The Sweetwater County Library Foundation is getting a head start on Halloween this year, and it is doing so with a scoop of ice cream and a few visitors from Wonderland. On Friday, Oct. 23, from 6 to 9 p.m., Pin Up Coffee at the Train Depot in downtown Rock Springs will host the Meet the Monsters Ice Cream Social Fundraiser, a free, family-friendly evening that offers a sneak peek at characters from the Foundation's upcoming Twisted Tales Haunted Maze & Candy Crawl.
The premise is simple and a little strange, which is part of the appeal. Characters inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland will be on hand to meet children and pose for photos, Halloween music will fill the depot, and ice cream will be for sale. Costumes are encouraged for kids and adults alike, and admission costs nothing. The fundraiser works through the counter: Pin Up Coffee will donate a share of ice cream sales during the event to the Sweetwater County Library Foundation.
For the Foundation, the social is less a standalone party than a doorway into the bigger production that follows. The Twisted Tales Haunted Maze & Candy Crawl runs Oct. 30 through Nov. 1 at the Expedition Island Pavilion in Green River, with day and night sessions each day and a family-oriented slate of activities. According to the event's own site, the weekend includes a haunted maze, a candy crawl scavenger hunt through the maze, a trunk-or-treat on Halloween afternoon, photo booths, tarot and aura readings, gaming trailers, food and drink vendors, raffles, and DJ sets, with a Sunday afternoon maze-only session closing things out. Wonderland is one of the themed chapters woven into the maze, which is why its residents are being trotted out early in Rock Springs.
"The Ice Cream Social is really just a fun way for us to give the community a little sneak peek of what we have planned for Twisted Tales," said Lisa Frint, executive director of the Sweetwater County Library Foundation. "We wanted to create an opportunity for families to come out, meet some of our Wonderland characters, take pictures, and enjoy a sweet treat while supporting a great cause. It's also a chance for us to connect with the community, build some excitement for Halloween weekend, and have a little fun along the way."
Frint is a Green River native who graduated from Green River High School in 1999 and studied marketing at the University of Central Florida before returning to the county in 2013. She was hired as the Foundation's first executive director and began the job on July 1, a move the library system's director, Lindsey Travis, described at the time as a way to strengthen the Foundation's fundraising and advocacy. The Foundation is a nonprofit that supports the county's libraries and the Community Fine Arts Center beyond what the library system receives from county commissioners. Frint said then that one of her main goals was to build partnerships to sustain and expand library programs, and the Halloween slate looks like that plan in motion.
The setting fits the theme better than a generic storefront would. The event takes place inside Rock Springs' historic Union Pacific passenger depot, a 1920s building restored in the 1990s and now part of Depot Park downtown. Rock Springs, unusually, once had two railroad depots rather than one, a reminder of the town's railroad and coal origins. Putting a haunted-maze preview inside a restored depot gives the evening a bit of local texture that a strip-mall party would lack.
There is more to the fundraising push than ice cream. The Foundation has also launched the Twisted Tales Treasure Vault Online Raffle, with prizes donated by local businesses and community partners. Tickets are sold online at SweetwaterMazes.com. The raffle is aimed partly at people who cannot make it to Expedition Island in person but still want to support the libraries from wherever they are.
"We are incredibly grateful to all of the businesses and individuals who have stepped up to donate prizes for our raffle," Frint said. "Fundraising efforts like these simply wouldn't be possible without the kindness and generosity of our community. Every donation, whether big or small, makes a difference, and it's wonderful to see so many people willing to support us. We truly couldn't do what we do without them."
The Foundation's Halloween programming also has a literary and folkloric bent that goes beyond Alice. Its site describes a companion project, Twisted Tales of Sweetwater County, as a curated collection of true stories of the supernatural and unexplained from across the county, preserved as local folklore, with proceeds supporting the Foundation. That interest in the county's own ghost stories is not new. The Sweetwater County Library in Green River has a long-running reputation for odd happenings, and its Ghost Walk events, led by a volunteer crew, have raised money for the Foundation by telling those stories straight. A retired librarian, Micki Gilmore, who spent 24 years in the library system, has stressed that the walks are honest accounts rather than staged spook-alley theatrics. The haunted maze is, in a sense, the same instinct dressed up for Halloween weekend.
For families in Rock Springs, though, the Oct. 23 social is the easy entry point: no ticket, no scare, just costumes, music, photographs with a few Wonderland characters, and ice cream whose sales send a cut to the library. It runs three hours at the Train Depot, and it doubles as a reminder that the bigger maze is only a week away.