Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"Now let's all watch some happy fish..."}]

Smile 9 19 23

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

<title>Daily Smile: Tuesday, September 19, 2023 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Now let's all watch some happy fish...

Daily Smile: Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Heinz mark

Mark Heinz

Around Wyoming

This story was updated at 6 p.m. Tuesday.

The Weiser Knoll wildfire southeast of Lander, sparked by an overheated trailer wheel bearing Sunday afternoon, exploded to roughly 16,300 acres by late Tuesday afternoon and was 0% contained. 

The fire, the largest of the summer so far in Wyoming, prompted an evacuation order for residents in the Twin Creek Drainage area, east of Wyoming Highway 28. More than 200 fire personnel were fighting it, according to the federal government's InciWeb wildfire tracking website.

Area rancher Rhett Abernathy told Cowboy State Daily that by about noon Tuesday he and others hoped the worst was over, as winds calmed and “slurry bombers” continued to drop water and fire retardant on the blaze.

Sunday night was awful, he said, as the fire was driven by strong winds.

“That first night, the wind picked up and the fire started running down the ridges. Everybody was just waiting for their places to go up,” Abernathy said.

According to state and federal fire agency reports, the fire was sparked at about 2:15 p.m. Sunday on Highway 28 about 13 miles southeast of Lander.

The overheated bearing caused three initial fires to spring up alongside the road at a spot known as Johnnie Lee’s Corner, according to reports. 

Rancher and outdoors business owner Ron Hansen, who lives about 7 miles northwest of Lander, told Cowboy State Daily late Tuesday that he was worried about another possible wildfire. 

That blaze appeared to be growing about 5 miles southwest of Fort Washakie, he said. 

“If this one blows up, it’s going to come straight for us,” Hansen said. 

With hot, dry conditions persisting, he said he’s worried about how bad the fires might get. 

“I hate to say this because I’m in the outdoors recreation business. But I’m almost to the point of begging people to not go outside, to not go out into the hills,” Hansen said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"‘Five-Foot Flames’"}]

Lander resident Michelle Motherway told Cowboy State Daily  she was camping with family Sunday and drove back into town after the fire started. 

“There were five-foot flames right on the side of the highway,” she said. 

The smoke in town wasn’t terrible Tuesday, but late Sunda, it was miserable, Motherway said. 

“Two nights ago, it was really reminiscent of the (1988) Yellowstone fires, where you could see that the moon was orange and the sky was orange. It was just eerie,” she said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Rangeland Scorched"}]

Abernathy said that during its initial stages, the fire tore through ranchland on the Abernathy Ranches and Bureau of Land Management allotments leased by the ranch. 

It was touch-and-go for a while, he said, as they scrambled to move cattle out of the flames’ path. 

Luckily, Abernathy said, nobody was hurt and no cattle were killed. 

“We had a couple of old log cabins and old barns burn, but they were of no function,” he said. 

However, a significant amount of rangeland was rendered useless for grazing, he said.

“It will be the year after next before we can graze any of it again,” Abernathy said. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Feeding the Firefighters"}]

Motherway owns Mr. D’s Food Center in Lander, which has been helping to feed firefighters. 

“When the fire broke out on Sunday, I got hold of the fire incident command, and we arranged to get food for them,” she said. “We fed 65 people Sunday evening.” 

But as local Wyoming State Forestry and BLM crews were called in, the number of firefighters needed three meals a day delivered to them ballooned.

“We’re feeding 200 people breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” she said. 

With only three full-time staff at the store, meeting demand requires “an army of volunteers,” Motherway added. 

Codi Jorgensen, a local teacher, volunteered to help prepare firefighters’ meals, along with her 11-year-old daughter. 

“We were there (at the store) for four or five hours, putting meals together,” Jorgensen said. 

Motherway stepping up to help is “just Michelle being Michelle,” Jorgensen said. So, she and her daughter were happy to pitch in.

She added that while the smoke hasn’t been so horrible in town, the fire still has an ominous presence.

“We can see it from our back deck at my house. You can see the flames,” Jorgensen said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"‘Lookie-Loos’"}]

Motherway said there have been some “lookie-loos” showing up to try to get a look at the fire, which can impede firefighters and cause safety problems. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The BLM concurred. "}]

“Twin Creek Rd. is closed to the public and only open to area landowners. Highways WY 28 and US 287 remain open, but please remain alert and yield to fire traffic and crews working in the area. For public and firefighter safety, the public is asked to remain out of and away from the fire perimeter,” the agency stated in a fire update Tuesday afternoon. “Red Flag conditions, characterized by strong gusty winds, low relative humidity, and elevated temperatures, contributed to heightened fire activity yesterday (Monday).” 

On Tuesday, ground crews were “constructing direct containment lines," as aircraft continued to drop water and fire retardant. 

“Coordination continues with local power companies to restore power to the area,” the BLM reported.

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<title>UPDATE: Fire Near Lander At 16,530 Acres And 0% Contained, Prompts Evacuations | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The Weiser Knoll fire near Lander, started by an overheated wheel bearing on Highway 28 on Sunday, exploded to Wyoming's largest at 16,530 acres and was 0% contained late Tuesday. “Everybody was waiting for their places to go up,” a local rancher said.

UPDATE: Fire Near Lander At 16,530 Acres And 0% Contained, Prompts Evacuations

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

Renée Jean

Growing up, Texan James Neeley had never heard of mountain man Jim Baker, who was a frontier scout, trapper and early non-Native settler with ties to both Colorado and Wyoming when the West was young.

A sister’s genealogy search changed all that a couple decades ago. On Saturday, he was among a handful of Baker descendants who gathered for a photo commemorating the Little Snake River Museum’s work to preserve the cabin Baker built when he settled in present-day Savery in 1873.

Members of HistoriCorps and other volunteers in the Savery area spent last summer hand-hewing cottonwood logs to replace water-damaged logs at the cabin. The work is not finished, Little Snake River Museum Director Lela Emmons told Cowboy State Daily. 

Efforts are already underway to raise additional funds to keep the restoration going, and to source more of the huge cottonwood logs 

“There’s still another 10 or 12 logs we need to replace,” she said. “Getting those logs is the hardest part of the whole thing.”

Large cottonwood logs aren’t simply available at Home Depot or some other lumberyard.

“We have to find the right cottonwoods, get them milled,” she said. “And they’re so heavy, you can’t just lift them up. You have to hire a guy with a big backhoe or something who can lift them.”

It’s a fuel-intensive process, Emmons added, which means the logs must be sourced as near to the museum as possible.

Once they have the right logs, they’ll also need to bring HistoriCorps back to do the work, which will cost around $40,000 for another two-week stint.

Emmons said she hopes to identify grant funding to help with that.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Best Shot In The West"}]

Neeley drove from Texas with his wife, Sandra, just to learn more about his ancestor and see the cabin where Baker once lived.

“I would be a first cousin, three times removed,” Neeley told Cowboy State Daily. “So, there’s a lot of people here who know more about him than I do.”

The work done on the cabin, which is a rare surviving structure from the mountain man era, is “wonderful,” he said. 

“It’s an important part of history and, of course, if it deteriorates, nobody can enjoy it,” Neeley said. “So it’s really nice that they have done this. A lot of people, at least in our part of the world, are not familiar with Jim Baker. They’ve heard of Jim Bridger, people like that … but (Baker) was an important character, too.”

Kit Carson, in fact, has been quoted in newspaper articles of the time saying Baker was the “best shot in the West,” next to himself, of course. When Carson sent invitations to 18 mountain men for what would be their last trapping event together in 1851, Baker was on that list. 

Bridger, when he was looking for an elite scout to help him at Fort Phil Kearney, hired Baker. Baker was also one of the scouts for Gen. John Charles Fremont’s third expedition to explore and map the American West alongside Carson, and he was part of the 1841 Bartleson-Bidwell Party, among the earliest wagon parties bound for California.

Baker’s contemporaries certainly thought he was important. But unlike them, Baker was not interested in publicity, biographer Leighton Baker wrote in his book, “The Red-Headed Shoshoni.” 

Baker loved the mountains and hated the spotlight. So, when Ned Buntline suggested writing a biography about him, Baker flat out refused. 

He did not care if the world forgot who he was.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Too Many People"}]

In fact, when Denver became too populous for his tastes, he packed up and in 1873 moved to Savery, where he built a two-story cabin with a third-story tower as his home. The tower, dismantled in 1881, was so he could climb high and see far — just in case any of the American Indian tribes who disliked him decided to come to call. 

Baker is thought to be one of the first non-Native settlers in Denver. He was later honored with a stained-glass likeness at the state Capitol, and he became one of the first settlers of the Little Snake River Valley. 

The cabin itself has lived several lives. 

Baker first built it from massive cottonwood logs felled by himself and some of his children along the Little Snake River. They squared the timbers by hand with broad axes and not much else.

After Baker’s death in 1898, there was a tussle between Wyoming, Colorado, and Savery over who would keep the cabin. 

Wyoming won the first round of that battle, and Baker’s cabin was displayed in Frontier Park in Cheyenne for 60-some years starting in 1917. Then, one year, the cabin was disassembled and stored, never to return as a display at Frontier Park. 

Savery still wanted Baker’s cabin though, and was eventually successful in convincing the state to send it back home to the Little Snake River Valley in 1976.

When it arrived, it was like a giant pile of scattered Lincoln logs, with few numbers explaining how the cabin had been put together. 

Original photos of the cabin and miniature models of the logs were used to figure out just how to reassemble the cabin in its present location, a mile from where Baker had originally built it.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Fight Is On"}]

Three decades before Baker built his fortified cottonwood cabin near Savery, he’d already helped make the surrounding landscape part of Wyoming history.

In 1841, near the Little Snake River Valley, Baker was among trappers who survived the fight that gave Battle Mountain its name. 

The conflict also became associated with Battle Creek, Battle Pass, and Battle Highway — place names that still mark the country where Baker later chose to make his home.

The battle is one of the most stunning tales of the mountain man era.

That summer, Baker had been trapping in the Green River country. Bridger decided to send the young scout to warn French-Canadian trader Henry Fraeb, who was building a trading post somewhere near the confluence of Battle Creek and the Little Snake River, that large war parties of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho were gathering in the region.

Bridger wanted Fraeb to abandon his exposed trading post and come back to Bridger’s camp along Henry’s Fork of the Green River, where he and his men would be much safer.

But Fraeb wasn’t keen to abandon his post. 

One day, while Baker and a few companions were hunting bison and cleaning their kills in the vicinity of Fraeb’s outpost, they saw huge puffs of dust suddenly appear over the southwest flank of the peak now known as Battle Mountain, which was then called Bastion Mountain. A large allied war party of Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux — what Baker relative Chilly Rollingson calls the “Platte River Indians” —  then came riding down the southwest side of Battle Mountain. 

They were making a beeline for Fraeb’s trading post — exactly the scenario Bridger had feared.

Baker and his companions raced back to the outpost to help defend it and their lives. In the ensuing battle, Fraeb was among the first killed.

Baker, just 21 or so at the time, stepped up to take command, and his fellow scouts would later credit him with saving their lives. 

Baker, in an account decades later in a Denver newspaper, said the Indians numbered 700 or more. Other accounts have put the numbers anywhere from 200 to thousands. 

Baker told the newspaper he and the men hid behind stumps and positioned dead horses as breastworks to withstand what was about to happen.

With their manpower limited to about 24 scouts, and scarce quantities of ammunition, Baker told the men they had to make every shot count. That meant waiting until their attackers were close enough to ensure each bullet was going to hit someone or a horse. 

Baker and the men with him believed they were going to die. All they could do was make their own lives as costly as possible.

Baker’s strategy worked better than they could have imagined. Each time one of their fellow warriors fell, the Indians would stop their charge and draw back. Eventually, with only five horses left to fight over, the Indians decided to take their dead and wounded away and leave the trappers alone.

It was a stunning reversal of fate for the surviving trappers.

Carson, who told a Denver reporter he heard the story later from Indian points of view, said the warriors believed a supernatural force had turned the fight against them. They could not otherwise see how a battle where they held such overwhelming odds went so poorly.

Bastion Mountain was renamed Battle Mountain after the fight, and a different mountain was renamed Baker’s Peak.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Keeping History Alive"}]

In later times, some of Baker’s favorite trails, drawn out on his trapper maps, have become paved highways today. 

Many people travel these routes who do not realize how these roads came to be. 

The preservation of Baker’s cabin, as the mountain man who helped settle this area of the West, is a “big responsibility,” Cynthia Reschke Collyard told Cowboy State Daily. 

She now lives in Colorado and is a direct descendant of Baker. Her great-grandmother was Baker’s daughter, Jenny, making him her great-great grandfather.

“This is rightly where it belonged, because this is where it was originally built,” she said. “But it’s a big thing for a little museum to take on the care of something like this, outside in the elements.”

She hopes to see the restoration work continue, knowing some logs on the cabin have rotted and need to be replaced. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The restoration so far is good, she added."}]

“It’s been done in the nick of time,” she said. “And I think a lot more work needs to be done. I don’t think it’s finished by any means.”

Collyard has been actively working through tribal records to learn more about Baker, trying to separate facts from “barstool” storytelling through the years, which have muddied the historical waters.

What she hopes for, more than anything, is for Baker and his role in history to be remembered accurately.

That’s a goal important as well to other Baker relatives such as Rollingson and Paul and Michael McAllister.

The McAllisters have donated rare Baker photos and artifacts to museums in Craig and Savery, as well as donated time to helping preserve Baker’s cabin.

“History is important,” Michael said, noting that he and his brother both helped mill and square many of the new cottonwood logs for the restoration. “Anytime you can keep history alive, it’s all for the good.”

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<title>Jim Baker Descendants Celebrate Work To Save Forgotten Mountain Man’s Savery Home | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Long before he built his cabin in Savery, Jim Baker led two dozen men in an 1841 fight that gave Battle Mountain its name. Now his far-flung descendants and a tiny museum are fighting time, money and rotten logs to save the frontier scout’s last home.

Jim Baker Descendants Celebrate Work To Save Forgotten Mountain Man’s Savery Home

<title>Brent Bien’s 50% Property Tax Initiative Puts Wyoming Homeowners First | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming’s first citizen initiative on the statewide ballot in 30 years would cut the taxable value of a primary residence by 50%—a first step toward Brent Bien’s goal of eliminating residential property taxes.

Brent Bien’s 50% Property Tax Initiative Puts Wyoming Homeowners First

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

Andrew Rossi

Wyoming Life

 on Saturday. Its prognosis for Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain region is “cold, snowy at times, and breezy.”

Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day is aware of this and other long-range forecasts coming out for the upcoming winter. He's not buying what anyone's selling.

“I'm not going to follow the herd into slaughter this time,” Day said. “The Farmer’s Almanac does what the Farmer’s Almanac does. The National Weather Service will do what they do, and people on social media can post every computer model that they want, but I’m not going there yet.”

With a Super El Niño on the horizon after several consecutive historically dry months, Day was willing to discuss the broad trends that could impact Wyoming this winter. As for the specifics, there’s such a thing as being too early.

Day's message: trust these at your peril, especially when it’s still summer.

“Last year was a good example of getting too far ahead of your scheme, but it's so easy,” he said. “I’ve learned the hard way, so I’m not seeing expectations when we’re still in August.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Super, But How Super?"}]

The “biggest player” this winter, according to Day, will be 

the much-anticipated “Super” El Niño

. Weather patterns and water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which have been 

, are manifesting as one of the most intense El Niños in recent years.

“We're definitely going to have this very strong El Niño,” Day said. “It's going to be the dominant factor this winter, but it's not the only one.”

Many long-range forecasts circulating are relying on historical data from past El Niños to provide an outlook for how it will impact global weather.

Day is a huge proponent of using historical data, but there might not be a historical precedent for what’s coming. A strong El Niño can be great for Wyoming or miss it entirely.

“The El Niño can be so strong it shifts the storm track to our south,” he said. “The enhanced rain and snow you can get in the winter can bypass Wyoming. It can just miss.”

In other years, a strong El Niño has tracked farther north, inundating parts of Wyoming with precipitation.

A strong El Niño is a given this winter. At this point, its trajectory could take it either way, which is why Day isn’t giving into the pressure to release a long-range forecast.

“The north-south extent of the El Niño signal is a real concern I have,” Day said. “It's really too early to glob onto and go all-in on either a model-driven forecast or what we would call an analog forecast of looking at El Niños from the past.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Hangover"}]

The top reason to be skeptical of any long-range winter forecasts for this winter is the lessons still to be learned 

Day acknowledged how his long-range forecast for the 2025-2026 winter season, released in August 2025, was radically different from the winter Wyoming got. That stung, but his misery had good company.

“That’s the cautionary tale,” he said. “We had 90 blocking patterns this winter. Nobody anticipated that, and no models predicted it. Simply put, our models fail.”

Those “blocking patterns” were stubborn ridges of high pressure that essentially 

 from reaching Wyoming and siphoned it elsewhere. That’s why it was historically dry in the western U.S. and historically cold and snowy in the eastern U.S.

By November 2025, it was clear that the colder, snowier winter forecasted wasn’t going to plan. Nearly every month since then has been 

“This summer was a hangover from last winter, especially through July,” Day said. “Last winter, all our weather went north. A really strong El Niño can direct all the storms south. That is a concern.”

El Niño isn’t known for having frequent blocking patterns. Instead, it tends to have one blocking pattern that can last for several months without let-up.

According to Day, very persistent, stubborn blocking patterns are “a concern” with the incoming El Niño. Where those patterns could set up, and how it would impact the winter, remain to be seen.

That’s one area where Day had a sliver of confidence when looking ahead. Historically, the enduring block patterns have favored Wyoming.

“You can have a semi-permanent high-pressure system over central Canada that migrates back and forth,” he said. “El Niño patterns can lock in between December and February, which is a concern, but it's not in the Pacific, which was our problem last year.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Who’s On The Bench?"}]

For Day, putting out a long-range forecast for the 2026-2027 winter season would be like betting on the winner of a barely started chess game. The game’s afoot, and there’s no way to confidently say what the winning move will be.

However, Day can look at the board and see which pieces are and aren’t in play. Many of the factors that came together to make last winter so warm and dry aren’t a factor now.

“What we can say about the upcoming winter is that it does not look like we have all of the big players that we had last winter,” he said.

The 2025-2026 winter season started with a weak La Niña. Since the Super El Niño is already manifesting, La Niña won’t be a factor going forward.

The quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) is a cyclical pattern of wind directions in the stratosphere, the second-lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. It has enormous impacts on global weather.

According to Day, the QBO was in “an easterly phase” last year. This year, winter will begin when the QBO is in its opposite, westerly phase.

Then there are the North and South Poles, which are already colder than they were at this point last year.

Several elements that affect long-range weather and seasonal forecasting are different this year. How it all plays out with a strong El Niño remains uncertain.

“El Nino is going to be the quarterback and head coach this winter, bar none,” Day said. “There are other players involved, but that's why we've got to understand these players and those that aren't going to come off the bench until a little bit later on.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Given"}]

Historically, El Niño has been favorable for Wyoming’s winter, bringing colder temperatures and precipitation. That’s a possible scenario for this winter, but there are no guarantees.

That’s another reason Day doesn’t want to make people more optimistic or pessimistic than they need to, especially in August. Many people who are seeking salvation from a strong El Niño might not get it.

“If you take a critical look at El Niños in Wyoming, it’s extremely rare that the entire state benefits from it,” he said. “If we do get into stubborn holding patterns, El Niños can be feast or famine, and Wyoming is a big state.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"No Voodoo That You Do So Well"}]

As Day was discussing his concerns about long-range winter forecasts in August, he didn’t even consider what the Farmer’s Almanac was forecasting.

“I'm not going to include the Farmer’s Almanac,” he said. “They're either taking models verbatim, or they're taking El Niños that have occurred in the past. These approaches aren't necessarily wrong, but I don't think that's the right way to approach the winter forecast when we're still on the backside of summer.”

Day’s hoping to have his winter forecast ready by mid-September, when the impacts of the Super El Niño are starting to roll in. It’s going to be so critical that its impact shouldn’t be anticipated so soon.

“A lot of things that are going to drive this winter, in addition to El Niño, aren't going to really start showing themselves until we get deeper into fall,” he said. “I am not going to go there yet. I’m not setting expectations. We need to be patient.”

Day’s word of caution to Wyomingites was to be extremely skeptical of any long-range winter forecast they might see for the next month or so. Any person or agency that’s confident in their forecast, in his opinion, doesn’t have enough critical information to be credible.

“The problem with doing long-range weather forecasts is that weather is so dynamic,” he said. “If you make a graphic that's good for three or four months, and subtle things change, then you have to throw it out the window. That’s why we have to be careful.”

That goes double for the Farmer’s Almanac. While it still has its uses in the 21st Century, long-range weather forecasts aren’t one of them.

“I don't know what voodoo magic they use to get their forecasts,” he said. “I don't think we should be talking about any detailed winter forecast till maybe mid to late September. Until then, it’s not helpful for anybody.”

Don day winter 8 11 26

<title>Meteorologist Don Day Calls New Farmer's Almanac Winter Forecast 'Voodoo Magic' | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The Farmer’s Almanac has released its winter forecast, and Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day calls it "voodoo magic." However, he does believe a very strong El Niño is on the way but he's "not going to follow the herd into slaughter this time."

Daily Smile: Tuesday, September 19, 2023

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