Welcome.
Over the years, many people have asked why I care so deeply about Idaho, why I started The Great Idaho Show, why I ran for public office, and why I spend so much of my time talking about water, public safety, growth, and preserving the character of this state.
The answer isn't political.
It's personal.
This is my story.
It isn't the campaign version or the polished résumé. It's the experiences that shaped me—from a difficult childhood and military service to building a business, raising a family, and eventually finding my voice through The Great Idaho Show.
Whether you agree with me or not, my hope is that after reading this you'll better understand where I come from, what I value, and why I believe Idaho is worth protecting.
Thank you for taking the time to read it.
— Dylan Stocker
Dylan Stocker – My Story
My family has been in this state for generations. This is the account of my life, written as accurately as my memory allows. I am sharing it because I am becoming more involved in public matters and prefer that people have a perspective
from me rather than from second-hand versions.
At a Glance
• Born 1975, Hailey, Idaho
• Family roots in the Upper Snake River Valley going back to the early settlers (Ferney and
Glover families)
• Served as an Infantry Scout with the 1/17th Infantry in Alaska; received the Army
Commendation Medal
• Began at $12.50 an hour at Wells Fargo during the Great Recession
• Founded Old Arms of Idaho in 2015; now the largest vintage gun parts dealer in the West
• Married to Jasmine since we were nearly in high school
• Committed to the traditional values and work ethic of the Idaho I grew up in
A Family Written Into the Land
My earliest memories of Idaho are not of houses or schools. They are of the wild places that
were here long before any of us:
“Without a doubt, my earliest memories of Idaho are of the wild, ancient landscapes that
were here long before humans ever arrived. Growing up, I skied in Sun Valley where the
world’s first chairlift was born. I camped at Redfish Lake and explored the rugged Sawtooth
Mountains. I spent time in the Tetons and traveled through the otherworldly Craters of the
Moon. But the memories that sit deepest are the quiet ones: fishing with Grandpa on the
Snake River in eastern Idaho and spending still days at Henrys Lake.”
Those places never felt like scenery. They felt like inheritance. Because they were.
On my mother’s side, the Ferney and Glover families helped shape the Upper Snake River
Valley when it was still raw. My great-grandfather, George Ferney, came from Iowa and
became the first Studebaker auto dealer in the St. Anthony-Ashton country. In the 1920s he
also ran the La Monte store, a lonely little outpost between Ashton and Tetonia, the kind of
place where you sold whatever the valley needed and then closed the door against the
winter. That was the work of planting a life in a hard landscape.
My grandfather, Dean Ferney, grew up in that same world. He graduated from South
Fremont High School in St. Anthony, served in the U.S. Navy Reserves during World War II,
attended Ricks College and Utah State University, and later built the Credit Bureau of
Eastern Idaho. A long oral-history interview he recorded in 1982 still sits in the BYU-Idaho
archives. Dean’s own voice talks about the families, the businesses, and the quiet
determination it took to stay and build in one place for generations.
My grandmother Jackie was raised in Ashton by Arvid and LaJetta Glover, early settlers
whose large family (about eight brothers and a couple of sisters) shows up in the old
centennial histories not because they sought recognition, but because they were the
people who simply showed up when something needed doing: seed company, school
sports, community projects. Arvid managed Charter Seed Company in Ashton. The Glovers
cleared land and put down roots the same way the Ferneys did.
Dean and Jackie raised their children and grandchildren on that eastern Idaho ground. Both
are buried at Fielding Memorial Park Cemetery in Idaho Falls, the same land still holding
them.
This is not a family that moved to Idaho looking for a better life. This is a family that helped
make the better life others later came seeking. When I talk about preserving Idaho values, I
am not reaching for a talking point. I am talking about specific people, my people, and the
specific places they worked, served, and are buried in.
That inheritance was tested almost immediately.
The Early Years: When the Foundation Cracked
I was born in 1975 in Hailey, Idaho, a small town twelve miles from Sun Valley in the Wood
River Valley. My early childhood held genuine warmth. My mother and stepfather Mark gave
us a sense of basic family values. We had holidays together, went camping, and shared
adventures. Both held professional jobs, and I had a close relationship with my brother.
From the outside it looked like a normal Idaho household.
Around age ten the stability fractured. My mother and Mark began having intense fights, not
arguments, but the kind that ended with things smashed and one of them moving out. By
the time I was thirteen the divorce was final. My mother seemed defeated as a parent. She
worked hard enough to cover the basics, but she was rarely home. We moved back to
Hailey, where she fell deep into alcoholism and spent most of her free time partying.
I struggled badly in school. There was no one paying attention to my growth, no one
checking homework, no one asking what I needed. I was adrift.
Then, in the second term of seventh grade, the football coach, Mr. King, invited me to join
the team and made one thing clear: I needed decent grades to stay eligible. That single
invitation became a turning point.
“I started to prosper. I was welcomed into a tight group of athletic friends whose parents
genuinely cared about me. I began to excel. I loved football. I finally felt like I belonged to a
team and had real friends.”
For two years, seventh and eighth grade, I found footing, purpose, and real friends. Then, at
the end of ninth grade, my mother met a musician named Mike Wendling and moved us to
Hagerman. Just like that. No discussion. No consideration for the stability I had finally
found.
In Hagerman, life deteriorated rapidly. My mother continued working in Hailey and traveled
a lot for her job, leaving me mostly with Mike. He was an angry alcoholic. When he drank
too much, which was regularly, he took his rage out on me. The school environment offered
little refuge. Many students were unmotivated and more interested in drinking and partying.
Without a functioning parent at home, I started heading down a bad path myself.
We eventually moved into a rundown trailer with no wired power. Everything ran off a
generator. We were poor, and life felt chaotic in the most literal sense.
The breaking point came one night when I brought a friend home. Mike was sitting at the
kitchen table, drunk as usual. He said something rude. My friend responded with a
sarcastic comment. Mike stood up and grabbed me by the throat.
“I backed into my room while he came at me. I kneed him in the balls. My friend tackled him
onto my bed. And I grabbed a flashlight and hit him in the head repeatedly until he was
unconscious.”
I called my grandfather Dean in Idaho Falls. He drove over and took me in for a few days.
When I returned, my mother had a black eye. I begged her to help us get out. She just
looked at me blankly and offered no hope. She seemed completely helpless.
That was the moment I called my best friend back in Hailey. He put his mother on the
phone. “Mom… can Dylan come live with us?” Without hesitation she said yes. Two hours
later they picked me up.
A few months later my friend and I had to leave that household for our own reasons. What
followed was pure survival:
“I was a latchkey kid. I did not survive in any traditional way. I lived a life of eating what I
could find, where I could find it, if the little food Mom left me was even available. I floated
through the support of my friends’ parents. I stole, I lied, I survived. ”
I crashed on random couches. I stayed in homes where the adults were absent and drugs
and alcohol were part of daily life. I eventually quit school.”
The Ranch and the Ferneys
The first real turn came through the most impactful person in my life: my father, William
Ezra Stocker. My birth parents had divorced when I was young, so I did not see him often
during the years of chaos. At age sixteen he picked me up and took me to the Hirschy
Ranch, where he worked as the ranch foreman.
“That ranch was like the show Yellowstone, but in real life. We worked six and a half days a
week and earned five hundred dollars a month. There was a company store, a cookhouse,
and a ranch cook who prepared every meal for us."
”My dad taught me the value of hard work and to expect problems every single day. He was
a man of the old school, a man of strong character. From him I learned what it truly meant
to be a man of your word. Living and working on that ranch gave me a deep perspective on
loyalty, grit, and character. I learned to expect failure often, because every day brought
challenges that money could not solve quickly, if at all.
At seventeen my aunt Tammy and uncle Curtis Ferney invited me to live with them.
“They gave me the hand-up I desperately needed. They helped me get back into school,
and I graduated, a little late, but I did it. Their home was a strict Mormon household, a
complete one hundred eighty degree change from everything I had known before. I became
best friends with my cousins and started finding real positivity in my life.”
From there I joined the United States Army as an Infantry Scout and shipped out to Alaska.
Military Service: Arctic Infantry
I did not join the Army out of patriotic fervor or family tradition.
“I didn’t seem to have any other choice. It seemed like the only option.”
I was assigned to the scout platoon of the 1/17th Infantry in Alaska. We were the battalion’s
only unit trained and equipped for operations behind enemy lines. We worked alongside
the sniper team on reconnaissance. That mission meant we had to be completely self
sufficient. Everything we needed had to be carried on our backs.
In full winter gear as the Radio Telephone Operator (RTO), my personal load reached 225
pounds: a 75-pound load-bearing vest, a 125-pound rucksack, and another 25 pounds of
clothing and equipment. Once a year we conducted a three-week winter exercise in
conditions averaging fifty degrees below zero. For three weeks we had no heat source,
carried everything we needed, and survived with only occasional air-drop resupply. We
even carried out our own waste.
Each mission began with an insertion drop, followed by skiing up to thirty kilometers
through deep snow to reach our observation point. We also served as the battalion’s elite
biathlon team. Our weekly standard never changed: a minimum of three miles of running
every single day, plus at least one twelve-mile road march and one twelve-mile run, no
matter the weather, even in temperatures as low as forty below. Our motto: “Run farther,
sleep less.”
In my first week, Sergeant Irwin looked at me and assigned me the RTO role, the
communications backbone of the team. Responsible for all radio communication, map
orientation, and exact location. If the RTO failed, the team was deaf, blind, and lost.
“That single decision hit me hard. In just one moment, someone believed in me enough to
hand me serious responsibility. It changed something deep inside. It turned my heart
almost instantly.”
The night that earned me the Army Commendation Medal came during the annual winter
exercise. We had been conducting surveillance for two weeks in temperatures averaging
forty-five degrees below zero. On the night of the planned attack, both my platoon leader
and my squad leader (Sergeant Irwin) began showing serious signs of hypothermia and
frostbite. They had to get into sleeping bags together to share body heat.
That left me alone in the observation position with the radio, the map, and the mission. I
stayed. For twelve straight hours in the extreme cold, I maintained surveillance and
continued calling in real-time intelligence. When the attacking force arrived, I skied to the
landing zone, linked up with the commanding officer, and personally led the entire force
through the frozen terrain to the optimal attack position.
“The military teaches you to expect failure and problems. It teaches you to get over the
emotional parts of the trouble and to start focusing on solutions. You have no choice.
Those that succeed get that right away and carry on.”
Career: The Long Road Through Every Version of American Work
Coming out of the Army, I returned to Hailey, lived with my best friend, and found a job
quickly. For the first time in years I felt safe. Within a few months I was selling new cars at a
relaxed, family-run dealership twelve miles from Sun Valley. Collared shirt tucked in and
you were good. Everyday locals mixed with the occasional wealthy visitor. It was a good,
laid-back time, exactly what I needed after the Arctic.
It did not last long. I was recruited by The Coho Group as a technical recruiter placing
senior software engineers for Bay Area high-tech companies, all from Idaho. The late 1990s
were a gold rush. The work was intense and high-pressure, like the movie Boiler Room. We
were expected to make a hundred or more calls a day with a minimum of four hours of talk
time. I thrived. I built relationships with senior leaders at Yahoo, Netflix, Pandora, eBay, Sun
Microsystems, Oracle, and more. While the average recruiter closed about $250,000 in fees
per year, I once closed $125,000 in a single month.
The real education was the access. I worked with Google when they were still just twenty
four people. I worked with Palantir when it was a very young company. The industry
welcomed anyone who could make a real impact, no matter where they came from.
“We are all human, and with the right idea, confidence, and effort, you can sit down and
talk with anyone, from entry-level engineers to top executives, and make meaningful things
happen.”
After about a year I realized I was only receiving a small percentage of my own production
because of the team-based commission structure. A few friends and I struck out on our
own and launched a recruiting agency in Scottsdale, Arizona, three months before the dot
com crash. We gained some early momentum, then the industry dried up almost overnight.
The post-crash stress hit me hard. I fell into depression. My lady Jasmine came to
California, collected me, and brought me home to Hailey. It was the first of several times
she would pull me out of a tailspin.
What followed was a repeating pattern I now see clearly: explosive performance, an
impulsive decision made from ego rather than strategy, and a painful landing. I returned to
Coho, managed sales at the Wood River Journal for two years, launched YP City Boise with
Jasmine and a friend (and walked away when I discovered unethical practices), rose
quickly at Combined Insurance, then chose the easier path at Qwest. I was part of the
initial sales team when HP opened its telephone sales center in Boise. We bought a house,
had our first child, and life felt solid, until, young, cocky, and naïve, I quit impulsively while
Jasmine was visiting her parents in Mexico. She was furious, and she had every right to be.
I bounced back into recruiting, set a company record of $125,000 in cash fees in my third
month at The Payette Group, then quit again with the same cavalier attitude and started
another agency, just months before the 2008 financial crash. Recruiting dried up
immediately. The Great Recession crushed us. We lost nearly everything.
Defeated, I tucked my tail between my legs and took a basic telephone customer-service
job at Wells Fargo for $12.50 an hour. I had a family of four and a mortgage. The man who
had once closed six figures of net money in a month was now answering phones at the
bottom of the corporate ladder during the worst recession in modern memory.
I stayed nine years. I worked my way up from that entry-level seat to managing one of Wells
Fargo’s four national service centers handling all online banking services. On paper it looks
like a classic success story. What I actually saw changed how I understand money and
power.
“During my nine years at Wells Fargo, I was directly involved in practices that I now see as
systemic cheating within the banking system. Agents were routinely trained and pressured
to sell products and services that customers clearly did not need. This was not occasional.
It was rampant and happened every single day. Overdraft fees, unnecessary accounts, and
aggressive upselling were the norm. I watched the bank take collateral or push products
they knew were not in the customer’s best interest, simply because they could. The longer I
was there, the more I realized the banking industry, in many ways, operates as a grift. It
often extracts whatever it can from people, using every possible fee, loophole, or pressure
tactic.”
I left after reporting unethical pressure from a superior and feeling immediate retaliation. I
managed a customer-service center at ICON Credit Union, then two branches.
A serious sporting accident put me in the hospital for nine days. When I came out, Jasmine
and I looked at each other and made a decision that had been building for years: we never
wanted to work for anyone else again.
In 2015 we started Old Arms of Idaho, LLC. The roots had been planted earlier, during the
worst of the recession, when that first Wells Fargo job paid $12.50 an hour and a family of
four needed more. Out of pure necessity I taught myself content-management systems and
built the MVPAL, an online classified site for hard-to-find military and vehicle parts. At the
same time I began buying and selling anything I could find in the firearms industry. I would
pick up an item for fifty dollars and resell it for four to ten times that amount, piece by
piece. It was a daily grind just to survive.
Those years taught me that money is hidden everywhere, in people’s garages, dusty
shelves, and forgotten corners. I developed a deep passion for historical firearms and
became a certified appraiser and auctioneer of fine goods. Today Old Arms of Idaho is the
largest vintage gun parts dealer in the west. We have also built a regionally successful
business as fine firearms appraisers and estate managers.
“It’s never just about the money. People have very different motivations when letting go of
their items. Sometimes it’s about convenience, sometimes it’s the memories attached to
them, and sometimes it’s purely financial. Everyone is different, and understanding those
motivations became just as important as the transaction it self.”
Looking back across car sales, dot-com recruiting, newspaper advertising, insurance,
corporate banking, and small-business ownership, the common thread is simple:
“I learned that we are all human and are equal in the mind of emotion and goals. Social and
monetary judgment are secondary to the goal at the time. I learned the concept of
emotional intelligence and the difference between politically motivated and technically
motivated people. Understanding what people mean versus what they say is the difference
in success. The only difference between those that do and those that don’t is those that do
just did.”
Family: The Foundation
"My family is my life. Jasmine has been by my side since we were nearly in high school, and there has never been any possibility of anyone else. Our marriage is the foundation of everything we've built together. Nothing is more important to me than my wife and our children.
We have always believed that once you have children, your priorities change. Family comes first. While friendships are valuable, they should never come at the expense of the people who depend on you most. Our greatest investment has always been our family."
Jasmine has been the constant through every success, every setback, and every rebuilding season of our lives. She stood beside me through career changes, financial hardship, raising our children, and helped build Old Arms of Idaho.
The day our first child was born reminded me just how strong she truly is.
During labor, the anesthesiologist—who had a cleft hand—attempted to place her epidural thirteen times before it finally took effect. Even then, it numbed only one side of her body. Jasmine endured more than eighteen hours of labor in extraordinary pain before our daughter was born with jaundice.
Two weeks later, she began suffering severe headaches caused by spinal fluid leaking from the repeated punctures. We rushed to the emergency room, where doctors performed a blood patch to seal the leaks.
I sat beside her and watched my wife endure nearly two hours of unimaginable pain as they injected her own blood back into her spine. It remains one of the most difficult experiences I've ever witnessed, and it gave me an even deeper appreciation for her strength and resilience.
Life didn't become easier afterward.
Within just a few years, we lost all four of our parents—each to cancer. The losses came one after another while we were raising our children and building a business. Those years changed the way I measure success. They reminded me that careers, accomplishments, and possessions are temporary, but family is irreplaceable.
Today, as a father, one of my greatest concerns is watching how technology is shaping the next generation.
My younger children are good kids. They work hard in school, stay out of trouble, and make us proud. But like many families, we struggle against a world where phones and video games compete with the outdoors, imagination, and real adventure.
The places that shaped my childhood—the rivers, mountains, forests, and small towns of Idaho—taught me curiosity, independence, and resilience. I hope my children discover that same sense of adventure. My greatest wish isn't that they spend less time looking at screens; it's that they someday realize there's a much bigger world waiting for them beyond one.
Why I Care About Idaho
For most of my adult life, my world revolved around two things: my family and building Old
Arms of Idaho with Jasmine.
Until my oldest child moved out and the younger ones became more independent, I had
almost no social media presence and little interest in public life. My time belonged to my
wife, my children, and my business.
I had always loved talk radio and followed Idaho politics, but eventually I noticed
something that stayed with me. Many of the people shaping the public conversation about
Idaho had only lived here for a handful of years. Some had arrived only recently, yet they
were interviewing governors, legislators, and statewide leaders while many lifelong
Idahoans rarely had a voice.
Rather than complain about it, I decided to become part of the conversation.
That decision became The Great Idaho Show.
I started with a series of long-form interviews featuring county sheriffs. I wanted to
understand what was really happening beyond the headlines. Those conversations opened
my eyes to the challenges facing rural Idaho—deputies covering hundreds of square miles,
shrinking volunteer forces, aging infrastructure, limited budgets, and emergency services
trying to do more with less.
Then one night those realities became personal.
Jasmine and I were sitting around a campfire when she suddenly became violently ill.
Within hours she was in unbearable pain. We called for an ambulance just after three in the
morning and were told the estimated response time was about two hours.
I drove her to Boise myself.
Thankfully it turned out to be a kidney stone.
But during that drive I could not stop thinking about what might have happened if it had
been internal bleeding, a heart attack, or a stroke. I wondered what would have happened if
I had been injured, or if I had been drinking and unable to drive.
It changed the way I looked at rural Idaho.
The podcast continued introducing me to people and problems I otherwise never would
have understood. Water rights. County funding. Public lands. Growth. Roads. Emergency
services. Mining. Wildfire. Subjects that once seemed separate gradually became
connected.
I realized they all came back to the same question:
How do we preserve Idaho while Idaho continues to grow?
Running Old Arms of Idaho taught me another lesson.
One customer brought in more than twenty collectible firearms, explaining that he needed
insurance appraisals. I spent more than two hours carefully valuing every firearm. The
following day every one of them appeared online for sale.
The lost time wasn't what bothered me.
If he had simply told me he intended to sell them, I would have gladly helped him exactly
the same way.
What stayed with me was the assumption that honesty wasn't enough—that getting what
you wanted required a story.
That isn't the Idaho I grew up in.
The Idaho I know is built on a simple belief: do things the right way, even when nobody is
watching.
I've watched parts of Idaho change over the course of my lifetime.
As a child I experienced communities where neighbors knew
one another, where a handshake meant something, and where your reputation mattered
more than your résumé.
Many of the small communities in Boise County still carry that spirit.
Others have changed dramatically.
Places that once felt rooted in community increasingly feel driven by money, status, and
outside influence. Large interests with resources greater than entire county budgets now
shape conversations about land, water, development, and the future of communities that
generations of Idaho families built.
That realization is what eventually led me to run for Boise County Commissioner.
Whether I won or lost was never the point.
I wanted every decision to begin with one simple question:
How would this affect the Idaho family that has been here for generations?
I don't pretend Idaho has ever been perfect.
Every generation has faced its own challenges.
But I believe we are at a point where decisions made today will determine whether Idaho
remains culturally Idaho fifty years from now.
That is why I continue asking questions.
That is why I continue interviewing people.
That is why I continue speaking up.
Not because I think I have all the answers.
Because I care deeply about the place that shaped my life.
Who I Am
I am a multi-generational Idahoan whose great-grandfather became the first Studebaker
dealer in the St. Anthony–Ashton area.
I am an Arctic infantry scout who earned the Army Commendation Medal after spending
twelve hours alone in forty-five-below temperatures when every leader above me became a
casualty.
I am an entrepreneur who started over during the Great Recession, working for $12.50 an
hour before eventually building Old Arms of Idaho into one of the largest vintage gun-parts
businesses in the West.
I am a husband who has loved the same woman since we were teenagers.
I am a father.
I am a son who lost all four parents to cancer within a remarkably short period of time.
Those experiences changed how I measure success.
Today, success is not measured by money or recognition.
It is measured by whether I leave Idaho stronger than I found it.
If, years from now, my children and grandchildren inherit an Idaho where honesty still
matters, neighbors still help one another, families can still build a life through hard work,
and our mountains, rivers, and small communities still resemble the places that shaped
me, then I will consider my life well spent.
If you have questions about anything I have written, ask me directly.
I'd rather answer them myself than let someone else answer for me.
Written July 2026. This is the version I stand by.