The road to the Wyoming Rescue Mission's recovery ranch climbs out of the high plains and into the Medicine Bow National Forest, past the tiny community of Esterbrook, where winter winds scour the open ground without much to stop them. That is precisely the problem that a new piece of public art — and public infrastructure — was built to solve.
On Oct. 3, at 11 a.m., the mission will dedicate "Windborne," a functional art installation and snowfence made from a single repurposed wind turbine blade, chopped into a dozen pieces and planted in a row along the property at 3046 Esterbrook Road. The ceremony is free and open to anyone who can make the drive.
Functionally, "Windborne" is a modern-day snowfence. It is designed to pull swirling snowflakes down into a pile instead of allowing them to drift across the road near the recovery camp. Wyoming knows something about this problem: there are roughly 500 miles of snowfencing across the state, most of it the familiar wood variety, practical infrastructure in a place that battles snowdrifted highways every winter.
But this fence is also art, and its story begins with a photograph.
Several years ago, Casper sculptor Chris Navarro — a man who has spent four decades working mostly in bronze, with public sculptures scattered across the West — saw a picture in a local newspaper of a bulldozer pushing dirt over a massive pile of decommissioned wind turbine blades at the Casper landfill. "I saw that and I just said, 'Wow, what a waste of material! There's got to be something better to do with them,'" Navarro recalled.
He was not the only one bothered by the sight. Jake Milne, a Casper entrepreneur, founded ReviablEnergy, a company built around reducing and reimagining renewable-energy waste. The blades are a stubborn problem: made of fiberglass and carbon fiber, lightweight enough to be efficient yet durable enough to withstand storms, they are nearly impossible to recycle. As Navarro put it, "It costs more to recycle them than it does to bury them." Industry reporting has noted that thousands of blades are decommissioned in the U.S. each year, hacked into pieces with industrial saws and hauled to landfills that will accept them.
Navarro's first instinct was grander than a snowfence. In 2022 he floated a concept he called "Windhenge," a Stonehenge-inspired monument of cast-off turbine blades, and reached out to energy companies about donating decommissioned equipment. NextEra Energy, he said, was willing to ship blades to Casper when it decommissioned them. The idea evolved, found partners, and eventually settled into something both more modest and more useful: a working snowfence at the entrance to a recovery ranch.
The turbine itself was donated by Vestas, the Colorado-based wind-energy manufacturer, which cut one of its blades into 12 pieces before sending them to Wyoming. Vestas also helped with the aerodynamics of the blade and its optimal installation, Navarro said — the sculpture and snowfence concept runs from the wider parts of the blade down to the narrower ones. "It took us three days to dig the ditch and install the blades in November," Navarro said of the initial build.
The nearby Mantle Ranch Wild Horse Adoption and Training Facility was integral to the project as well. The Mantle family has worked with the Bureau of Land Management for decades to gentle and train wild horses for adoption, caring for roughly 200 head of mixed-age horses each year — one of the only private operations contracted with the BLM for that work. Navarro tapped local artists to paint a band of wild mustangs racing across the blade sections, and the Mantle connection gave the imagery its living reference point.
The symbolism is deliberate. "When I look at those 40 mustangs, I don't see horses running away. I see a herd moving forward," Navarro said. Elsewhere he has described mustangs as "the spirit of Wyoming — untamed yet capable of being guided," adding that "recovery is like that — strength harnessed, not broken." The installation has also carried the name "Wall of Renewal," a title that speaks to both the blade's second life and the second chances sought by the people the ranch serves.
The ranch itself is a 355-acre property about an hour and twenty minutes from Casper, purchased by the Wyoming Rescue Mission — a Christian homeless shelter and discipleship program that has operated in Casper since 1978 — from the Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming. It has no cell service, a feature rather than a bug for a place meant to help people unplug and focus on recovery. Mission leaders have described long-term goals of turning the property into a facility where residents can learn ranch skills and train horses for sale. Executive Director Brad Hopkins said the snowfence is about creating winter access to the ranch, which expands opportunities for mission guests — and he sees a parallel in the project's larger purpose. "There is just such a parallel with our people coming out of homelessness at Wyoming Rescue Mission," he said. "We are so thankful for Chris and for Jake."
The back of the fence is to carry a mural made from the handprints of mission members. "Every handprint says, 'I was here. I helped. I matter,'" Navarro said.
What makes "Windborne" genuinely unusual is that its engineering purpose is not decorative. The Wyoming Department of Transportation will monitor how well the installation prevents drifts, and may consider wind turbine blades as part of its snowfence program — a prospect that could turn a landfill problem into a highway solution. For Milne, the snowfence is the proof-of-concept he has been looking for to demonstrate that blades can serve as snow fencing for WYDOT.
So the artists are, in a sense, waiting on the weather. A few good, blustery snowstorms this winter would be the truest test of whether a piece of industrial waste, painted with a herd of mustangs and planted in a row beside a mountain road, can do the quiet work that 500 miles of wooden fence have done across Wyoming for generations — and whether it can inspire a more solutions-oriented way of thinking about the mountains of blades still buried in landfills.
For now, there is the dedication: a free ceremony on a fall morning in the Medicine Bow, at the gate of a ranch where the fence and the people it shelters are, in Navarro's framing, both moving forward.