It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, August 4th. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by the Converse County Tourism Promotion Board! Discover Douglas and Glenrock in beautiful Wyoming, where rich history, outdoor adventure, and welcoming communities await. Feel the Energy of Converse County at www.ConverseCountyTourism.com.
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Because he removed emissions controls from diesel engines, a 65-year-old Wyoming man is bracing for his sixth month in federal prison. Tampering with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-required emissions systems is a federal felony, and Troy Lake pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act in June of last year.
Lake will also live out the rest of his days as a convicted felon, unless he receives a pardon from President Donald Trump. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that recent changes in the regulatory landscape fuel that hope.
“I took on this story because I heard from a person who was trying to help the Lake family, like, these rules might soon be reversed, and yet, this man is in prison. But after I wrote it, I mean, I've gotten a flood of emails and online interaction from people who are just like, ‘Yeah, I'm about to quit trucking,’ or ‘I've burned up on the side of the road. This man is a hero,’ you know. And I didn't frame the story that way. I just told the story head on, bare bones, these are the facts. But the absolute deluge of sympathy and concern and outrage toward the mandates that has followed this story, I did not anticipate.”
Lake reported to prison Feb. 10 and remains at the FCI Florence correctional complex in Colorado – but as the Trump administration inches toward reversing the mandates that landed Lake in prison, his family is pushing for the president to pardon him.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Colorado ranching family recently went under a $6.7 million contract to buy the Muleshoe Ranch just north of Torrington, which includes 4,300 acres with three center pivots and strong water rights.
Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that the seller's decision to get out of cattle ranching reflects multiple pressures facing today's beef producers.
“There seems to be a collection of trends right now in the cattle industry. One of them is the drought that's reducing the amount of feed that's available just through rain and growing there on the ranch that's reduced herd sizes. There's been some bottlenecks around process processing. There's also an aging group of ranchers right now who are hitting their golden years. And when you see cattle at the prices they're fetching right now, they immediately think of cashing out. And some are.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for uncooked beef steaks are 198.43% higher in 2025 than they were in 1997.
Read the full story HERE.
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Lynn Dianne Olson, known as Dianne to those who knew her, was 16 when she vanished from the GP Bar guest ranch about 50 miles northwest of Pinedale.
She and her twin brother, Mike, had come from Utah to spend the summer working on the ranch. She had only been there for about a month when she disappeared on June 28, 1963. Now Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher reports that Dianne’s sister, Camillia, holds out hope that it’s never too late to find her sister’s remains.
“The theories were that Diane might have wandered off, gotten lost in the wilderness, or she might have tried to hitchhike back to Salt Lake City or catch a ride with somebody, and her sister, Camillia, said there's no way, there's no way that Diane would have done that she was a good just a very wholesome, Athletic, nice girl, and they were very excited to be on the grandparents ranch that summer, working. So her sister believes that she was foul play, that likely somebody raped and killed her sister and buried her body or hid her body somewhere on the property. And her goal, at this point, she no longer believes her sister’s alive, but her goal is to find her and bring her home and give her a proper funeral.”
Camillia hopes her sister’s remains will one day be discovered and believes it’s never too late to get answers. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office.
Read the full story HERE.
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If you’ve ever listened to morning radio in Cheyenne, high school sports or coverage of Cheyenne Frontier Days on the FM airwaves, you’d instantly recognize Larry Proietti's baritone voice.
But after undergoing numerous cancer surgeries that have left him disfigured, Cowboy State Daily’s Zakary Sonntag reports that the veteran broadcaster continues to inspire on and off the mic with resilience and grit.
“His entire face was changed, and he said, at times I felt like it was wearing a Halloween mask, and I was afraid that I was going to scare people and scare the kids, so I didn't want to go out. It was impacting the way he was soliciting new business, because he knew how big of a distraction and how uncomfortable it made people feel, and the fact that he has basically swallowed his pride, while still not giving up on improving his situation, getting back to something that he is proud of, in terms of how he looks, while still adjusting to this new reality. It's a really inspiring story.”
Proietti is cancer free now, having defied death with the help of medical specialists who successfully removed the carcinoma. He’s back on air with a Sunday morning program while promoting and strengthening his station's other shows.
Read the full story HERE.
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The death of a 43-year-old man who spent days repeatedly climbing up and down Snow King Mountain in a test of endurance and athleticism is drawing renewed attention, and scrutiny, on an increasingly popular climbing trend called “Everesting.”
Slava Leykind died July 2 at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls, Idaho, while attempting his Everesting challenge, which is trying to climb the equivalent of Mount Everest in 36 hours. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi spoke to experienced mountaineers who said that while Everesting might not be the same test of ultimate endurance as an actual Everest ascent, it is an intense physical challenge.
“Going up Everest requires oxygen and Sherpas, and it can take up to two weeks, whereas Everesting, you do it within a fixed amount of time, in the case of the event at Snow King mountain in Jackson, 36 hours. So it's something that skilled mountaineers wouldn't take lightly, and they wouldn't recommend other people take lightly as well, because it is an endurance challenge… if you're doing it 19 times, and you're doing it within a 36 hour window, that can lead to some pretty serious side effects, which unfortunately this Connecticut man experienced.”
The Teton County Coroner’s Office confirmed that Leykind died of “an electrolyte imbalance causing cardiac arrest.” This condition is called hyponatremia, which can be caused by anything from underlying medical conditions to drinking too much water.
Read the full story HERE.
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When people found out that artist Jordan Dean would paint 80-foot-tall murals on two of Cheyenne’s water towers, he heard all kinds of ideas about how to accomplish the feat.
But Dean told Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean that he used a method that’s worked well for him with other major mural projects - epoxy, a couple of boom lifts and a projector.
“What they really use are these big booms, boom lifts, they call them. And he actually has two. He has one that's set up to project the image on the tank, and then he has another that he himself is standing in. And he's thinking of himself like he's the tip of the ballpoint pen, drawing these humongous horses on the side of this tank with basically cans of spray paint that are close to the color of the epoxy… This paints rated to like 30 years. If it's properly mixed. It's an epoxy, though, so the minute you mix it, it starts hardening and drying out, right? So you got about an hour to work with this paint… And it's not inexpensive paint either. It's like 400 bucks a gallon.”
Dean said that Cheyenne officials were insistent that no taxpayer money be used on the murals, so private fundraising is making the tank murals a reality.
Read the full story HERE.
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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down its operations after Congress stripped its federal funding amid claims from Republican lawmakers that CPB-funded media outlets propagate a left-wing, “woke” bias.
Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that for the Wyoming Public Broadcast Service, losing CPB funding represents a budget deficit of $1.4 million annually, or about a third.
“Unless the public was or I guess, individual donors, other sources, were willing to cough up 1.1 billion in a big hurry, of course, it was going to shut down. And as it shut down, there's all of this argument about what role public media should serve, if any, going forward. And you know, Joanna Kail, the CEO of Wyoming PBS, said, maybe this is a time, especially for some of those national public outlets that have possibly disregarded their rural satellites, to reflect on what it means to be invested with the trust of the entire public.”
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has managed to survive for six decades, and never before faced the shutdown that is now a reality.
Read the full story HERE.
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And a Wyoming man has discovered a family heirloom — an ivory-handled Colt .44 revolver — is a part of Old West outlaw history thought to be lost.
The grandson of Sam Swanner, a Deputy Sheriff from what was then known as Jackson’s Hole, began to research the history of a gun he inherited from his father. Tom Neiwirth told Cowboy State Daily’s Jackie Dorothy reports that it most likely once belonged to George Spencer, a 30-year-old horse thief, who had been gunned down in Idaho in 1892.
“All the signs are pointing towards this gun is actually the gun that was lifted off an outlaw during the 1892 horse wars here in Wyoming. So the horse wars, just to give you context, crossed over into Idaho, Montana, just spilled over, and it was the ranchers doing a war of extermination on these horse thieves. They approached this cabin, had a gun fight. These two young horse thieves died. They're in their late 20s, early 30s, and one of them had a gun that was ivory handled. They described it and Swanner, Deputy Sheriff Sam Swanner, is known to have bent down and picked it up.”
Neiwirth, who was adopted when he was just days old, continues to dig into his birth family’s history, and said the gun he has connects him to the grandfather he never knew even existed.
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.
