It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Wednesday, September 4th. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - brought to you by ServeWyoming - Wyoming's center for volunteerism and AmeriCorps service for the last 30 years! For volunteer opportunities, visit ServeWyoming dot org"
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An advancing Fish Creek Fire prompted an evacuation of the historic Brooks Lake Lodge and nearby subdivisions Tuesday evening.
Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean was in Dubois when the evacuation order came.
“I got an evacuation order on my phone, and they sent the entire map of like, of what I thought would be the area that's being evacuated, and DuBois was on the edge of that… they have been preparing Brooks Lake Lodge, you know we've been writing about that… They've got an elite firefighting team there, so it's as safe as it can be with a wildfire bearing down on it… what's burning in the Fish Creek Fire is all this pine beetle killed pine trees… And this fire is just, you know, 1,000% more intense than most other fuel sources would be so it would take a real gully washer to stop this fire.”
Smoke and unstable fire lines have also closed Highway 26/287 over Togwotee Pass, forcing some tourists who were headed for Yellowstone National Park to turn back and filling up nearly every room in town in Dubois Monday night.
Read the full story HERE.
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A series of delays placed a Black Hawk pilot and a former athletic trainer in the right place and time to rescue a wrecked and hurt airplane pilot from a fire outside Meeteetse on Sunday.
Steve Atencio and J.R. Larsen were out looking for bighorn sheep Sunday morning so they could fill Larsen’s hunting tag, the pair told Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland on Tuesday.
“Atencio actually said there were all these stupid little things that kept getting in our way. So they took their own course. They were trying to follow a friend's direction. They were avoiding grizzly bears. They were distracted by some wolves… So all of these things happened where they were just not anywhere on the schedule they had envisioned, or the path they had envisioned. And that was when they heard that the plane go down.”
The woman who died in the crash has been identified as 78-year-old Mary Lou Sanderson of Lake Havasu, Arizona. The pilot is still alive and is being treated in a Billings hospital.
Read the full story HERE.
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There will be a gaping hole left in the Saratoga, Platte Valley and Carbon County communities by the death of Loren “Teense” Willford, a former state legislator, music man and familiar face at countless public events around Cheyenne and southern Wyoming.
Cowboy State Daily’s Leo Wolfson reports that Willford, a fourth-generation Wyoming native, died early Tuesday morning at the age of 85 from cancer.
“Willford served in the legislature from 1993 to 2002 but he's probably even well more well known for his musical presence that he carried and public presence that he carried in Saratoga, in the whole Platte Valley and carbon County as a whole, Willford was a mainstay in seemingly every public event that occurred in some of these communities. He also served as the executive director of the local Chamber of Commerce. Spoke to a number of different people about the impact he had on the community, and he was just well known as being just a consistent figure who is perpetually friendly and jovial, making friends wherever he went.”
Willford was still playing three shows a week into the last year of his life.
Read the full story HERE.
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Accused of shooting another man roughly 10 times with a .45-caliber pistol in Fort Bridger, a Lyman man is charged with first-degree murder.
36-year-old Skyler Gray could face life in prison or the death penalty if convicted of the first-degree murder of 48-year-old Mountain View resident Jeremy Jacques. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland examined court documents, which showed that the shooting appears to have been prompted by a disagreement between the two men.
“Gray pulled up to the home where the shooting happened and told Jacques, you owe me. You owe me something. And Jacques is said to have responded, I don't owe you a thing, albeit in more colorful language. And then Gray is accused of approaching and shooting several times, including continuing to shoot after Jacques fell to the ground.”
A Lyman woman who allegedly threw Gray’s pistol out the window of a moving truck after the shooting has been charged as an accessory after the fact.
Read the full story HERE.
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A large male grizzly bear attacked two archery hunters in Idaho Near Yellowstone National Park on Sunday, wounding one of the men before they both shot and killed it with their handguns.
Sunday’s attack happened west of Henry’s Lake in the Island Park area, on the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, according to outdoors reporter Mark Heinz.
“It's a pretty wild and rugged area of Idaho, and there's some archery hunters, uh, doing what archery hunters do, being, you know, being quiet, being stealthy… kind of goes against the protocols of how you're supposed to behave in grizzly bear country… Well, unfortunately, they had a run in a surprise close encounter with a large male grizzly bear. He the bear charged him, knocked one of the hunters down, bit his arm that he suffered non life threatening injuries, but serious injuries nonetheless. But both he and his partner were able to reach their handguns, and they shot and killed the grizzly.”
In a strange coincidence, Sunday’s attack mirrored one in roughly the same area exactly a year previously, on September 1st of 2023, when another set of archery hunters killed a charging bear with their handguns.
Read the full story HERE.
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The Papa’s Creek Ranch is a perfect fishing and hunting getaway in the heart of Star Valley — picturesque, mountainous and with not just one trophy trout stream, but two.
The 179-acre ranch had been on the market for $4.95 million, but Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that the property has apparently been snapped up by “Yellowstone” television show creator Taylor Sheridan.
“Nobody knows exactly why Sheridan bought this particular property. It could be that he wants a hunting and fishing getaway. It's perfect for that. On the other hand, it's also possible he wants to use it as the setting for one of his many projects with Paramount Plus - he's got a contract through 2028, at least five productions that he's working on for them, and $5 million or so might sound like a lot to pay for a movie setting, but Sheridan famously spends an outrageous sum putting together Yellowstone.”
Sheridan owns a number of ranches that have also served as settings for the popular television series he created. The Four Sixes ranch is a real ranch in Texas, as is the 600-acre Bosque Ranch, which is also featured in the show. Whether Sheridan has any such plans for the Star Valley property is not known.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Los Angeles-based clean technology company, which had wanted to build one of the world’s largest direct air capture of carbon dioxide and storage projects in southwestern Wyoming, is pulling the plug on development of the complex in the Cowboy State.
Energy reporter Pat Maio spoke with the CEO of CarbonCapture Inc., who said intense competition from data centers in the region is part of the reason the company is pulling out.
“It's a potential $1 billion operation there hub that they were competing against two other projects in the United States, one in Louisiana, and the other in Texas, and they potentially could have won, but what they said was… they could not come up with enough clean energy in order to make their car direct air capture project work… they would have had to have generated the equivalent, equivalent of three micronuclear reactors that, like Terra power, powers building down in camera in order to be able to make this, this thing, work.”
The decision to relocate the deployment of Project Bison outside of Wyoming and pause development efforts related to the project was driven by a desire to build the project as quickly as possible.
Read the full story HERE.
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The wrong-way driver who triggered a chain-reaction crash on I-80 last year that killed five people was sentenced Tuesday to the maximum sentence available under the law - a century in prison.
59-year-old Arthur Nelson was high on meth when he caused the crash that claimed the lives of five young people - all between the ages of 18 and 23 - who were on their way home to Arkansas after a visit to a Wyoming Bible college. That’s according to crime and courts reporter Clair McFarland.
“The defense attorney, Mike Bennett, was saying, look, a century in prison, is it going to bring these people back? This man has struggled with addiction. He has medical issues. He doesn't have many valuable years left… whereas the prosecutor… argued roughly between 70 and a century. Judge Snyder went 90 to 110 so pretty much the maximum on every count. And she had the choice to do what's called concurrent, where she could have made the counts run simultaneously to each other, and she didn't take that. She went consecutive. So back to back to back sentences.”
Carbon County District Court Judge Dawnessa Snyder sentenced Nelson to between 98 and 110 years in prison - more than either the prosecutor’s or defender’s suggestions.
Read the full story HERE.
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Whether by virtue of good food, great genetics or some combination of the two, a moose in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains is turning heads with its super-sized proportions.
Photos taken by a Sheridan wildlife photographer show the young bull, whose antlers aren’t exceptionally large, at least not yet, but whose body is freakishly huge, according to outdoors reporter Mark Heinz.
“The Bighorn Mountains is has one of the more robust moose populations that we have here in Wyoming, and she got some photos of this moose that, I mean, I'm not kidding. He, he's a tank is, you know, his his antlers aren't really that huge. He still appears to be a fairly young bull, but his body is just huge.”
This moose’s proportions are made all the more amazing by the fact that Wyoming’s moose are Shiras moose, the smallest of four North American subspecies. But smallest subspecies or not, this moose is a tank and likely to keep growing.
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.
