On an October evening, people will gather at the center of the Western Wyoming Community College campus in Rock Springs, fold paper into lanterns, and then carry them through the halls to float, lit, in the college pool. The event is called Walk with the Lights. It begins at 7:30 p.m. at the campus pendulum, near the student bookstore, and it is free and open to everyone, not just students.
The shape of the evening is simple and deliberate. Attendees make their own paper lanterns first. Then they walk together to the pool, where the finished lanterns are set afloat on the water, their light reflected back from the surface. People who prefer to bring a lantern from home are welcome to do so, with one condition: it cannot be electronically lit. The rule keeps the ritual analog, a small flame or glow rather than a battery, in keeping with the handmade character of the whole thing.
Sarah Grimm, a counselor at the college, described the event as doing two things at once. It promotes suicide prevention, and it serves as a memorial. That pairing is not incidental. In a state where the subject has long carried a stigma, an evening that is equal parts awareness and grief has a particular kind of usefulness: it gives people a reason to come together without requiring anyone to explain why they are there.
The choice of gathering place carries its own quiet resonance. The pendulum at the center of campus is a Foucault pendulum, named for the French physicist Léon Foucault, and it demonstrates that the earth, not the pendulum itself, rotates. A device built to show that what looks like stillness is actually constant motion is an odd but fitting place to begin a walk about people who are often unseen.
Western Wyoming Community College sits at 2500 College Drive in Rock Springs, a town of roughly 23,000 in the high desert of southwest Wyoming, where the economy has long run on trona, coal, oil, and gas. The college enrolls a few thousand students and offers more than sixty degree pathways and dozens of certificate programs. Its motto is "Enter with passion, leave with purpose." The counseling services it provides to students are free and confidential, staffed by licensed mental health professionals through the Student Life office. Walk with the Lights extends that same posture, care without a fee and without a file, out to the wider community.
The context for the event is sobering. Wyoming has for years ranked among the states with the highest suicide rates in the country. In 2023 the state lost the dubious distinction of holding the nation's highest rate for the first time in five years, but it has hovered in the top three since. In 2024, Wyoming recorded the highest ten-year increase in its suicide rate, at 35 percent, according to CDC data reported by KFF, and its rate stood second only to Alaska. The state also has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the nation, a combination that public health officials and advocates have only recently begun to address directly. Governor Mark Gordon and the Wyoming Department of Health have launched a multi-pronged effort that includes expanding access to mental health resources, training health care providers, and supporting grieving families. The governor's WY We Care Initiative has hosted free suicide awareness and prevention trainings around the state, including sessions in Rock Springs, and more than 3,000 residents had completed such trainings before the most recent round.
Rock Springs knows the toll personally. In a SweetwaterNOW piece urging residents to learn the warning signs, April Thompson spoke about her son Joshua, a lifelong Rock Springs resident who loved music and tattoos, served in the Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and returned to Wyoming in 2012. He died by suicide on August 13, 2013. "I believe by talking about loss and raising awareness, more people may seek help," Thompson said. She has since worked with local prevention efforts, including free QPR — Question, Persuade, and Refer — trainings offered through Sweetwater County's prevention program, which teach people how to ask someone directly whether they are considering suicide and how to connect them to help.
That is the logic behind an event like Walk with the Lights. Prevention research and lived experience point the same direction: connection helps, and so does plain speech about a subject that families once avoided. A lantern floated on a pool is not a clinical intervention. But it is a public act, done in the open, by a community that has decided not to keep the subject in the dark. The walk from the pendulum to the water is short, a few minutes at most. The point is that it is made together.
For anyone who needs support, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline can be reached by call or text at 988 at any hour. Western Wyoming Community College's counseling services are free and confidential for students. Walk with the Lights is free, and everyone is welcome.