It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Wednesday, June 25th. 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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Enclosed in the U.S. Senate’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is language that, if it becomes law, would require the sale of between half and three-quarters of a percent of Bureau of Land Management and National Forest System parcels.
Now, even if they can’t agree on much else, Wyomingites across the board value access to public land. That’s what the state’s four living former governors told Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz. They said that it comes as no surprise that strong opposition to proposed public land sales crossed political party and ideological lines.
“We talked today with all four of Wyoming's living formal former governors, Matt Mead, Dave Freudenthal, Jim Geringer and Mike Sullivan, and they all pretty much said the same thing, that really that's a huge part of why people even live in Wyoming is those vast tracts of easily accessible public land right outside their back doors. They don't have to ask anybody permission. They don't need any special permits, no trespass fees. They just go where they want to. You know, whether it's hunting, fishing, mountain biking, name, any outdoor activity that you can name, Wyomingites love it. And so that was one big reason why there was such a unified pushback against this bill.”
Read the full story HERE.
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Now Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that the Senator from Utah who has ignited controversy in Western states by proposing a mandatory selloff of between 2 million and 3 million acres of public lands in the next five years is offering to scale back his plan.
“Monday night, Senator Mike Lee did this big post on x.com like, I'm gonna pull the Forest Service lands. I'm gonna winnow the BLM land so it's just five miles outside of a population center. We're gonna have freedom zones to benefit American families. And it sounded great. And some people were like, yeah, they're listening, you know, to the outcry. But David Wills, who works for a group that's concerned about public lands, was like, we haven't seen the text, firstly. And secondly, I mean, this could hit the Senate floor Thursday, whereas usually, like, if there's a public land transfer under… federal law, there's like weeks of public comment and there's like stakeholder meetings, and there's all this deliberation. So he was saying, it still is something that is getting jammed through in a budget reconciliation bill.”
Alex Bakken, who spoke to Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday in his role as president of the Bow Hunters of Wyoming, was cautiously optimistic after hearing Lee’s proposed change. If nothing else, he said, it’s a sign of congressional lawmakers listening to people.
Read the full story HERE.
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A revolution in drilling technology is transforming Wyoming's Powder River Basin, turning what was once an economically challenging oil play into a more promising frontier.
The revolution centers on horizontal drilling. Although the technique has been around for more than a century, Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that Anschutz Exploration Corp is pushing the industry by drilling Wyoming’s first 3-mile lateral well on a pad in Johnson County.
“If you think of a oil well as a straw going into the ground, the horizontal technology essentially bends the straw and goes horizontally through the oil reserve. And that's important, because a lot of this oil is trapped in these thin, you know, shallow and wide reserves. So you don't want to just punch vertically through it. You want to go horizontally to access all of the resource. And there is a three mile lateral drilling project that was announced by one company, and then there's other two mile and three mile projects going in across the Powder River Basin.”
Because horizontal drilling makes it possible to access 3 miles of underground reserves, it’s possible to produce more oil with fewer rigs in the Powder River Basin. The BLM projects the Anschutz development could generate between $18 billion and $28 billion in federal revenues, while creating about 8,000 jobs over its 10-year timeline.
Read the full story HERE.
Three Cheyenne teens accused of burning down a vacant home in northeast Cheyenne were charged with arson Monday.
Warrants were issued for Kyle Brown, Ryder Peterson and Brayden Weil, who are all 18, and all face third-degree arson charges. Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck reports that the felony charges stem from a fire that claimed a brick house on Ridge Road in the early morning hours of May 28.
“Apparently four teenagers just decided to do something wild and crazy, and so they get out of their beds, or they don't go to bed, and at 1230 in the morning on a Cheyenne road, they go into a vacant property, and inside there, two of them at least, decide to start a fire in a basement. According to court records, and the record also says that one of them also started a fire in the garage on the property… There were a total of four different fires started within that vacant home, and so now they are facing felony charges in Cheyenne Circuit Court, potential, five year penalty.”
A fourth suspect has yet to be charged in the case.
Read the full story HERE.
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While the firearms industry is cyclical, the current slump in gun and ammo sales might defy the usual explanations.
Two Wyoming industry experts told Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz that gun sales are frequently driven by politics.
“If there is an administration in office, that at least people have the perception that they're going to implement more gun control, such as Obama or Biden, gun sales will predictably rise. But then they say what will happen is what they call a Trump Slump. In other words, Trump comes into office, he's perceived as being very firearms friendly, and so people go, Okay, I don't have to worry about a bunch of new gun control. I can relax… There's also economic factors going on. People are unsure about the effects of the tariffs. People aren't sure about, you know, the extreme instability in the geopolitical situation, how that might affect the economy? So… items such as firearms, could, you know, arguably, they're almost kind of a luxury item that you buy when you have some extra money. So people are hesitant to make purchases like that right now.”
Additionally, the hunting firearm market is usually slow this time of year, because the fall big game and bird seasons are a long way off. Sales usually pick up in August, when hunting is back on everybody’s minds.
Read the full story HERE.
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A handful of state House representatives who control Wyoming’s spending wore red dress coats to their Monday committee meeting in Gillette, to make a statement that the state is heading toward a projected deficit of nearly $700 million in the next five years.
House Appropriations Chair John Bear of Gillette told Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland that the move was a visual alarm to warn of the concerning state budget projection.
“He was like, it's because we're projected to be in this $700 million-ish deficit by 2030 if we don't change our spending scheme, our revenue scheme, our budgetary scheme. And so he was talking like, we need to cut fraud, waste, abuse, inefficient programs, we need to work on all these things, whereas former appropriations committee members who fielded the budget before, who handled spending before, like Lloyd Larson and Clark Stith, said, Well, there's also huge tax cuts implemented in the past couple years that Bear and some of the other people in red coats supported, and so maybe they need to reconsider those.”
The Wyoming Constitution forbids the state from running on a deficit, which means the state would have to cut spending, raise revenues, pull from its savings account, or a combination of all of those.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Hudson man busted by a vigilante child predator patrol YouTuber will serve 10 years in federal prison after admitting to possessing child pornography.
Federal District Judge Alan Johnson sentenced 58-year-old Sean Brennan to 120 months Tuesday afternoon in Cheyenne. Cowboy State Daily’s Matthew Christian reports that the vigilantes confronted Brennan at his job in Lander about his sexual conversations with adults pretending to be underage girls.
“There's a group called Colorado Pedo Patrol who reached out to him or contacted him and pretended to be a 13 year old girl… he contacted them… they went to his place of business and confronted him. He got fired. He was arrested at the state level. That charge was later dropped, and then he was arrested on a federal possession of child pornography charge and pleaded guilty earlier this year.”
Johnson also imposed 10 years of supervision following Brennan’s release from prison and restitution totaling $33,000. Specifically, Brennan is ordered to pay $3,000 to 11 victims.
Read the full story HERE.
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Lorri Lang’s passion project is a Facebook community that started as a group of 10 friends sharing their favorite photos of Wyoming.
Since Lang first launched Wyoming Through The Lens in 2015, the online photo repository has soared to a community of nearly 465,000 today.
Not only is the group large in number, it has a reputation for prolific engagement. A single post will often get hundreds of comments and thousands of likes within hours, if not minutes, Lang told Cowboy State Daily’s Zakary Sonntag. But that changed three weeks ago.
“All of the people that are a part of this group are constantly commenting. They're liking, they're sharing posts. And overnight, Facebook changed its algorithms and all of that engagement basically plummeted to zero… And what's even worse is that there's no clear path forward for what to do about it, and she can't get in touch with anybody at Facebook. Can't get in touch with anybody at meta, and there's no sense of what's happening, why it's happening, what if it's meant to happen, or if something's going wrong… you just have to weather the storm and find creative, new ways to get your audience re engaged.”
For Lang, the group’s greatest purpose is not promoting tourism, it’s connecting people to their home, from deployed military members and out-of-state college students or those who may be carried elsewhere by life circumstances. She says groups like Wyoming Through the Lens foster a sense of connectedness that helps make new places feel like home.
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.
