It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Monday, May 26th. 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.
Gov. Mark Gordon and Secretary of State Chuck Gray have sparred on numerous topics from whether there’s a need for additional voter-integrity laws in Wyoming to whether the state should grant leases on state lands for wind turbine projects.
The latter topic surfaced in a Friday discussion on Cowboy State Daily’s radio show with Jake Nichols, in which Gordon pointed to his constitutional duty to maximize revenue from state lands to the advantage of Wyoming’s schools. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that the governor is accusing the secretary of lobbing dishonest social media attacks at him.
“Earlier this week, Gray posted to social media a photo of a hideous wind turbine with a broken and charred blade out on the hilly landscape, saying, this is, you know, something like, This is Governor Gordon's vision for the future. And Gordon often, you know, spars with gray or banters or weathers these attacks, but he got a little more spicy in a Friday retort that he sent out as a press release, a mass email. And he also appeared on Jake's show that same day… usually he takes a little more even tone, but on Friday, the governor really came out swinging.”
In a video response posted Friday to Facebook, Gray called the governor's statements, quote, "bonkers" and "bizarre."
Read the full story HERE.
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In 2016, Andy Sandness of Newcastle, Wyoming, became the one of the first people in the world to receive a face transplant.
A new book published by Mayo Clinic Press details Sandness’ journey from a happy childhood in Wyoming, to struggles with alcohol, to a dark December night in 2006, when the then-21-year-old attempted suicide - and missed, disfiguring his face horribly.
Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison spoke with Andy about the revolutionary surgery at the Mayo Clinic.
“It was a long journey for Andy. It was a 56 hour surgery. And the way the story goes, when he saw his face for the first time, you know, he still had a trach tube allowing him to breathe so he couldn't speak. But what he did was he wrote a note, and I think the note said something like, far exceeds my expectations… And the doctors who were giving up their weekends for months, learning and practicing, were elated… they had meticulously figured out where each nerve that we just take for granted, you know, allowed him to smile… he used to be able to smile on the inside, you know, like someone something would make him happy, but he couldn't express it outwardly. Now he could actually smile to the world.”
The book is titled "Face in the Mirror: A Surgeon, a Patient, and the Remarkable Story of the First Face Transplant at Mayo Clinic,” and it details Sandness’ story.
Read the full story HERE.
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Yellowstone National Park has never published an official guide on how visitors can safely navigate a traffic jam caused by bison. That’s why wildlife photographer Max Waugh published his own.
The right way to deal with bison jams is a contentious issue among Yellowstone visitors. Many people frown upon proactive measures, but Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that others prefer not to wait for hours while the bison aimlessly wander or wait on the two-lane roads.
“I think the default of a lot of people when they run into a bison jam is to just sit and let the bison do their thing. But he brings up the point that there are emergencies on the park roads, and the park roads are a corridor of traffic for locals in addition to tourists. So he's saying, be respectful of the animals, give them a wide berth. But that doesn't mean that you can't take some more proactive action while you're waiting for the bison to do what they're going to do, because they're not on a human schedule. They're going to stay in the road as long as they want to.”
Waugh’s pictorial guide to bison jams hasn’t been endorsed by the National Park Service, as it’s based on his personal opinions and experiences. Nevertheless, it’s one of the only resources for anyone caught in traffic trepidation when bison brush past their vehicles.
Read the full story HERE.
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In the early 1970s, the raptors that many nations — including the United States — consider symbols of power and pride were, in the eyes of some prominent Wyoming ranchers, just predators at the top of a food chain that needed to be removed.
Poison, along with helicopter flights carrying “gunners” with 12-gauge shotguns, was the preferred method to deal with the federally protected bald and golden eagles that the ranchers viewed as threats.
But Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck reports that when two high school boys found the carcasses of a number of bald and golden eagles in a canyon southwest of Casper in May 1971, the days of good-old-boy solutions that defied the law clashed with a growing national focus on protecting eagles.
“Back in 1971 two teenagers in Casper were in a canyon southwest of town, and they found these dead, golden and bald eagles, and so they alerted the local Audubon Society. And that led to an investigation that uncovered some ranchers here in Wyoming that were targeting Eagles to get rid of them because of a supposed threat to their sheep herds. So they were shooting the Eagles from helicopters. There were Eagles being poisoned from antelope that were filled with poison.”
The teens’ discoveries led to an outcry that went all the way to Congress, a U.S. Senate investigation and criminal charges against ranchers Van Irvine, his son Lee Irvine, and two others. Investigations would also target Irvine’s father-in-law Herman Werner, a prominent rancher, longtime bank director and trustee of the Cowboy Hall of Fame.
Read the full story HERE.
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The future of federal highway grants for wildlife crossings in Wyoming remains in question. What started as a $300 million federal grant pool for wildlife projects across the country is shrinking fast, with about $80 million to $100 million remaining.
Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that with federal money for wildlife crossings drying up and on hold, wildlife advocates are soliciting private donations to get crossing projects rolling again.
“The National Wildlife Federation might have found a solution. I talked to their director, who's actually out of California, but she and many others just took a road trip all across the West, including in Wyoming, to check sites out, and they are trying to raise half a billion in private funds as seed money to get wildlife crossing projects going, not only in Wyoming, but pretty much the entire western half the country.”
The most notable project that’s currently on hold is a crossing along vital mule deer migration routes along U.S. Highway 26 near Dubois.
Read the full story HERE.
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Castle Gardens, a historic site located in remote Fremont County, has a reputation as being one of the most unusual places in the Wind River and Bighorn Basins.
The strange, twisting Paleocene and Cretaceous sandstone outcroppings are home to thousands of petroglyphs, including the unique Castle Gardens shields.
Cowboy State Daily’s Jackie Dorothy reports that previously, it was believed the Kiowa and Kiowa Apache did not appear in the Rocky Mountain region until the 18th century, but an archaeologist who has spent years studying the site has come to the startling realization that the art came from early members of those tribes, centuries earlier than they were previously believed to be in the region.
“up until recently, they thought that… the Kiowa and the Apache did not show up in Wyoming until about the 1800s but this rock art, when they started really diving in and using This new tracing technique that they pioneered, and were able to look at the paints, the style of it, they discovered that the Apache were here in the 1400s… they had this one shield of a warrior at Castle gardens here, just down near Riverton and Shoshone. And it was a picture of this bear coming out of a den, and this has been captured on shields that the Kiowa and the Crow Indians both used. That's one of the ways that they were able to figure out who actually made that artwork.”
The Bureau of Land Management oversees the site and is enthusiastic about the new data pointing toward a Kiowa presence and has begun to reach out to the southern tribes now believed to be associated with Castle Gardens.
Read the full story HERE.
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Jeffrey City didn’t die after the uranium bust in the 1980s. Some people just stopped looking for signs of life.
Cowboy State Daily’s Hannah Brock and Reilly Strand have produced a documentary titled, “Jeffrey City’s Not Dead," and it traces the lives of six residents, offering a window into a place that sparks curiosity across Wyoming, but is often dismissed or treated like a roadside oddity.
“Most of Fremont County just treats us like black sheep. We don't exist out here, you know, kind of like everybody says, Wyoming don't exist. Well, Jeffrey city doesn't exist either. Used to be when I was young and people say, Oh, I live in Jeffrey city. I'd say, Oh, my God. Why? But now that I've lived here, I understand the charm
The uranium industry transformed the small town of Home on the Range into Jeffrey city, a booming town of 4000 people, until falling uranium prices led to mass layoffs in the early 80s, and people up and left in droves for the ones who are still here. The remnants of this town's past are appealing in their own way, and to them, this place is more than a ghost town or a roadside oddity.
To me, this is whole it may not be a ranch and it may not be raising stuff, but I'm here. I've got my goats, I've got my chickens, and I have my horses, and that's all I need. I'm just here because I could afford it, and it's working out. So I'm happy. I don't really wish that anything would change, mostly because I don't think they will.
A ghost town doesn't have 50 people. No, there aren't 50 people here, and they're gonna be here for a long time. Well, wholesales, they're gonna be here for a while.
Jeffrey city didn't die in the 80s. Many people just stopped checking for signs of life.
I came in November of 1975 to work at Western Nicola mines, and we worked for almost six years before the mines closed and we moved back out here three and a half years ago.
While Steven worked in the mines, Linda was a teacher's aide and receptionist for the school district.
It happened like overnight. Soon as they the school got word that Western nuclear was doing all the layoffs, they brought the teachers in. They had just signed their contracts for the next year. They had to call the teachers in one by one and say, sorry you don't have a job here anymore for a population of over 600 kids, and obviously, since the town just about moved away, they didn't need that many for me working in the office that day, that was a really heartbreaking day. I think it was for the whole town to know that your neighbor was gonna be gone.
This was all school building, one building from kindergarten or first grade all the way through high school. And several years ago, they just tore it all down, took it all down, and just left the original school here, which will reopen this school year for however many kids there's probably going to be two or three, and they said if there's even one kid that would go to school here, they will reopen it. That's amazing. They didn't know ahead of time when they put all this money out here and built this huge building that they'd close a year later. That's just hard to imagine. Well, we thought the town was really going to continue to boom at the time, and it did for a short period.
As Jeffrey city flourished, the town kept investing in its future. Just a year before the bust, voters approved a $2 million bond, partially to build a state of the art gymnasium. It was only used a few times."
You can watch the rest of the documentary at Cowboy State Daily.com.
Watch the video HERE.
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