It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Thursday, April 24th. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by the Wyoming Community Foundation, who asks you to give back to the place you call home. “5 to thrive” is YOUR opportunity to leave a legacy for generations to come. Support the community nonprofits you care about with a gift through the Wyoming Community Foundation. Visit wycf.org to learn more.
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The rate of workplace fatalities in Wyoming has not improved over the past 20 years. In fact, they spiked in 2023, increasing by 25% to 45 deaths, the most recorded in Wyoming in 16 years.
Marcie Kindred is the executive director of Wyoming State AFL-CIO. She told Cowboy State Daily’s Leo Wolfson that she believes that Gov. Mark Gordon and the Legislature aren’t doing enough to prevent those workplace deaths.
“Wyoming had the highest per capita rate of workplace fatalities in the country based off population size. So it is a serious issue, and they… just don't see the legislature or the governor really doing much about it… Kevin Holly, who's also the president of the Wyoming truckers Association… He's going to try to work to gain public and private funding for an awareness campaign to alert drivers to the dangers of driving on Wyoming roads.”
The director of the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services said only six of the 2023 deaths fell under OSHA jurisdiction, and the remaining 39 were either related to transportation accidents, drug overdoses, or other areas over which OSHA has no authority.
Read the full story HERE.
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The trespassing case of a Cheyenne man known for striding into local businesses with a staff in hand and pronouncing hexes on people is set for a bench trial next month, putting his fate in the hands of a judge rather than a jury of Laramie County residents.
43-year-old Joshua Hayden-Ali was originally charged with felony-level intimidation, on claims that he entered the Laramie County Courthouse last August and disrupted its business, threatened its attendees and scattered its papers on Aug. 6, 2024, after early voting had started.
But Hayden-Ali told Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland on Wednesday that he’s being set up by a secret society.
“He said that claims against him started surfacing when he disavowed the Masons, and he was part of that society his whole life, and he decided to cut ties a couple years ago. And after that, accusations started piling on. And he also claimed that they paid him to put curses on people so that their businesses would would die. And I asked the grand Mason, leader of the whole state of Wyoming, is there anything to this? And he said, No, this person has never been on our rosters, applied to be within our ranks, and we do not pay people to perform witchcraft.”
A handful of Cheyenne shop owners told Cowboy State Daily that they’re worried for the man’s mental health, and described him as a “time bomb.”
Read the full story HERE.
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It’s not all smooth flying for Wyoming’s regional airports. There’s financial turbulence ahead, in particular for the Riverton, Rock Springs, Gillette and Sheridan airports, who created their own capacity purchase agreement with SkyWest a few years ago rather than continue with the federal government’s Essential Air Service program.
Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that the current troubles are caused by a variety of factors coming together all at once, creating a perfect storm that is jeopardizing airline services for those communities.
“I think this is kind of a confluence of factors that are coming into play here. The main one, of course, is the inflationary growth in costs that the airline sector has been seeing since the pandemic. But it's also kind of that oscillating roller coaster that we've had too, you know, pilot shortage, then the pandemic came. Suddenly, there wasn't a pilot shortage, but there was an aircraft shortage, and then back with the pilot shortage, again, stronger than ever. Costs after that started to kind of run away, and they've more than doubled since it four communities in Wyoming set up a compact to negotiate better airline services for themselves.… one of their folks told me that, if not for this compact we we could have lost some of those airports during the pandemic. There were something like 79 communities that lost their airport service during the pandemic.”
If the state won’t put more money into the air service fund during the next legislative budget session, those four communities could lose air services altogether — particularly since federal legislation prohibits airports that have left the Enhanced Air Services program from returning.
Read the full story HERE.
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At first glance, it might seem that an abundance of elk is a good problem for Wyoming hunters and outfitters to have.
But Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that things get complicated when it gets down to the nitty-gritty of elk tag allocations, providing hunting access and balancing the allure of high-dollar trophy bull hunts with the need for average Janes and Joes who just want to shoot a cow elk to fill their freezers.
“Elk hunt area 123… south and just slightly east of Gillette. So, you know, kind of more that open, rolling hills, sagebrush country down there… one of the landowners, told me that… they're producing some really gigantic monster bull elk on there… But there's some concern Game and Fish is ramping up the number of licenses there, and there's some concern that's going to put too much pressure on the the public land there, or the elk herds there… there are some reclaimed coal mines there that might not have the greatest access for hunting, but if the elk go there and start eating up too much of the forage the the coal mines might lose the ability to get released from their reclamation bonds.”
In parts of Wyoming, elk herds ballooning well beyond the Game and Fish’s target populations has become a serious problem. Ranchers have grown weary of elk gobbling up forage on their pastures, raiding haystacks, tearing up fences and otherwise causing trouble. However, some hunters complain that landowners aren’t granting them enough access to go shoot the elk and trim down their numbers.
Read the full story HERE.
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The Wyoming Republican Party isn’t taking kindly to a lawsuit filed Monday by members of the Hot Springs County Republican Party, and former state legislator Clark Stith.
The lawsuit in question has been filed in an effort to rebuff the state party’s efforts to tell the county party how to conduct its elections. Cowboy State Daily’s Leo Wolfson reports that the state party accuses the bringers of the legal complaint of being, quote, “Liz Cheney Republicans,” in reference to one of the most vocal GOP critics of President Donald Trump.
“This lawsuit was filed by individual members of the Hot Springs County Republican Party who are upset that the state party has directed their local party to do a recount of their leadership elections. As a result, the Republican Party is calling the people who filed this lawsuit, Liz Cheney Republicans who are basically just bringing lawfare against the state party, much like what they say President Donald Trump's administration has already been experiencing. All this stems to the way that hot springs did their elections last March. Basically they did not allow unelected members of the party to vote in the election, which is following state law. The state party has consistently said that the state law is unconstitutional and that these unelected members should be allowed to vote.”
In 2023, the Wyoming Supreme Court handled a very similar issue involving an election in Uinta County. The court ruled that the local party there had erred by allowing non-elected members to vote and upheld the state law on the matter. The state party still asserts this law is unconstitutional.
Read the full story HERE.
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Release of body cam video, particularly edited and notated by police, is becoming more of a standard response in the wake of controversial or high-profile incidents. Since the beginning of 2024, body camera video for a number of officer-involved shootings in Wyoming have been released.
Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that body cam video was recently released showing the shooting death of 17-year-old Victor Perez by Pocatello, Idaho, police - and locals have begun protesting the police because of it.
“Often, when there is a police involved shooting, there is often body cam footage to go with it. In Idaho, in Pocatello on April 5, there were several body cams rolling when officers pulled up to the scene of what they were told was a stabbing in progress. It turned out to be an autistic teen having a mental health crisis, and he was holding a knife in the body cam footage, you can see officers telling him to drop the knife, but this is a non verbal autistic child who also suffered from cerebral palsy, and so I don't know what his ability was to understand anyone, but he doesn't drop the knife, and he's hit with nine bullets. He later has to endure some surgeries, and I think, an amputation of one of his legs due to the wounds, and eventually he was taken off life support.”
While an internal investigation continues in Pocatello, and the officers involved remain on paid leave, many following the story are calling for justice as they try to give voice to a shooting victim who could not speak.
Read the full story HERE.
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With Colorado set to ban letting customers grab ammunition off store shelves for themselves, some Wyoming gun shop owners are looking forward to more potential business coming from south of the state line.
Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that a new law set to take effect July 1, 2026, will require stores in Colorado to keep ammunition locked up and out of customers’ reach. And that could push more business to Wyoming.
“You can't just walk up to the shelves and grab whatever box of cartridges you want and go buy it like you can throughout Wyoming and like you have been able to do in Colorado now, they're going to make stores lock it up or keep it under the counter, and you have to produce an ID and go through a clerk to get ammunition. And I talked to one Wyoming gun store owner who's in the Cheyenne area, that's right near the state line, and he said he doesn't know yet whether that will drive more business towards Wyoming, but his words were, well, I hope so.”
Some might argue that having to ask for ammunition, instead of just grabbing it from a store shelf and heading for the cash register is little more than an inconvenience. But some gun rights advocates say it could be regarded as a restriction of Second Amendment Rights.
Read the full story HERE.
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Very few people are all smiles before sunrise. But if they’re willing to wake up and look up before dawn Friday, they’ll see a rare smiling face in the eastern sky.
Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that the planets Venus and Saturn will be aligned with the crescent moon in a way that makes a celestial smiling face.
“The technical term for it is a triple conjunction. And the conjunction is when anything in the night sky appears closer than they otherwise would be. So this conjunction, the make the Smiley is Venus, Saturn, the planets and the crescent moon, which is going to be less than 10% illuminated, but it's going to have the nice curve, so we'll get the smiley face in the sky… it's going to rise at around 5am and going to be visible between 5am and 515 so there might be some ambient sunlight in the sky, because sunrise is not far behind. But if you look in the southeast sky, it should be there, assuming there's no cloud cover. And at this time of year, it's a hit and miss might be clouds might not be. But the important thing is that if it's clear, you won't need the telescope or binoculars to see it. It'll be very visible to the naked eye.”
Conjunctions are unique but not particularly rare events to observe. It’s the amusing addition of the crescent moon that makes this triple conjunction of the three planetary bodies so intriguing.
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, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for tuning in - I’m Wendy Corr, for Cowboy State Daily.
