It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Tuesday, July 15th. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by Cheyenne Frontier Days. Ten days of rodeo thrills, Xtreme Bulls, live concerts, carnival rides, western heritage, and unforgettable cowboy spirit in Cheyenne, Wyoming! Don’t miss the 129th Daddy of ‘Em all July 18-27th.
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Yellowstone National Park has announced the discovery of a new thermal feature — a 13-foot baby blue hot spring in the Norris Geyser Basin.
The U.S. Geological Survey announced that the new pool emerged sometime around Christmas and was first spotted in April. While the feature doesn’t have a name, Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that it’s an exciting new addition to the most dynamic thermal basin in Yellowstone.
“It was a Christmas gift of sorts to geologists who study Yellowstone National Park. It wasn't there December 19 of 2024, but it started forming within that window, and by February, we had a 13 foot wide pool that is filled with - it's a hot spring, so its water is warm, but not scalding hot… the kind of milky blue color, which Wendy so aptly described, like the blue milk from Star Wars… comes from the high amount of dissolved silica in the water. So it's just kind of like a cloudy blue that's a result of the rock that's in the area. But it is a new pool in Yellowstone, and geologists are monitoring it very closely, because it's it's an ever changing place, but it's exciting when you get something like this that came subtly.”
Unlike the explosion in Biscuit Basin last year, or other more volatile changes in Yellowstone, the event that led to the formation of this new pool didn’t register on any of Yellowstone’s seismic stations and barely registered on acoustic sensors.
Read the full story HERE.
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While efforts are moving forward to reverse part of a Biden administration rule that would end mining coal in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin by 2041, Montana faces a similar fight.
Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that Montana's entire congressional delegation has introduced legislation to overturn a Biden-era decision that effectively bans new coal leasing on nearly 2 million acres of federal land in eastern Montana.
“I won't get into the kind of boring minutia of the rule making, but they can introduce a resolution to essentially reverse decisions made in the Miles City Resource Management Plan, which oversees Montana's section of the Powder River Basin. So it's a lot of area, it's a lot of coal resource, and we'll see how the industry responds… We spoke to one local conservationist who's worried that this whole process and approval timeline is speeding up so much that he's concerned that he and his neighbors might not have their voice heard as they're watching different areas in eastern Montana get put up for potential development.”
The Powder River Basin spans both Montana and Wyoming and makes up about 85% of federal coal production and 40% of all coal production in the United States.
Read the full story HERE.
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A 61-year-old New Zealand man was sentenced Monday to 4-4.5 years in a Wyoming prison for stealing millions of dollars in silver and gold from his father’s Lincoln County home while his 90-year-old father was away from home.
Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that in late 2023, Michael Reps started taking gold from his father’s home, but told authorities that he had no idea that this case would surface to the criminal level, adding that he was trying to intervene in what he saw as a family crisis.
“According to Reps, he was worried that someone was pilfering the family money, and that, you know, the Reps side of the family was getting cut out of the will or of other help… But on the other side of that, Lincoln County's chief deputy prosecutor, Amber Oakley was like, okay, so if you were just trying to help your siblings and preserve your dad's wishes, why are you spending 10s and 10s of 1000s of dollars on designer bags and clothing events, high dollar wines, things like that?”
Reps was also ordered to pay $2 million in restitution to his father, an amount meant to offset any sums he’s ordered to pay in a civil case filed in a Nevada court.
Read the full story HERE.
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For Harvey Deselms, dreams really do come true.
For nearly two decades, the Cheyenne art dealer has dreamed of seeing bronze sculptures lining every corner of Capital Avenue. Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that now, Cheyenne’s Capitol Avenue Bronze Project is closing in on its 100th sculpture. There have been 82 installed so far, and another nine are already spoken for and in the works.
“When they started this Wendy, they thought it would take them three years to get to 32 statues. And 20 months later, they had a statue on every corner of Capitol Avenue… putting up bronze statues, that's usually a pretty time consuming, lengthy process. Three years 32 statues was already pretty ambitious… They started in 2021, here it is 2025, and they've almost reached 100.”
Deselms said the sculptures have captured not just the history of Cheyenne and Wyoming, but personality as well. Cowboy culture shines out from them, and it’s captivating to the tourists who visit each year.
Read the full story HERE.
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The man who was shot to death Friday in an alley in Pinedale was a 67-year-old local man from a community known as Bargerville.
67-year-old Paul Browning died of a single gunshot wound to the chest in the manner of “homicide.” That’s what the Sublette County Coroner told Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland on Monday.
“So homicide is a big umbrella term that coroners use. It just means one person's actions led to the death of another… Prosecutors and law enforcement have to take a narrower look like… was it accidental? In which case we aren't going to charge it? Was it criminal? In which case we are going to charge it? Or was it justified, in which case we are not going to charge it. And so even though you have this big umbrella now established, like you, guy died, homicide, gunshot wound to the chest, it now falls to investigators and prosecutors to determine, Okay, is it justified, or is it criminal?”
Death investigators pulled toxicology information but won’t have those results back for around four weeks.
Read the full story HERE.
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Black bears have become so common around Sheridan County that locals consider them neighbors, and when there is trouble, it’s usually because people are behaving badly.
But Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that it’s generally bears that end up paying the price.
“I just talked to a couple people about long term trends there, including a guy who owns a cabin up in Story and has seen a lot. And he said, Yeah, several years ago, a black bear broke into a shed and stole a deer carcass he had hanging in there, and that bear was deemed a repeat offender. And so that bear was killed by game agents. And that does happen occasionally… it's kind of that sad, same old story when things do go badly, it's usually, it usually starts with bad human behavior, but ends with the bear being killed.”
So far this summer, Game and Fish reports that black bear activity is about normal. There have been three conflicts reported so far this year, all caused by human carelessness.
Read the full story HERE.
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Sweetwater County’s top prosecutor will have to wait at least an extra month to pursue charges against a New Mexico man accused of a 1982 bombing attack in Green River as he has his sanity evaluated.
76-year-old Stephen Campbell is accused of sending a bomb to his ex-wife’s new boyfriend’s house in Green River in 1982, causing a blast that blew off one of her fingers and injured her hand, chest, legs and feet. But Clair McFarland reports that it has taken decades to bring Campbell to justice.
“The guy is accused of living under the identity of his deceased college classmate who died years ago, and how the Feds grabbed him is they allege that he used a false passport to get thousands of dollars of Social Security benefits. So they're claiming social security fraud, which, you know, has parked him in a federal case for now, but he's asking for a mental health evaluation, which could, you know, that could delay the case at least a month, if not longer. It could throw a monkey wrench in the prosecution if he can never be well enough to be prosecuted.”
Campbell was caught in New Mexico amid a dramatic standoff with law enforcement Feb. 19, more than 40 years after he bonded out of jail and skipped court in Wyoming on an attempted murder charge.
Read the full story HERE.
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More than 300 firefighters are fighting the Deer Creek Fire in southern Utah, which as of Monday has exploded to more than 10,000 acres and is 0% contained.
One of the most remarkable images from the raging wildfire is a swirling vortex of fire, smoke and wind. But Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that while some have called the phenomenon a “Firenado,” it’s actually more of a fire “Devil.”
“It's formed by the same atmospheric conditions that form dust devils. You have heat rising off the ground as heat does, and when that vertical motion combines with the horizontal motion of wind in the atmosphere, you get a swirl of dust. That's a dust devil. The same thing can happen in wildfires, and that's when you get these fire devils, and they are extremely dangerous, extremely fast moving, because when they're sucking that hot air into this chimney, if you will, this vortex of flame and smoke, they're sucking oxygen into the fire, which makes things worse.”
Fire devils can swirl into existence wherever a wildfire burns. Experts say the best way to counter them is to avoid them, while trusting in the strength of other defenses.
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.
