It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Monday, November 18th. 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. From 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday, Cowboy State Daily’s Jake Nichols takes you deeper into the stories that matter - and keeps up with the news, weather and sports in your part of Wyoming. Just tune into Cowboy State Daily Dot Com and join the conversation.
It’s been 32 years since Wyoming produced less than 200 million tons of coal, a streak that’s about to be broken - unless a miracle occurs, according to one of the nation’s leading energy economists.
Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson spoke to Rob Godby, an energy economist and University of Wyoming associate professor. He said that with less than nine weeks remaining in 2024, Wyoming’s coal mines need to produce 40 million tons of coal to keep the run alive - that’s an average of about 5 million tons a week, which Wyoming’s mines haven’t hit for any week so far this year.
“Production was way down, more than 20% for the first half for the year, mostly first on a really, really warm and long winter that you know, people didn't have to heat their homes a whole lot, so they used a lot less energy, which means they burned a lot less coal… The coal plants themselves had huge stockpiles of coal, so they still they weren't ordering more and building up their stockpiles because they were already full.”
Godby said that the Powder River Basin, which produces 97% of Wyoming’s coal, is on the verge of a seismic shift that will lead to mines closing and potential consolidation.
Read the full story HERE.
The first candidate to throw his name in the ring for Wyoming governor in the 2026 election is Cody Republican Brent Bien.
Bien told politics reporter Leo Wolfson on Saturday at the Wyoming Republican Party Central Committee meeting in Big Piney that he’s running for governor in 2026. Bien believes he can bring strong leadership to Wyoming and represent the voice of the people.
“He considers himself a very conservative, and he believes that people in Wyoming and the United States have been giving up freedoms and giving up their individual liberties as a result of federal overreach. He really wants to run his campaign on making Wyoming more self sufficient and stand up better to the federal government. He also wants to cut property taxes and make elections more secure.”
Bien ran for governor in 2022, but was a relative unknown in the Wyoming political scene headed into that election, and was outraised by Gordon financially roughly five to one. Since that time, Bien has gained much larger statewide recognition.
Read the full story HERE.
A brutal and grisly murder in Big Sky, Montana, last month was initially reported as a grizzly attack. A man was found dead at his camping site, seemingly mauled to death. The gruesome scene a pair of witnesses stumbled upon led them to report it as a bear attack.
But it wasn’t. And Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher reports that the Montana incident isn’t the only murder in recent weeks that’s been staged to look like a grizzly was to blame - but the sources she talked to say it’s actually quite hard to successfully pull something like that off.
“I found out that it is very hard to stage a murder scene pretending to be a grizzly bear. In fact, none of the sources I spoke to had even remotely heard of it and thought it would be impossible to pull off for the obvious reasons. A, that it's super hard to replicate claws and teeth and B, that DNA and others forms, you know, sophisticated testing would immediately rule it out. So the fact that there were three different bear crimes is absolutely bizarre in general, and that they all occurred within a, I think was a three week span in three different states.”
When it comes to staged crime scenes in general, the most common is burglaries and home invasions, but grizzly bears did not make the list. In fact, a person’s chance of being attacked by a bear is approximately 1 in 2.1 million.
Read the full story HERE.
When sisters Maggie Haron and Sadie Howard bought a Jersey cow, they wanted to give their families the benefit of raw milk.
A little over a year later, their family business has become a burgeoning enterprise in northwest Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that Hippie Cow Creamery has acquired four more Jersey cows - and a long list of subscribers who buy their raw, unpasteurized milk by the gallon every week… and the demand keeps growing.
“The milk that they sell and that they consume isn't pasteurized. It comes directly from the cow. It's immediately chilled, and it's kept chilled until it's sold. So it keeps a lot of the stuff that's in there, which can actually be beneficial for your gut health and a bunch of other things. But it was one family's desire to drink raw milk from one cow they decided to purchase. And one year later, since they started the business, they have five cows, 100 over 100 subscribers, of people who buy at least a gallon of milk on a weekly basis. And there's a growing demand.”
Cream cheese, sour cream, ricotta, and mozzarella could become future offerings from Hippie Cow Creamery. In the meantime, the family has more than enough demand for raw milk to keep them busy.
Read the full story HERE.
At the Torrington Livestock Market in Wyoming, the third Friday of November is usually the biggest sale of the year of culled cattle.
This year, drought and wildfires sweeping through Wyoming and neighboring states made this year’s sale the largest in a decade. Cowboy State Daily’s Jackie Dorothy spoke with ranchers who have been forced to sell more cattle because of hundreds of thousands of acres of lost pasture.
“We had one rancher we spoke to, and she is selling what she calls the heart of her herd. You got to understand what they're doing is that they are taking cows that are seven, eight years old, that they've had for years, that they've been breeding, and they're being forced to sell them because they're worried that they won't be able to survive the drought conditions on their ranches.”
One rancher whose family has ranched since 1926 told Dorothy that she has never seen the conditions as bad as they are this year - but said they’re not going out of business, they’re selling cattle to try to stay in business.
Read the full story HERE.
A handful of women now suing the Mountain West Conference claim its rule on transgender sports participation was invented seven weeks ago to shut down a multi-school boycott of a volleyball team with a transgender player.
But the conference told Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland last week that the rule was adopted two years ago and “has not changed.”
However, that argument isn’t the only point of a 132-page lawsuit that was filed Wednesday by 12 people who say their lives have been affected by the participation of Blair Fleming, a transgender outside hitter on San Jose State University’s volleyball team.
“Two women claim that they lost scholarships to Fleming. One said that she changed in front of Fleming. One said that she watched everybody else changing from front of Fleming, not realizing what the situation was. And so I think some of the more passionate statements by the plaintiffs came from the women that were around Fleming for months or years without knowing the situation, and I think that's where some of the bitterest feelings and claims are coming from.”
SJSU sent a statement to Cowboy State Daily Thursday saying the school has not been officially served with the lawsuit and won’t comment at this time.
Read the full story HERE.
The controversial Bureau of Land Management’s Rock Springs Resource Management Plan to manage 3.6 million acres in southwest Wyoming could face major opposition from the new Republican-led Congress and President-elect Donald Trump.
Cowboy State Daily’s Leo Wolfson reports that with the upcoming change in administrations, the legal document that charts the future management of BLM land in the Rock Springs regional area could be killed altogether.
“The RMP is set to be finalized with the record of decision here in the next few weeks as kind of one of the last moves taking place under President Joe Biden's administration. And with that, Congress gets 60 days to weigh in on the regular decision either way. But even more importantly, it's less than 60 days till the next Congress takes over, the new Congress will also get 60 days to weigh in on it, and that is critical, because the Republican majority Congress is much more likely to reject the RMP that was created under Biden's administration.”
Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon, along with all three members of the state’s congressional delegation, have expressed opposition to the proposed plan.
Read the full story HERE.
When a 16-year-old boy went missing in the Wyoming Wilderness in 1963, a desperate search was launched.
More than 200 searchers looked for Edward Eskridge, including the National Guard, but he was never found. Cowboy State Daily’s Jackie Dorothy spoke to one of those who searched, 90-year-old George Liska, who said the incident still haunts him today.
“I came across this monument about this car crash that had happened…. He walked out of this car crash, and immediately… they had aerial searches going on, and that's how they even located the car in the first place found his 15 year old brother, who he had covered with a parka left with a fire, wondered off to get help, and this boy nothing. There was no clues, except for some footprints that they found up a draw… And I got the privilege to interview the last surviving member of the search rescue.”
When the search was officially called off, questions still remained of what happened to Edward Eskridge. This outcome did not rest well with any who had been involved and those who had watched with waning hope.
Read the full story HERE.
Shumway Farms is the last dairy standing in a Western Wyoming valley that used to have so many, it was famously known as “Little Switzerland.”
Its survival is a tale of perseverance and dogged stubbornness. But Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that it’s also one of reinvention and thinking outside of the box.
“The history of the valley is, it was known as Little Switzerland. They had a lot of these dairies because they were settled by folks from Switzerland, and they brought their cheese making with them when they came… But as the dairy industry has changed over the years, most of those dairies are now gone, and this one is the last one remaining the I was just too stubborn to give up. And then when Wyoming's food freedom law came into play, he was able to sell direct to consumer, and they started making premium products out of the milk and selling that instead.”
Nationwide, America had 648,000 dairies in 1970. By 2022, there were just 24,470 remaining. In Star Valley, it’s just one — Shumway Farms.
Read the full story HERE.
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! And don’t forget to drop in on the Cowboy State Daily morning show with Jake Nichols, Monday through Friday from 6 to 10 a.m.! Thanks for tuning in - I’m Wendy Corr, for Cowboy State Daily.
