols.  Grandpa Hardy was a tough old cowboy, but Perry & Fred loved him and would have done anything to help him.

Perry worked for the county for awhile and then he & Fred were mechanics for Nan at Anderson-Penton Chevrolet.  He & Fred loved to hunt and they’d go out early in the mornings to get a few ‘chickens’ (Sage Grouse).  They were late for work.  Nan warned them but early morning is the best time to hunt grouse & they were late again and again.  Finally Nan said, “If you’re late one more time, you’re fired”.   Perry said, “And then Antelope season opened”.  Sure enough, they were late.  Perry & Fred just went in without saying anything and started packing their tools.  When Nan said, “What are you doing?”  Perry replied ‘You said we were fired if we came in late one more time, so we’re clearing out”.   Fred & Perry opened their own B&B Repair on the east end of town & became their own bosses.  In 1975 Perry sold out to Fred and went into the lumbering & sawmill business.

Fred scared easily and liked to sleep on a cot when they went hunting trips.  One time another ‘buddy’ crawled under the cot & started growling.  Fred rolled off the cot but (thank goodness) couldn’t find his pistol.  At another hunting camp someone arrived after dark, scared Fred and Fred fell backwards into the fire.

Perry had a heart attack in 1994 and suffered a stroke in 2007.   He just smiles & tells everyone that sometimes it takes him a bit to recall the word he wants.  Connie often helps him.  Watching him work or lead a visitor to the Tie Hack cabins, you wouldn’t know.  When he was in the hospital, he got his brain working by putting together those puzzles of 9 almost-identical pieces.  The doctor saw this & asked Perry if he was ‘damned dumb’.  Perry said, “Here, you try it!”  The doctor couldn’t do it.  Connie began chemo for a lump on her neck in 2010.  She has a week or more of bad days after each session, but on the days before the next round of chemo, you’d never know, because she is so full of good cheer & aliveness….except perhaps from the colorful bandana around her head.

By Judi Myers,  October, 2010