Knitting a future for Wyoming wool

There is a gray, nondescript building off Highway 16 in Buffalo that is tucked behind other gray, nondescript buildings. If not for the two sheep that live in a north-facing pen adjacent to the structure, you might never have a clue what’s inside. 

Those two sheep are named Yarnold and Lambert, and they are owned by Karen Hostetler, who also owns the tucked-away building off the highway, which — despite its unassuming appearance — houses the West’s largest full-service wool mill. 

The mill is named Mountain Meadow Wool, and its goal and purpose, Hostetler explains on a tour of the mill, is twofold: support local ranchers by helping them keep their operations sustainable and give a “brand identity” to Wyoming wool. 

“We coulda been just a cottage-in-our-garage kinda thing, but we wanted to impact the state and try to preserve ranching, because so much of it was disappearing, and you can only keep sustainable if you’re profitable,” she said on a rainy spring day as she recalled starting the company in 2007. 

“From the very beginning, we knew we needed wool, and we needed a rancher who was gonna see the vision,” she said.

One local rancher helped them launch the operation by donating 10,000 pounds of wool up front without payment. It took almost five years to use the entire supply, Hostetler explained, and they eventually paid for it all. 

Now, Mountain Meadow Wool exists as a tourist attraction, an internship opportunity, a way for ranchers to participate in a producer program and, of course, a mill for thousands and thousands of pounds of fibers. If you go to any locally owned yarn shop in Wyoming, chances are that you’ll find something that came from the mill.

Hostetler leads a tour around the mill, speaking loudly to be heard above the din of the machines, massive and ceaselessly moving. First, she explains how the machines’ long fingers move each strand of freshly spun yarn into sellable skeins — the oblong bundles of yarn you’d see in a craft store. Interns and employees float nimbly around the room, eyes darting from one operation to the next, as if they were circus tamers managing metal lions, tigers and bears. What the machines cannot do is wrap loops of yarn into hanks — loops that are twisted into themselves to preserve the quality of the wool and hang nicely on displays. That must be done by hand. 

Then, Hostetler reverses and goes into the room where the wool is processed and spun. Rain or not, that room is kept at 70 degrees and 70% humidity to prevent the fibers from getting staticky. Machines stretch from one end of the room to the other. Large vats that look like slushy machines dye fibers yellow, orange, green. A porthole window lets you see everything sloshing around inside. Behind the vats, cloudlike, clean wool emerges from a machine that combs through it to remove any plant matter. 

After all that comes the tourist room with an informational video and machines that guests can try, and the store, where you can buy anything from bleacher pads to one-off cones of various yarns. 

And faceless but omnipresent in the entire operation are the mostly Wyoming-based ranchers who provide their wool. 

Hostetler sets a baseline price for the yarn, so nothing changes with market ups and downs. That helps the producers and the brand: Mountain Meadow Wool gets to pay for the wool in a few payments; the producers don’t have to fret about higher or lower prices. 

The wool must pass a certain number of tests before the ranchers who provide it can be accepted into the brand’s producer program. The brand uses mostly Rambouillet, Targhee and Cormo wools, from sheep originally from France, the United States and Tasmania, respectively. 

“The rancher ends up making more money, because we don’t change our prices,” Hostetler said. “So we just go with that minimum, and we have probably 10 [ranchers] that we work with.”

Last year, those ranchers got lucky as the raging House Draw Fire swept north of them, according to Hostetler. But not everyone was so fortunate. 

In her office just off the store, Hostetler recalls seeing smoke billow into the sky. 

“Finding out what kind of devastation they had and watching the smoke columns, and knowing how fast it was running, you just wonder, ‘Where is it gonna go next?’ and ‘And when will it stop?’” 

Hostetler let her sentence trail off. “It was just concerning,” she said. “You feel a bit like it’s — like those big old fires from a long time ago that would race across the prairie.”

Luck was on her side, too. The fire was never going to cross her path. But she was still moved by its impact on the people who did meet it face-to-face. So she added a pop-up to Mountain Meadow Wool’s website giving visitors the chance to donate fencing to ranchers who were impacted by that fire. In the end, Hostetler said they raised between $18,000 and $19,000 from that. 

“It was really good how everybody pitched in,” she said. 

With the tour complete, Hostetler sits in her office, gazing at the land outside her window. If you exit the office and turn left, you’ll find a wall full of products that the wool mill sells. The yarns are all named for places in Wyoming — Jackson, Alpine, Powell, Cody, La Barge. Hostetler only has a bit of time to talk before she hosts a monthly barbecue for her staff. 

And anyways, she has a sweater she wants to finish knitting. 

***

Hostetler’s wool producers may have been able to escape a wildfire unscathed, but they have not been able to avoid the struggles of an industry in decline. 

Once upon a time, sheep flourished in Wyoming, where they could graze without parameters and were needed — and prized — for their wool and meat. Wyoming winters never pass without leaving their mark, of course, and there were other struggles that flockmasters faced, but for the most part, it was a golden era. 

It is not so anymore. Lands that once accommodated over 6 million sheep in the early 1900s are now down to around 320,000, according to a January 2024 report from the United States Department of Agriculture.

As president of the Wyoming Wool Growers Association, Alison Crane is troubled by the state of sheep ranching in Wyoming. Jim Magagna, who was a sheepman for most of his life and is now the president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, also understands it. 

They differ on what the causes are — after all, there are many, Crane said.

“It’s a lot of different reasons,” Crane said with a sigh. “And I’m sure if you talked to 20 different people, you’d get 20 different reasons.”

In Magagna’s eyes, it’s limitations on grazing; losing effective predator control methods; increased competition from wool imported from New Zealand and Australia; decline in the labor needed to shepherd thousands of sheep; negative connotations associated with sheep after World War II and dependence on a global market as opposed to a national one. 

“Thank goodness we do have some small mills like Mountain [Meadow Wool], because, again, historically there were large wool mills in the United States that used volumes of wool, particularly the finer-type wools that are produced off of the sheep here in the West,” he said. “Over time, they all went out of business, and the wool business moved to other countries.” 

We used to have a clear domestic wool market; now they’re dependent on a global market.” 

In Crane’s eyes, the challenges are changes in the National Wool Act of 1954, which aimed to support domestic wool producers; changes in environmental policy and grazing management, particularly after 1972; the reintroduction of Bighorn sheep in some areas; increased imports of lamb and dropping wool prices. 

“People get frustrated and — it’s depressing to talk about, really,” she said.

“Places like Mountain Meadow Wool … they can do it on a small- to mid-range [level], but they’re helping, especially Wyoming producers, incentivize their wool,” she added. “Every little bit helps, but we need things like that to happen on a big scale. And we need it not only on the wool side, but also on the lamb side, too.”

Both Magagna and Crane decided as young adults that nothing — neither high-profile career paths nor the popularity of cattle — could dissuade them from pursuing sheep. Crane and her husband run about 400 to 500 sheep; Magagna’s flock peaked at around 8,000, though he now manages a much smaller number. 

While they’re aware of the industry’s struggles, to say it’s all doom and gloom would be inaccurate. Crane wants to double the amount of sheep that are in Wyoming, and the association she runs is seeing lots of new people — young people, she said — starting to join the sheep industry. Magagna, though not optimistic enough to believe that Wyoming’s sheep industry will ever ascend to what it once was, doesn’t see sheep ranching going extinct, either. 

As for Hostetler and her wool mill, she has no plans to slow down how much she buys from her ranchers. Last year, the mill processed about 60,000 pounds of wool, she said. Balance can be tricky — those 60,000 pounds ensured that they won’t need to buy any more wool this year, which displeases Hostetler, as she doesn’t want to leave her ranchers hanging. 

But the mill has a brand new dyeing process that can be used not only for its own wool but for several other commercial brands. Their internship program, capped at four spots, received 150 applications for this summer. And they are setting up equipment to house another yarn-spinning operation. 

It might not happen this year, but Mountain Meadow has a new goal: double the amount they process – and tug the woolen strands of history, woven into the fabric of Wyoming, into the future with them.