It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Monday, September 23rd. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - brought to you by the Cowboy State Daily Morning Show with Jake! Launching October 1st at 6 a.m., Cowboy State Daily’s Jake Nichols is making morning radio cool again. Tune in from wherever you are for the latest news, weather, sports and in-depth conversations that matter to you.
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It’s never too late for a first, and there was a big first to celebrate at the 43rd Annual Buffalo Bill Art Show and Sale’s live auction this weekend.
When Lot 101, the oil painting “Trout Peak Traverse” by Mark McKenna, sold for $9,000, auctioneer Troy Black told the crowded tent of patrons and artists that in his years of doing this show, they have never hit $1 million on the first night - until that moment. And Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi was there.
“As opposed to just going to cover it, I was actually writing down the amounts and the bid numbers as they came in, and adding them up as they went along. And it was really cool the moment when the one piece was sold, that they crossed a million dollar mark. That was the first time that they had crossed a million dollars the first night of the show… that's part of the excitement and the adrenaline and the atmosphere that keeps people coming back year after year after year. They come for the bidding wars. They come for the camaraderie, and they come to watch as the art goes up in value, and people want to see these contemporary Western art pieces in their homes and museums.”
By the end of Friday’s auctions, 98 of the 104 pieces in the 43rd Buffalo Bill Art Show and Sale had been sold. Only six pieces didn’t meet their reserve at auction.
Read the full story HERE.
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It's not every day when a plane lands in front of you on Interstate 25 - but it happened on Saturday morning to Levi and Kelsi Dutton of Casper.
Cowboy State Daily’s Jimmy Orr reports that the couple was driving down to Cheyenne for their daughter's softball game when they spotted a single engine airplane about 150 feet off the ground flying directly over the highway about 23 miles north of Cheyenne.
“The plane was able to pull over. They pulled over right after and and they got out, and they started talking to the pilot. The pilot was completely calm. He was he just said, Yeah, I'll be able to fix this thing… So he got out of his toolkit, started fixing it on the side of the road… He was able to do whatever he did, and then took off again on the interstate and was able to fly to Cheyenne… we did speak with a chief instructor for an aviation school, Mitch Semel, who said that it was a remarkable story, because they teach the flight instructors, teach pilots… If you're in trouble, highways are pretty good, but there's always the fear of trees and signs and traffic. But here in Wyoming, at 8: 30 in the morning on a Saturday, there's some pretty good chance that you can land it.”
Semel said instructors teach not so much the best option in an emergency situation, but what’s the least bad option.
Read the full story HERE.
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Dust devils are sometimes the only life David Belus can see on his Johnson County ranch as he looks out over miles and miles of scorched earth.
He told Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean that the whirlwinds are a disquieting sign of the erosion he knows is happening across not only his land, but across all the other acres upon acres that have burned up in the House Draw and Remington fires.
“It's really staggering when you consider he lost 50,000 acres, but within 100 mile radius of his farm, there's like 500,000 acres that has burned up, and it's going to take millions of dollars in at least a couple of years for those rangelands to recover, management to get back to a new normal. I think one of the most significant problems facing that whole area that all that dirt, that 500,000 acres of burned land, is a blank canvas just waiting for every weed seed to pop as soon as it rains.”
Relief funds have been set up, and government agencies are working hard to help the affected ranchers design management plans to deal with the aftermath.
Read the full story HERE.
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As Friday morning rolled around, David Mercado of Casper was headed out for three days of elk hunting in a remote area near Muddy Mountain.
He was back home from what could only be described as the Wyoming elk hunt from hell when he spoke over the phone with outdoors reporter Mark Heinz on Thursday.
“Their friend from Texas, his horse started acting up, eventually bucked him off and and the guy suffered a really badly broken femur, and so by that time, they're already out in the freaking middle of nowhere… right before the the chopper took off, he told him, Look, you guys, don't quit hunting. Go get out there and kill one of those bulls for me… They run into a grizzly bear with two huge cubs, almost grown cubs, the mama bear charges them… in the process of all this chaos, their horses ran off… all their gear was gone, so they basically had to sleep on the ground with a fire, no food… fortunately, they ran into an outfitters camp. The outfitters had found their horses had all their gear that the horses hadn't ripped any of the gear off in their panic, so at least they had that.”
The plus side? Everybody made it out alive, although the man who was bucked off had to have several bone screws put into his leg to begin his long healing process.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Casper man was sentenced Friday to seven years and six months in prison for being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition.
But the arrest of Frank Berris was anything but routine. The 53-year-old had essentially proclaimed himself a sovereign citizen before being stopped for driving with fictious license plates - and held police to a three-hour standoff. And that wasn’t the only time that Berris had run-ins with law enforcement.
“In one instance, in the winter time, he had just this long argument with troopers and Natrona County Sheriff's personnel where he was basically saying, if you make me get out of this car, we're going to shoot it out on the road. And he actually filmed all of this in his own YouTube video, which he then published to YouTube… he was very frank about his resistance and his unwillingness himself because he believed himself to be independent of the law.”
Berris pleaded not guilty in March. He represented himself at trial and was convicted in June.
Read the full story HERE.
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One of the defining aspects of Yellowstone National Park is how it adapts to change. That can be natural, such as a forest fire or a 500-year flood, or artificial, such as the impacts of millions of tourists visiting every year.
Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi spoke to one person whose job it was to clean out the Morning Glory pool - which for decades had become a stop for visitors, who treated it like a wishing well.
“When people first started seeing it in the 1880s it was one of the many wishing wells in the park, so they just tossed coins and other objects inside of it, to the point that a lot of that is still embedded into the pool today, into the rock wall where the water collects… they could try to restore these pools back to what they were, but it's kind of a reflection of what the values of the national park systems have become, and that's to protect the parks as they are, which means their natural and artificial adaptations to their environment. And Morning Glory pool is an perfect example of that.”
Yellowstone’s geothermal wonderland is no longer perceived and used as an amusement park, as it was in the early days. It ensures that everyone can enjoy the natural wonders without coins flooring the bottom of every pool.
Read the full story HERE.
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The Lamp Lounge on Cheyenne’s south side has new owners. The legendary dive bar, with its famous penny-laden counter, is going through a major renovation.
Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean says they are working hard to shed the dive bar’s notorious and violent reputation.
“This one guy had a story just unbelievable. He walks into the men's room, and there's a woman in there shooting up with a syringe in her jugular vein. And she at first, she's like, cursing him for being in the women's room. And he's like, Uh, hey, your stuff is on the urinal, you know, pointing at the men's urinal. And she's like, Oh. So she gathers all that stuff up and rushes out with the syringe still hanging out of her neck. Just like, totally unbelievable. Of course, things are not like that anymore.”
Co-owner Michael Jordan said they’ve installed a number of security cameras, which they’ve hooked up to facial recognition software - so if anyone comes in with an attitude and starts causing trouble, Jordan knows who they are, what they did, and he can ensure they don’t return anytime soon.
Read the full story HERE.
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38-year-old Chris Hicks is serving three consecutive life sentences in the Wyoming maximum security prison - without parole - for his role in accessory role in two murders in Gillette in 2005, when he was 19.
But Hicks is hoping to have his sentence reduced. Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher reports that science is proving that young brains don’t fully mature until much later than previously thought - which might make a difference in sentencing for youthful offenders.
“There is a emerging neuroscience that shows that the age of adulthood is actually much older than anticipated based on this brain science that says adult brain is not fully formed until age 29 in her filing, Lauren McLane is asking that this age be raised to 21… in Chris's case, he was 19 at the time of his crimes, and in the motion, it also includes he was evaluated by a psychologist who said he … definitely did not have a fully formed adult brain at the time of his crimes.”
UW Professor Lauren McClane, who has filed the motion, asserts that had this advance science been known at the time of Hicks’ trial, it would have provided mitigating factors that would have impacted his sentence.
Read the full story HERE.
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When Porshia Birdsley asked officials in her hometown if she could borrow a fire hydrant, they did a double take. When she explained that she needed it to train for a strongman competition, they said yes.
Cowboy State Daily’s Jackie Dorothy spoke to the 33-year-old self-proclaimed “girly-girl,” who has been carrying fire hydrants, toting heavy sandbags and performing all kinds of other awesome displays of strength around Thermopolis for the past two years, training for and competing in the growing sport of strongman.
“Porshia has been doing strength training since 2019 just lifting weights on her own and just kind of getting into shape. And the Montana strongest man came to Gottsche here in Thermopolis, and he actually had her do a, I think it was called log lifting. This is all new to me as well, but she was doing log lifting and broke records right then, first time to touch the weights….she loves it, and she's out to prove that you can lift heavy, as she calls it, and still be a girl.”
Birdsley also went to the Official Strongman Games Southwest Regional in Mesquite, Texas, in August and won her category. She qualified to represent the United States in the Official World Strongman Competition in December.
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.
