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Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 21, 2021 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 21, 2021

Image depicting a missing headshot of a Cowboy State Daily team member.

Gail Symons

Opinion

CSD Columnists

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Anger Is Easy. Governing Is Hard."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":" "}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Wyoming’s primary election is Aug. 18."}]

We’re about to see more mailers, Facebook posts, endorsements, and candidates’ last-minute claims about their opponents.

Here’s the question worth asking before marking a ballot: Is this candidate telling me how they intend to govern, or mainly giving me something to be angry about?

The distinction matters: campaigning and governing require different things.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Campaigns reward simple messages."}]

Governing requires decisions about budgets, taxes, schools, health care, local governments, property rights, infrastructure and economic development. Those decisions involve competing interests and consequences.

Grievance politics focuses on who is responsible for what’s wrong. The message emphasizes threats, betrayal, loss, ideological enemies and political purity.

Some candidates love to tell voters who must be stopped.

But governance politics looks different. It names a problem, says what government should do about it, explains what should happen as a result, and owns the cost.

Anger alone doesn’t make a campaign grievance politics. Government deserves criticism when policies fail. The distinction is what comes next.

Sheridan County’s legislative races provide useful examples because the campaigns cover the full range.

Some campaign messages warn about “socialism,” Democrats “infiltrating” the Republican Party, “true conservative values” slipping away, “real Republicans,” or threats to Wyoming’s way of life.

Mark Jennings’ campaign, for example, leans heavily on warnings about socialism, forced charity and Democratic infiltration but also provides specific proposals such as capping state spending and placing conditions on future data-center development.

Having proposals doesn’t automatically make a campaign governance-focused. The real question is what receives the emphasis.

Other candidates spend more time discussing property taxes, school outcomes, health care access, housing, local services or how state decisions affect local governments. Those subjects don’t automatically make a candidate a good legislator either. They do give voters something more concrete to evaluate.

A legislator eventually has to choose between competing priorities. Property-tax relief affects revenue. Spending reductions require deciding what gets less. Education funding carries constitutional obligations. Economic development brings questions about infrastructure, taxes, water and power. Ask a county commissioner what a smaller mill levy means, and the answer isn’t abstract. It’s road grading. Ambulance coverage. Library hours.

The old concept of local control raises another question: which level of government should make that call? A candidate who talks through those tradeoffs is showing you how they think about governing.

There’s also a third category: candidates who simply don’t tell you enough.

Some Wyoming candidates have no campaign website. Some Facebook pages contain little beyond endorsements, photos, and slogans. Others rely on broad phrases such as “fiscal responsibility,” “local control,” “strong schools” or “protecting families” without explaining what those words mean in legislative terms.

A thin campaign record doesn’t prove the candidate lacks knowledge or serious ideas. Still, if someone is asking for your vote, they owe you enough information to judge how they’ll use it.

Don’t fill in the missing platform for them.

If a candidate says “fiscal responsibility,” don’t assume what gets cut. If a candidate says “local control,” don’t assume which decisions stay local. If a candidate says “support education,” don’t assume what funding or policy choices follow.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Ask one simple question: Then what?"}]

Cut property taxes. Then what happens to the lost revenue?

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Reduce spending. Then what gets reduced?"}]

Stop government overreach. Then which law, regulation, agency or authority changes?

Protect Wyoming values. How is the Legislature going to do that from Cheyenne?

From there, use four questions for any major campaign promise.

What specific Wyoming problem is being identified?

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"What government action is proposed?"}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"What result should follow?"}]

What cost, consequence or tradeoff is acknowledged?

If a candidate answers those questions, you’re learning something about governance.

If the message repeatedly returns to who should be feared, blamed, defeated, exposed or excluded, you’re getting pummeled with grievance politics.

If the candidate offers almost no answers, that's teaching you something too. 

Before Aug. 18, look at whatever each candidate has chosen to provide. Review their website. Check their Facebook page. Read their mailers. Visit voter information websites  

Then ask yourself: After reviewing this candidate’s campaign, do you understand what they want government to do, what they want you to be angry about, or have they told you too little to know?

The better test isn’t simply, “Does this candidate have proposals?”

Ask what the candidate wants you thinking about when you enter the voting booth: what they plan to accomplish, or who they want you to fear gaining power.

Ask the four questions before you fill in a single bubble. Then decide: are you hiring someone to govern, or just someone to keep you angry?

Campaigns end on Election Day. Governing starts after that. Send someone ready for both.

Gail symons 3 23 25

<title>Gail Symons: These Candidates Better Have More Than Fear And Blame To Give | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Columnist Gail Symons writes: "If a candidate answers your questions, you’re learning something about governance. If the candidate only says who should be feared, blamed, defeated pr excluded, you’re getting pummeled with grievance politics."

Gail Symons: These Candidates Better Have More Than Fear And Blame To Give

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Tourism

Will Grant still has the two horses, Chicken Fry and Badger, that he rode across Wyoming in the summer of 2019 when he retraced all 2,000 miles of the Pony Express trail. 

Chicken Fry was born in New Mexico, and no one knows for sure how old he is.

“He’s had some hard miles on him,” Grant said. “Not a hard life, but plenty of work. So we rope off them a little bit, but not too much, and they’re like trail horses.”

Some of those hard trail miles happened in a landscape that deeply respects its roots. Wyoming, Grant told Cowboy State Daily,  has cared for its Pony Express Trail better than other states.

“You can see it there,” Grant said. “It’s very well marked in Wyoming. Very well marked.”

Mosquitoes in Jeffrey City are particularly bad, while South Pass can be freezing cold even in July. 

That’s left Grant wondering how Pony Express riders kept their feet and their hands warm, given that they were riding through South Pass in January of 1861.

“The winds through there are no joke,” he added.

These are just a few of the gritty details Grant learned about Wyoming as he rode through it on the back of a horse, surrounded by a vast, windswept sea of sagebrush. 

He had known from the outset that he would face the same brutal elements the pioneers did — shifting mud, relentless wind, desert conditions, mosquitoes, and the like.

But, as he wrote in his book, “The Last Ride of the Pony Express,” thinking about the hardships ahead of time and experiencing them firsthand are two very different things. 

That point became starkly clear under the flash of a sudden Wyoming summer storm. Grant and his two horses, he realized immediately, were the highest point on the landscape. They were walking targets clad in iron horseshoes. And there was nowhere for them to take cover. It was just miles of open sagebrush in every direction, as far as his eyes could see.

The crack of thunder overhead filled him with dread as he rode across the land in that gathering storm. He also gained a new appreciation for the 1860s couriers who wrote of learning to read the landscape in between blinding pulses of lightning strikes.

“I learned that the Pony Express as a mail service was a really impressive display of American entrepreneurship,” he said. “There’s no other country in the world that could have done the same thing given the same environmental parameters. There were no horses out there. There was no infrastructure on which to set up a fast horse mail relay over 2,000 miles to deliver a letter in 10 days.”

There were wild horses, and they were a huge danger to a lone rider managing two horses. Grant writes about that in his book, how careful he was to avoid either inciting an attack or losing his horses to that stallion’s wild harem.

The Mongols and the Romans and the Persians did have ancient horse relays to quickly traverse their kingdoms. But these were created in already civilized areas that their empires controlled, and those relays were fed and maintained by the full resources and might of those empires. 

America’s Pony Express was a business venture started completely from scratch, with no empire behind it at all, traversing a vast and empty land that was openly hostile. There were no resources from a surrounding empire to help them through all the places that lacked food, water and shelter. 

Pony Express riders didn’t wait for perfect conditions, though. They rode in all kinds of weather, making a 2,000-mile trip in a just 10 days. 

Grant took his time, compared to them. His journey lasted 142 nights.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Modern-Day Station Masters"}]

He also had something else the original 1860s riders didn’t. Wyoming ranchers — many of them descended from original homesteaders — who helped him all along the way, as did members of the modern-day Pony Express riders. The ranchers, in particular, were an informal network of modern-day station masters, ready and willing to help him all along the way.

Time and again, just as weather threatened to overwhelm him and his small string of horses, Grant would ride up on a private gate to find it already opened to him. The rancher before had let the next farm know he was on the way and to watch out for him.

These ranchers didn’t just grant him passage through their land. They would actively pull him out of a storm, offering secure pasture space and protection from the elements. There were often hot meals and a dry bunkhouse were included, as well as their stories.

“The traveling horseman still finds a lot of hospitality in Wyoming, I’ll tell you that,” Grant said. “People were good to me. Opening pasture gates, no worries. Really good people all along the way.”

There was the time a well-meaning rancher tried to talk him into taking an ornery mule with him … 

But warm hospitality and cheerful dinners and storytelling were more common. It was a powerful reminder that while the physical shelters of the 1860s may have crumbled, the human infrastructure of mutual aid remains intact across the Wyoming plains. It’s been actively kept alive behind the closed gates of modern cattle ranchers, many of whom are still living by the unwritten code of the West, handed down from one generation to the next.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Write What You Know"}]

Grant’s Pony Express ride wasn’t just a history fascination for him. He found in the ride a perfect intersection for the two halves of his life.

“I’m a journalist, and I mostly have been writing for magazines,” he said. “What I really wanted to do is write a book. The Pony Express emerged as a topic that I thought I could shed some light on because I worked as a horse trainer and a cowboy.”

Grant, born and raised in Littleton, Colorado, spent his summers cowboying on a ranch between Chugwater and LaGrange in Wyoming, studying under a foreman named Tim Sussex.

“Those were good years for me because Tim really showed me how to handle horses in a lot of different ways, but really how to be quiet with a horse,” he said. “That is the best thing you can do, get a ranch hand job on the wide open prairies of Wyoming.”

His first degree program was forestry and geology in Tennessee, after which he went back to horses, breaking colts in Larkspur, Colorado, then working for a ranch in Texas. 

In 2008, he went back to school to study journalism at University of Montana School of Journalism.

“I needed it,” he said. “I’d been training horses and doing ranch work for like eight years. I had to use a different part of my brain.”

When he went hunting for a book idea, the old writer’s advice — write what you know — stuck.

“I saw the Pony Express as a way to overlap my expertise with horses and write what you know,” he said. “I decided to dive into the Pony Express and I thought, ‘Well, obviously, I’m gonna have to just ride it. Travel it by horseback.’”

That, he added, was the “best summer of my life.” 

Even if it was the summer of 2019 — not the summer of ’69.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Trail Logic And Life"}]

Spending five months on the back of a horse gave him new perspectives on hardships and life. 

“When things are bad, you can expect they are going to get better,” he said. “If you have a bad camp, then the next night is almost certainly going to be better. And if you have two bad nights in a row, then your odds are even better that you’re headed for greener pastures.”

That simple trail logic helped him keep his morale intact through the inevitable stretches of cold and wet, hot and thirsty, tired and hungry all along the way.

He also learned more about his horses than he expected.

“I’ve been around horses my entire life,” he said. “But I learned a lot about their nonverbal communication. I learned you can tell a lot about a horse by listening to the way they walk.”

Any discomfort comes out in the sound of the hooves striking the ground.

He also noticed things about humans as well, including that they seem to care more about someone who is riding on the back of a horse than they do about someone who is on foot.

“They’re more likely to offer support because of the horses,” he said. “People cared about the wellbeing of the horses more than they cared about the wellbeing of me for sure. Having the animals with you opens up a lot of doors.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Next Book"}]

These days Grant lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Chicken Fry and Badger have the run of the place, and Grant spends more time “wrangling sentences” than he does cattle.

He’s already knee-deep in his next book, which is about the ancestry of the American cowboy.

The research has already taken him to Mexico, Spain, and soon Morocco. Next summer he’ll tackle history that’s “closer to home.”

Whether that brings him back to Wyoming remains to be seen. But Wyoming will have its thread in the book regardless.

“I’ve got a lot of good Wyoming material built up over the years,” he said. “Horsebacking it across Wyoming for the Pony Express gave me a pretty good look at the country.”

And being a wrangler near Chugwater was a whole other dimension of the state and its cowboys.

After riding the Pony Express across Wyoming and sleeping under its stars, Grant may have left tracks that already blew away. But the stories Wyoming whispered to him in the night still live on, indelible memories that explain the code of the West in ways words never could.

Will Grant 7 N8 A8831 8 9 26

<title>Cowboy Rides All 2,000 Miles Of Pony Express, Says Wyoming Weather Overwhelming | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Cowboy and journalist Will Grant rode all 2,000 miles of the Pony Express trail on horseback. He said the trip gave him a newfound respect for Wyoming weather. Mosquitoes in Jeffrey City are bad, while South Pass can be freezing cold even in July. 

Cowboy Rides All 2,000 Miles Of Pony Express, Says Wyoming Weather Overwhelming

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Around Wyoming

A GMC Yukon is smashed against giant boulders in a ravine off U.S. Highway 14-16-20 between Cody and Greybull. It’s been there for two years and could be there for many years longer.

, Suzanne Marie Cole drove the 7,000-pound SUV off the highway in what she claimed was a carjacking. She was arrested on two misdemeanor charges of probation violation, as it was determined she was intoxicated at the time of the accident.

Cole’s case has long since been resolved, but her Yukon is 

. Its windows and windshield are gone, anything of value inside is long gone, and it's riddled with bullet holes.

Pere Davison saw the Yukon while hiking in the Oregon Basin this past week.

“I hike up along that ridge all the time, but I have to go down and look over an edge to see the car,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “It is hard to believe it got down to where it stopped. It had to go over some pretty big boulders.”

The Yukon is likely to become one of dozens, possibly hundreds, of vehicles left abandoned in remote, hard-to-reach areas in Wyoming. It’s just not worth the effort to recover it.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Fruitless Effort"}]

Zac Beardall of Zac's Towing and Recovery in Cody knows exactly where the Yukon is. After Cole’s accident, the Park County Sheriff’s Office contacted him about recovering it.

Beardall isn’t one to be intimidated by a challenging recovery. He knows he could recover the Yukon, but as a business owner practicality takes precedence.

“There's no reason for it other than it's basically a fruitless effort,” he said. “Trying to devote an entire day and an entire fleet of equipment to a non-paying job is not exactly the best business decision.”

In these incidents, the owner is usually responsible for recovery costs. According to Beardall, that wasn’t an option for Cole.

“The owner didn't really make that choice,” he said. “It's more that they had no other option because they didn’t have the money or insurance to cover the operation as it stands. It’s not like breaking down on 1000 Wyoming Street and getting towed for $100.”

Because the State of Wyoming doesn’t cover recovery expenses, Beardall would have to cover it himself. It wasn’t worth it then, and it’s even less so now.

“That Yukon will never be roadworthy again,” he said. “It launched off a cliff and bounced up three boulders. The very second it lost momentum at the bottom of that cliff, it was never going to be roadworthy again.”

Two years later, the Yukon is in ever worse condition. It’s full of holes, created by rust and dozens of bullets, indicating it’s been used for target practice more than once.

When Beardall’s on the hook for a difficult recovery, he can recoup some of the cost by scrapping the vehicle. Even then, recovering the Yukon wouldn’t be worth it.

“The recovery’s not worth the scrap value,” he said. “Even the best scrap value on it wasn't ever going to be worth the recovery effort.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Live And Let Live"}]

Given the Yukon’s location, it’s under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The agency might decide that recovering the vehicle is worth the expense.

But will it? Beardall thinks it’s unlikely, especially because it’s not doing any harm where it is.

“For the BLM, it falls under the same purview as trash and litter,” he said. “It's not hurting anything where it's at. It's not obstructing a roadway or hiking path, and it’s not causing some huge environmental friction. Nobody’s going to pay a huge amount of money to get a vehicle out when it’s not doing anything.”

That’s what Beardall described as something that’s “been the establishment” since the invention of motorized vehicles. Sometimes, they end up where they shouldn’t be and remain there.

“They're big chunks of steel that take a lot of effort to move,” he said. “Sometimes, they’re in an area where it’s not really worth trying to move them, so we leave them.”

That’s nothing new. Beardall knows of “about 50 different vehicles in the area” that ended up in similar predicaments and haven’t moved or been recovered since. Many of those are older than one might expect.

“I can take you out to places where there's Model A’s in canals,” he said. “They’ve been there since they went there, and nobody's moved them in the last 100 years.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Like, Share, Subscribe?"}]

Unless the BLM decides to pay Zac’s Towing and Recovery or some other company to get the Yukon out of the ravine, Beardall expects that it’ll stay where it is. It’s so far away from U.S. Highway 14-16-20 that it can’t even be seen from the road.

There was only one scenario where Beardall might find the Yukon worth the time, effort, and expense. That would require more social media savvy.

“I could be like some of the YouTube guys and publicize the effort to make money off it,” he said. “Maybe one day I'll have a YouTube channel set up, where we're getting paid for views recovering vehicles from canyons and sinkholes, but that’s the only way it would make any sense, financially.”

If that ever happens, Beardall doesn’t anticipate becoming a social media star anytime soon. Business is busy enough without the extra clout.

“At this time of year, especially, we're ‘all hands on deck’ trying to operate and pick up cars, motorists, and anybody else who might be stranded, broken down, or wrecked,” he said. “Taking a full day to recover that Yukon just isn’t worth it.”

SUV off cliff for 2 years 8 6 26

<title>SUV That Went Off Wyoming Cliff 2 Years Ago Still There With No Plans To Recover | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Two years ago, a GMC Yukon flew off a highway in Park County and bounced off giant boulders in Wyoming's Oregon Basin. It's still there and likely there to stay because recovering it would be a fruitless effort, said the owner of a local tow company.

SUV That Went Off Wyoming Cliff 2 Years Ago Still There With No Plans To Recover

Jen Kocher - Headshot CSD

Jen Kocher

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Crime & Courts

Public Safety

The last thing she remembered was walking into circuit court. To numb the dread, Lisa had smoked fentanyl and swallowed a couple more pills before the hearing.

How do you explain turning to the very thing that’s killing you? For her, it was her daughter’s face: The look in her eyes as she realized, even before the judge spoke, that her mother wasn’t coming home. 

That look broke something nothing could repair for Lisa, a woman in her 30s from southern Wyoming who asked to remain anonymous.

“It’s insane,” Lisa said four years later. “The thing that was wrecking me was the only thing I trusted to make the pain stop.”

Her memory of that day broke into pieces: Shaking in front of the bench, the van ride to jail, then strangers leaning over her, pounding her chest. She woke in a hospital with a naloxone drip in her arm. 

They told her later about the Narcan shots and the deputy who’d refused to give up on her.

That was what finally scared her sober. That, and the silence from her daughter, her family — the relationships she’s spent years trying to mend.

“Fentanyl isn’t a high. It’s a terrible way to live,” Lisa said. “Worse than anything else.”

She started because people around her said it was cheaper and didn’t show up on probation drug tests. But once you’re hooked, the sickness that follows keeps you coming back — even if it wrecks your life. 

[{"type":"text","text":"Even if it kills you."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Wyomingites Dying From It"}]

For years, fentanyl has dominated America's overdose crisis. The powerful synthetic opioid has largely replaced heroin in many illegal drug markets and has been found disguised as prescription painkillers, hidden in counterfeit Xanax tablets and mixed into cocaine and methamphetamine.

It’s also costing a lot of lives in Wyoming and elsewhere.

 provided by the Wyoming Department of Health, around 350 Wyoming residents died of an opioid-related overdose. Of these, more than 90% were unintentional.

The demographic hardest hit during this five-year period was men and women ages 35 to 39, which accounted for about 60 of those deaths, followed by those between the ages of 25 and 29 equaling about 42 overdose deaths.

The bulk of these overdoses occurred in Sweetwater County at about 29.4 deaths per 100,000 residents, or an estimated 61 lives lost due to opioid overdoses. This was followed by Fremont County at 18.2 deaths per 100,000 residents.

That number appears to be growing in 2026, with the Cheyenne Police Department issuing  a warning in April of an uptick in overdoses, including five in less than a week. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Two were fatal."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"New Danger Hitting Rockies"}]

Now, federal investigators say they've encountered another unusual combination.

The DEA's Rocky Mountain Laboratory recently identified pills containing both fentanyl and heroin during drug seizures in Colorado and Utah.

The pills have not been found in Wyoming, but officials say that's no reason for Wyomingites to let down their guard.

When Ryan Cox, Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation commander, heard the DEA had identified pills containing both fentanyl and heroin in neighboring states, he wanted to know which drug was being added to which.

"The fentanyl is more potent than the heroin," Cox said. "Heroin laced with fentanyl is more dangerous."

That distinction matters, Cox said, because someone who believes they're buying heroin but unknowingly consumes fentanyl faces a dramatically greater overdose risk.

Someone intentionally seeking fentanyl who unknowingly ingests heroin is still in danger, he said, but the heroin doesn't substantially increase the threat posed by fentanyl.

"The fact that they're adding a lesser substance into a more dangerous substance doesn't cause me as much concern as vice versa," he said.

Cox stressed that either combination can be deadly.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Unusual Discovery"}]

Another reason the discovery caught investigators' attention: Heroin rarely comes in pill form.

Steffan Tubbs, a DEA Rocky Mountain Division spokesman, said the DEA routinely sends seized drugs to its laboratory for analysis, but this time chemists identified tablets containing both heroin and fentanyl.

In some cases, they also detected carfentanil — an extremely powerful synthetic opioid originally developed for large animals that is about 100 times more potent than fentanyl.

"It's highly unusual to see heroin mixed in pill form, and then you combo that with fentanyl," Tubbs said. "It is definitely concerning."

The DEA declined to discuss the specific investigations or how many pills were recovered.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Wyoming Drug Hubs"}]

Investigators say geography makes Wyoming vulnerable if the trend spreads.

According to Cox, Wyoming's illicit drug market is heavily supplied through larger distribution hubs in neighboring states.

"Most of our state, our drug traffickers, either travel from Denver or it's locals that travel down to the Denver region ... to obtain drugs that are brought back into Wyoming," Cox said.

Waking up in a hospital with a naloxone drip in her arm after an overdose finally scared Lisa sober, and she's now warning people about the growing access to fentanyl in Wyoming. "It's a terrible way to live, worse than anything else," she says.

Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 21, 2021

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