It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, September 29th. I’m Mac Watson, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom…
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Why would you pay about 2 mill for a used Gulfstream jet when you can possibly acquire a Fairchild C-119L Flying Boxcar military transport plane for $150? Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that Big Horn County is selling the aircraft, mainly from the World War II and Cold War eras, after the Wyoming Supreme Court gave the go-ahead.
“So none of these aircraft are air worthy. They date back to the World War Two, Cold War era, and a lot of them have been used for parts over the years to manage similar planes that are still in the air. Big Horn county managed to get several of them. They're 16 up for auction through a convoluted, convoluted legal thing, but basically, someone who owned the planes wasn't paying their rent, and they didn't pay their rent, so they seized the assets, and now they're auctioning them off. So the thing is, you can buy some of these planes. The starting bids for some of them are as low as $25 and up to upwards of $500 to catch is you can buy it for cheap, but you have to move it or disassemble it on your own.”
If you, or someone you know who would be interested in bidding on these aviation treasures, look up the website Public Surplus.
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When former Casper resident, Sgt. Thomas L. Cotner disappeared without a trace in the Pacific during World War II, his family was left with unanswered questions like: “What happened to the B-17 that Tom and his crew members were flying in after returning from a successful bombing mission. Now, Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that, eight decades later, a man named Justin Taylor has some answers for the Cotner family.
“Pacific Wrecks is in a unique position, where it's out and about in the Pacific doing active research. And Justin Taylor was in another part of New Guinea when he heard about this discovery made by a logging crew that was building a road through a really remote and high elevation place in New Britain Island, New Guinea. And so he rushed to the scene. So that was really fortuitous that that he happened to be within reach and could get there within days. And then he's armed with all of these serial numbers for all the B seventeens that saw action in that part of the Pacific Theater. So he was the perfect guy, right place, right time, matched the wreckage, and then started doing these amazing deep dive research projects into each service member.”
Sgt. Cotner was deployed to the Pacific and earned recognition for bravery in August of 1942. A month later, he and the other eight members of his B-17 Flying Fortress crew disappeared.
Read the story HERE.
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Wyoming’s executive branch has told the state’s highest court that if it doesn’t reverse a judge’s order expanding the legislature’s public school funding expectations to include a computer for every student and other provisions, it’ll amount to letting schools, not the legislature, determine school funding in Wyoming. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland says the Tuesday filing by the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office in its appeal of the Wyoming Education Association’s school-funding lawsuit is the latest in this three-year saga.
“It was way back like February that Judge Perlier said, Okay, you guys need to reassess how you fund education. Needs to be one computing device for each kid. Needs to be elementary school level counselors and fill in the school lunch gaps. And so that case is now on appeal in the Wyoming Supreme Court, with some kind of barbed back and forth between the public school advocates and the Wyoming Attorney General's Office, where Wyoming is saying things like, why do you guys claim to be doing a good job when you're renewing your accreditation, but you claim that you can't do a good job because of our funding when you're suing us.”
WEA sued in 2022. A handful of school districts have joined the lawsuit.
Read the full story HERE.
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After a four-year quest, elk hunter Terrance Monger got what he considers the bull elk of a lifetime — a behemoth of an animal, shot on public land in Wyoming with a general season hunting tag. Outdoors Reporter Mark Heinz reports, the Gillette man says from the first moment he saw the bull in northeast Wyoming’s Hunt Area 129 four seasons ago, he was obsessed.
“A bull in a 370 inch class is pretty darn big for Wyoming. the odds against this guy getting this thing in. The icing on the cake is that he chased the same bull for four years before he got it. Every time he went out, it just had a way of circling him or getting into the thick timber. Just evaded it for four years. And he finally, after four years of pursuing the elk, he got it this, this fall, this month in a kind of an early season rifle hunt there.”
Monger tells Cowboy State Daily that it was pure tenacity and refusing to give up that helped him bag the animal.
Read the full story HERE.
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I’ll be back with more news, right after this.
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A man from Star Valley was hiking in the beautiful badlands near Kemmerer, when he noticed a bone-white streak jutting out an embankment of brown earth. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports that dinosaur bones have been found all over Wyoming, but this one is different.
“The foot was found in southwest Wyoming, and it was found in an Eocene paleosol. Now, the Eocene is about 50 to 55 million years ago. It's right after the time the dinosaurs got wiped out by the asteroid. But this was not rock. It was a loose soil from that time, and the foot appears to have tumbled into it, because even though it looks like a fossil in situ, still in the rock where it was preserved, it's actually a modern foot, you can still see some of the connective tissue that tumbled into this loose soil that happens to be around 55 million years old. So it's interesting in circumstance, but not interesting in actuality, because it doesn't belong where it is”
Hiker James Sanderson sent an email to the Wyoming State Geological Survey telling them of his find. They responded by telling Sanderson that their specialist is waiting to connect with paleontologists from the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, who will be looking at it more closely in the field.
Read the full story HERE.
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Curt Gowdy State Park is a 35-mile trail system that attracts close to 600,000 visitors per year. And with most being from Colorado, Cowboy State Daily’s David Madison reports that Wyoming legislators want all users to help pay for the trails they're loving, but “greenies” would pay more.
“Certain folks in Wyoming use the term “greenie” to identify Coloradans, and it's because of that iconic green and white license plate that shows the outline of the mountains. Well, you see a lot of those license plates in places like Curt Gowdy State Park, which is increasingly popular among mountain bikers…Well, now comes a proposal to charge a trail fee similar to what's charged to snowmobilers and ATV years to help pay their way and make sure that trails are maintained and that it that these places across Wyoming, including this new, amazing mountain bike trail up on to pass that recently was renovated, and sounds like a great downhill, seven full miles. If riders access through a state park, this law, which is just a proposed bill…might slap a $20 per car.
If the proposed bill passes, monies collected would be used for signage, policing, and bathroom maintenance.
Read the full story HERE.
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Mining has always been a dangerous occupation, especially coal mining. But back in the 1920’s Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck reports that even though The Frontier mine blast became the second worst mining disaster in the state and the Sublet, Wyoming explosion the fifth, the number of fatalities could’ve been a lot worse in the 1924 accident.
“What's interesting to me is that the men in the first explosion, you know, there was men that survived by just staying inside the mine. They had the thought to stay inside the mine and until the ventilation improved, so they blocked their air passages to not allow gas to get into where they were at, and so because of that, they spent hours in the mine, but they ended up surviving.”
After the two tragedies, the State Coal Mine Inspectors of Wyoming report emphasized that no matches or smoking material were allowed in the mine because of coal dust and flammable gas.
Read the full story HERE.
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And Robert Redford was an iconic actor who, like many people, fell in love with The West. But as Cowboy State Daily’s Jackie Dorothy reports, Wyoming had a special allure for the Oscar-winning actor and director.
“So what Robert Redford did is he immersed himself in the wild west. I think this set him apart from many of the actors of his day, and even today, he visited where the outlaws lived, slept, played. He was right there in the middle of it, and he experienced so many of the different things, from the cold of the night to sitting at the bar where the outlaws congregated…And so what Redford really valued about Wyoming was the outlaw West, and that's what he explored, and he did it in a very real and raw way.”
Redford had spent time over the years immersing himself in his breakout roles of both Butch Cassidy and mountain man Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson. He passed away at 89 on September 16th.
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 Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.
