It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Monday, July 29th. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by Wyoming Senior Olympics! Don't miss the action at this year's summer games from July 31st through August 4th in Cheyenne, Wyoming. For more info and a schedule of events, visit Wyoming Senior Olympics dot org.
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Three members from the gospel group The Nelons were killed in a plane crash on Friday afternoon in northeast Wyoming.
The Pilatus PC-12 had left Nebraska midday Friday and was bound for Billings, Montana. It crashed about 8 miles south of the Wyoming-Montana border, sparking a wildfire upon impact and killing Jason and Kelly Nelon Clark, Amber and Nathan Kistler, Melodi Hodges, and the pilot, Larry Haynie and his wife, Melissa.
Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that experts believe the autopilot system malfunctioned.
“Some of the last data that the airplane sent to the ground indicates that it was pitching up and down that it was thrashing vertically at 26,000 feet traveling about 300 miles an hour shortly before the crash. And so you know, exactly what happened hasn't been confirmed yet.”
The jet fuel crashing down into Wyoming’s sage lands sparked a large fire that Campbell County authorities fought both via air and from the ground. Firefighters were combatting the last smolders on Saturday.
Read the full story here.
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Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone National Park blew itself up in a spectacular hydrothermal explosion Tuesday, and videos of the violent eruption made headlines around the globe.
The story blew up again Wednesday thanks to the reports that a perfectly preserved baby mammoth was exposed after the explosion - a “mammoth discovery” that never was, according to Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi.
“The Casper planet is a satirical Facebook page. All the articles on there are written to be fun and satirical just on current events… Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has a million followers, and he didn't share the Casper Planet’s posts, he actually copied and pasted the text in the image and shared it on his own page, which is why it got so widely distributed… There was no factual basis behind it. A baby mammoth was not uncovered in the explosion of Black Diamond pool earlier this week.”
Mammoths roamed Yellowstone 30,000 years ago and could return in the future, but there are no traces of them in the park today. And that’s unlikely to change, no matter how many hydrothermal explosions occur.
Read the full story HERE.
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Airloom Energy, a Laramie-based wind energy startup with backing from Bill Gates, is raising $12.7 million dollars to promote its novel design of wind energy loops that operate horizontally and low to the ground instead of the giant turbines that dot the Cowboy State’s landscape.
The innovative design could eventually produce hundreds of megawatts of power at a fraction of the cost and footprint of traditional horizontal axis wind turbines with three blades, according to energy reporter Pat Maio.
“It's not like building the big wind turbine towers, like you see out in the landscape across Wyoming that are the size of half the size of the Eiffel Tower, roughly, is what I've calculated… this one's gonna be working on like an oval track… they go forward and backward, depending on the direction of the wind. And theoretically, they won't cost as much to operate. About a third third of the cost.”
Wyoming energy projects aren’t foreign to Gates. He also is an investor in the small nuclear reactor company TerraPower, which is building a plant in Kemmerer in southeastern Wyoming.
Read the full story HERE.
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Authorities say Yellowstone concessionaire worker Lucas Fussner took a hostage and threatened to "shoot Jew-babies" before dying in a shootout with park rangers July 4. But Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland spoke to members of Fussner's family, who told her that that wasn't the person they knew.
“One of the shooter's brothers actually reached out to me, and just saying I had no idea he was even up there... And he put me in touch with their mother who was very forthright. And I did public records requests to get police records, and I spoke with a county records keeper. And … I had noticed that there was some chatter on Facebook that Lucas had bought a car before going up to Yellowstone, I managed to track down the car salesman who remembered him just as this wide eyed, naive, very inquisitive young man.”
Fussner had been firing a semiautomatic weapon towards a dining area in the Canyon Village area of Yellowstone when he was confronted and eventually killed by park rangers on July 4th.
Read the full story HERE.
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One of the world's largest celebrities is retiring to Wyoming after years of sweating and sweltering in a California desert.
Guapo, a giant 3,000-pound Holstein steer, is retiring from the Coachella Valley in California's Low Desert to a 3-acre ranch in Campbell County. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi spoke to his rescuer, who said he’s going to be living his best life from now on.
“He's a big, gentle giant in every sense. He’s had children's books written about him. He's getting up there in years, though. And he's been living in the Coachella Valley for most of that time. And it's hot down there. And his owner told me he's not doing so great. So they're looking for a spot where he can spend golden years. And they found that in what they're calling their piece of heaven, on a three acre ranch outside of Rozet that's where Guapo and other rescued animals are going to spend the rest of their years.”
Guapo is one of the oldest living super-sized steers in the world, if not the largest.
Read the full story HERE.
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And getting video of a grizzly mother and cub fighting over food, practically within arm’s reach, seemed cool enough to share on social media for a Cody man, but he didn’t expect it to go viral.
Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz spoke to Ryan Aune, who had his camera running from inside the cab of his truck when the sow and cub burst through the underbrush next to the road.
“This guy said these things were like 15 feet from his truck. It was just crazy. And one of the Cubs is just kind of there but the other one is actively fighting with his mom over a chunk of food ...this guy posted on social media so it's just absolutely blowing up because you know what seems normal to a person like me from Wyoming, I guess seems crazy to people in other parts of the world.”
After a few seconds of mighty struggle, the video ends with the cub claiming the prize and running back into the cover, with its mother and sibling close behind.
Read the full story HERE.
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Terri Smith was a respected Wyoming tribal judge. But in 2019, Smith was arrested for dealing cocaine and helping to sell prescription drugs, and spent six months in a federal prison.
Now, nearly 5 years later, Smith told Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland that she's working to help other addicts recover, and finding redemption through accountability and gratitude.
“I was actually the reporter that broke this story when she was first indicted with federal charges when she was a chief tribal court judge. And so I followed the case all the way through. So I was very surprised that she agreed to meet with me and have coffee and discuss what she now describes as her recovery and her triumph. She's home with her longtime partner with two kids, she is working as what they call a peer support specialist, somebody who has struggled with addiction, and who now helps others get out of addiction.”
Smith said she’s even grateful for the DCI agents who caught her. They brought her to a fresh start.
Read the full story HERE.
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Wyoming mountaineers who have been up close and personal with the trashed-out death zone that the Nepal side of Mount Everest has become, are concerned for the safety of the Sherpas tasked with recovering a growing number of bodies off the world’s highest peak.
A Laramie journalist, mountaineer and adventurer who has climbed mountains all over Wyoming and the world, told Cowboy State Daily that he stepped over four bodies on his way to reaching the world’s highest summit with a National Geographic expedition in 2012.
“Mark Jenkins, one of the Mountaineers that has been actually on top of Mount Everest, was kind of skeptical about taking bodies off the mountain, he believes that there should be cemetery like up at camp for the peak, so that there's not the danger to all the Sherpa and other people that have to take the bodies off the mountain because it's such a huge and dangerous task.”
More than 300 deaths have been recorded on Everest over the past century, and more than 200 of those bodies remain there.
Read the full story HERE.
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With more than 2,500 volunteers spread across nine different committee cabins, Cheyenne Frontier Days has more helpers than many small Wyoming towns.
It’s a city within a city — CFD Town, if you will — and like any Wyoming community, the collection of volunteers has its share of old-timers. They are people like Lynn McColl, who told Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean that he remembers how it was when Cheyenne Frontier Days was younger and just a little bit wilder.
“Those were the days, Wendy, you could run through the Plains hotel, and they would just hand out beers. They aren't even looking at how old people are. So that's how he found himself riding down the street on a horse with a beer drinking his first beer at Cheyenne Frontier Days… But he also remembers an almost Park wide water fight.”
Since its inception in 1897, and in Lynn’s more than five decades of volunteering, Cheyenne Frontier Days has continued to grow and evolve with the times.
Read the full story HERE.
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The Museum of Evolution at the Knuthenborg Safari Park in Denmark has unveiled its newest animal attraction: A 150 million-year-old, 42-foot-long Camarasaurus, found in a quarry in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming.
But when the massive long-necked Camarasaurus was flown from Utah to Denmark, it got lost for a week along the way, according to Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi.
“After hundreds of thousands of hours of preparation in Utah… it was sent on loan to Denmark. And then somewhere between Denmark and Switzerland, it got lost in the mail. And there was a week when they didn't know exactly where it was… thankfully, they got their tracking numbers in order and all of the 97% of the Camarasaurus skeleton that was found in Ten Sleep made its way to the safari park in Denmark.”
The fossilized skeleton is notable for its "exceptional preservation."
Read the full story HERE.
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And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on Cowboy State Daily Dot Com - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our YouTube channel. I’m Wendy Corr, for Cowboy State Daily.
