Daily Darwin

[{"type":"text","text":"British police in action......"}]

Darwin 10 14 25

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Daily Darwin: Tuesday, October 14, 2025 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

British police in action......

Daily Darwin: Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Jackie Dorothy.

Jackie Dorothy

Around Wyoming

 in Hot Springs County that was becoming a ghost town by the time World War II broke out. 

Beginning in 1932, the once busy mines were being closed permanently and families were moving away, with only a few remaining to work in smaller private mines. Then World War II called away the young men of Gebo to serve as soldiers, many of them still teenagers.

and his friends formed the Junior Marines and

re just as dedicated as any who were serving abroad.

“We all tried to be good soldiers, and whenever any of us got out of line, you sure heard about it from the rest of the group,” Bolich, 93, told Cowboy State Daily. “I think the added discipline was good for all of us.”

Bolich said that whenever they heard of a soldier coming home on furlough, the Junior Marines would gather at the schoolhouse and march to the soldier's home to sing the Marines' Hymn.

“When the family would come outside to see what was going on, we would salute the soldier and then march back to the school,” Bolich said. “We never gave any thought to the fact that they might have been in the Army, Air Force or Navy.”

Bolich chuckled at his youthful ignorance and said that when he was older he learned the soldiers and their parents got a kick out of watching the Junior Marines perform, especially if the soldier being serenaded was not an actual Marine.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Teenage Soldiers"}]

The Junior Marines were inspired by two Gebo teenagers who had both enlisted on the same day. 

Stanley "Dutch" Wedlock, 18, had graduated from Thermopolis High School and volunteered in the Marines. His younger brother, Lee, also volunteered to the Marines although he was only 16.

“Lee lied about his age so he could volunteer,” Bolich wrote in his memoirs, “Gebo, Living in a Coal Camp”. “At that time, there was such a demand for manpower that the War Department did not take the time to examine everyone's birth certificate. In fact, many of the soldiers could not produce a birth certificate, so if you looked 18, you were accepted.”

After their boot camp, Dutch and Lee were assigned to different Marine divisions. They were not to see each other for the next three years.

A miraculous story about the two young soldiers was broadcast to the world by the Denver Radio Station KOA and picked up by The Associated Press in July 1944.

“A story of Gebo boys comes out of Saipan, Marianas Islands,” Staff Sgt. Hy Hurwitz, a Marine Corps staff correspondent, reported. “Two brothers from Gebo, Wyo., met here by accident today just as Marines were about to start a push over one of the heavily fortified Jap-held hills.”

Marine Cpl. Stanley Wedlock had run out of ammunition and turned for help from another ‘Leatherneck’ who was unloading supplies on the beach.

[{"type":"text","text":"“Got any ammunition?” Wedlock asked."}]

When the Marine unloading ammunition turned around, Wedlock discovered it was his younger brother, Pvt. Leland R. Wedlock, whom he had not seen since they enlisted together in August, 1941.

Hurwitz, one of the official correspondents for the 18th Marines

, wrote dozens of human-interest stories from Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian, and later campaigns. 

He was so impressed with this chance encounter that Hurwitz sent a press release and the story 

 the world, including as the first presented on a new Marine program airing on KOA radio in Denver the following Monday.

“It was a rare experience that two Marines from a little town in Wyoming should meet during a battle on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” Bolich said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Young Marines"}]

Their youngest brother, Bob Wedlock, 12, was instrumental in forming the Junior Marines, according to Bolich.

“As patriotic youngsters, we all decided that we would join this group,” Bolich said. “All of the boys in the camp wanted to join.”

Bolich was one of the youngest at age 10 and the other boys who joined he named as Jack Toth, Fritz Jurovich, Joe Bandich, Pete Cavalli, Kenny Halbert, Jack Bretthauer, Buddy Cammock, Jim Hughes, Ken Bolich and Jim Isbell.

“In order to be sworn in, you had to be able to sing the Marines' Hymn,” Bolich said. “Once you did your performance, they would allow you to be a Junior Marine.”

found Navy officer caps in a catalog for about a dollar. The boys all saved money so they would have their ‘uniform dress.’

“They weren’t Marine hats but were Navy officer hats, but we got them and wore them,” Bolich said. “Boy, we were something. We felt like we were helping because people we knew were in the war.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Rubber Gun Rifle"}]

Once accepted as a Junior Marine, the boys were required to build a rubber gun rifle they would hold against their shoulders as they marched.

The boys would draw the outline of a rifle on boards they salvaged from the houses being torn down in Gebo. Sig Nelson, the grocer in Kirby, was also recruited into their wartime efforts. He would bring them wooden boxes from his store specifically for their guns.

“We would take a small axe and chop away a lot of the wood,” Bolich said. “When that was done, we moved on to using a knife to make a nicer finish.”

When the rifle was smooth, the boys would nail a heavy piece of string to the end of the "barrel" of the rifle. Four notches 

carved on the top of part of the barrel. Their ammunitions was from old inner tubes from the inside of car tires. The Junior Marines would then cut pieces out of the rubber about an inch wide.

“One tube gave us enough ammunition for our whole squad,” Bolich said.

To fire their guns, they would place one end of the rubber across the front of the barrel, stretch it backward, and place the band into one of the notches over the string. They could pull up on the string, which released the stretched inner tube.

They used the rubber gun rifles when they played war, and if you were hit by the rubber tube piece, you were out of the fight.

“We drilled regularly in the flat area just north of the town, on the old football field, which was used by the high school before the high school was closed,” Bolich said.

They would pick teams, then head up into the hills behind Gebo Hill for their wars.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Scrap Metal Effort"}]

“Our job was to help the war situation,” Bolich said. “We were really busy.”

Aside from singing the Marines’ Hymn to returning soldiers, waging their own wars in the Gebo hills and playing basketball, the Junior Marines were salvaging iron.

“The county was directing a scrap iron drive for the war, so we, as Junior Marines, worked hard to do whatever we could to help,” Bolich said. “We always got together, and our job was to help the war effort. We went up to the mine in Gebo and started hauling stuff away.”

They got spikes out of the railroad, and would haul a rail over to the vacant lot where the old basketball gym used to be to pile up the scrap metal. Once a month, a big truck would come to Gebo to gather it all.

“Since Gebo was being dismantled as a coal mining town, there were lots of items left that people did not take with them,” Bolich said. “We went into abandoned houses, collected whatever metal was left there.”

[{"type":"text","text":"They also got the privilege of legally breaking windows."}]

“We were always aware of any house that was being torn down and obtained permission to get rocks and throw them to break windows,” Bolich said. “We would line up like baseball pitchers do and see who had the most accurate arm.”

[{"type":"text","text":"Bolich said Pete Cavalli had the best pitching arm of the Junior Marines."}]

“Since the mine was no longer working, we were very efficient in picking up pieces of metal there,” Bolich said.  

[{"type":"text","text":"They would all pitch in to carry a rail and made it a military endeavor."}]

“When we all were in position, someone would call out, ‘lift' and we would lift the rail altogether and then wait for the 'forward march, hut, hut, hut' orders,” Bolich said. “We would all march in step to take the rail to the metal stockpile. I often wonder if some Gebo people saw us and just laughed.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Proud To Be Junior Marine"}]

Bolich recalled trying to get the wheel off an ore car and being chased off by a worker who was on the tipple.

"You get the hell out of there — we use those wheels," the worker yelled. “Leave that alone!”

Bolich said he took his wagon and hurried home with what little scrap he was able to salvag

His time as a Junior Marine soon came to an end, despite the war still being fought. Bolich’s own family moved into Thermopolis when he was in the fifth grade. Despite no longer being in the Junior Marines, Bolich said their wartime efforts continued.

“When we left Gebo, my brother got a job because so many men were in the Army, Navy or Marines,” Bolich said. “Ken started washing dishes at the Manhattan Café and I shined shoes for Steve Ely because it was hard to buy shoes.

“Leather went to the military, so Steve would repair the shoes, and I would shine them up. I got a dollar a day.”

As Bolich looked back at his childhood war efforts, he said that he was proud to be a Junior Marine. He would still sing the Marines' Hymn, no matter which branch the soldier

Gebo and young marines inset 7 26 26

<title>Wyoming History: How Gebo’s Gung-Ho Junior Marines Served During World War II | Cowboy State Daily</title>

In the dying coal town of Gebo during World War II, the patriotic Junior Marines were gung-ho in their wartime efforts of gathering scrap iron, marching and singing. They were inspired by the Wedlock brothers, two teens who left Gebo to fight the war.

Wyoming History: How Gebo’s Gung-Ho Junior Marines Served During World War II

Guest Column

Guest Columnists

Ask most folks what built the Powder River Basin, and they'll tell you it was hard work and good coal. 

Both are true, but the trigger was federal policy. When President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 and created the EPA, the new sulfur limits sent power companies hunting for low-sulfur coal —Northeastern Wyoming was sitting on Great Plains of it. 

The 1990 amendments tightened the screws further. The Powder River Basin went from producing 4.6 million tons of coal with 448 workers in 1969 to 184 million tons and more than 4,600 workers by 1990, according to the Wyoming Mining Association. 

In 1984 we passed West Virginia to become the number one coal state in the nation.

Sit with that for a second: coal didn't boom despite Washington. It boomed because of Washington. A rule written to clean the nation's air happened to require exactly what Wyoming had in the ground.

Now look at nuclear, which is the same story told backwards. For half a century, federal regulation didn't lift the nuclear industry — it smothered it. 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission built a culture so risk-averse that it effectively stopped licensing new reactors altogether, holding the industry to radiation standards stricter than the natural background you're sitting in right now. 

In the half-century since the NRC's creation in 1974, it has licensed two reactors from start to finish — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and that pair took fourteen years and ballooned from a $14 billion budget to over $30 billion. 

Not due to safety hazards, but due to regulation and oversight from the federal government; something Wyoming coal is no stranger to.

Then the door opened. In 2024, Congress passed the bipartisan ADVANCE Act to speed reactor licensing. 

In May 2025, four executive orders by the Trump administration ordered the NRC reorganized around a new mandate — to 

 nuclear, not just police it — complete with fixed 18-month licensing deadlines and a national goal of quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050. 

The same machinery that once made coal king is being retooled to build more reactors. The only question is whether Wyoming walks through this door the way our grandparents walked through the last one.

What Washington gives, Washington can take. The regulatory state that built our coal boom later turned on it-- a federal land plan would end all new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin by 2041. 

Wyoming is now tangled in more than fifty lawsuits defending its fossil fuels and has stood up a dedicated "Coal Litigation Fund" to pay for the fight. Nuclear isn't a betrayal of that history. It's the hedge and the next hand.

One county sits at the heart of both energy revolutions. 

More than 97% of Wyoming's coal comes from eleven mines in Campbell County, home to eight of the eleven largest coal operations in America. And now BWX Technologies wants to build a $500 million TRISO nuclear fuel fabrication plant east of Gillette, the first such facility built in the United States in decades. The State has already committed $100 million toward it.

 In Kemmerer, TerraPower broke ground this spring on its Natrium reactor — the first commercial advanced reactor the NRC ever permitted. 

And the uranium that feeds all of it sits in our soil. The same county that powered the last century is positioned to power the next one.

Before anyone's imagination runs to mushroom clouds, understand what this plant is. 

It takes enriched uranium delivered by truck and fabricates it into TRISO fuel — uranium kernels the size of a poppyseed, each sealed in carbon and ceramic that the Department of Energy calls one of the toughest fuels on earth.  

For the fear that still lingers: the coal we've lived beside for generations is itself mildly radioactive. An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study found a coal plant releases roughly 100 times more radiation into its surroundings than a nuclear plant producing the same power. We have handled energy responsibly, at scale, for a half century. This is more of the same.

Now picture the other path. Two years ago, a company called Radiant wanted to build its advanced reactors near Casper — then packed up and took its jobs to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, amid regulatory uncertainty and a cold local welcome. 

Tennessee had a nuclear fund ready and caught exactly what we dropped. Meanwhile our anchor industry keeps shrinking: Wyoming coal production has fallen by roughly half since its 2008 peak, 2024 was the worst year on record since the coal boom in the 1970s and forecasters expect output to keep sliding. 

Chase off the successor industry too, and Gillette is left with a contracting mine economy, a hollowing tax base in a state with no income tax, and a generation of young people who leave because the future moved somewhere else. That isn't caution. That's surrender in an installment plan.

Wyoming holds the nation's largest known uranium reserves; we already pull the raw material out of our own ground. The prize now is to own the entire chain, cradle to grave and back to cradle. 

The industry has three great unsolved problems: America can't enrich enough fuel domestically to feed its own reactors, it has nowhere permanent to put spent fuel, and it doesn't reprocess the fuel it could reuse. 

Those aren't reasons to run — they're the most valuable unclaimed ground in American energy. The country aims to quadruple its nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050; private investment in advanced nuclear has jumped more than thirteenfold since 2023, part of a digital-infrastructure-and-power buildout Goldman Sachs pegs near $5 trillion.

Imagine Wyoming as the state that enriches the fuel, fabricates it, and solves storage and reprocessing on its own terms — not the place the waste gets dumped on, but the place that master’s the cycle and gets paid for it outright, with no royalty owed to anyone.

 It would take hard conversations and changes to our laws. We are the right people for it: a state that knows hard energy work, owns the resource, and has never once been shy about a fight.

That fight is the whole point. Wyoming has sued the federal government more than fifty times and bankrolled a Coal Litigation Fund to defend an industry that is, by every honest measure, declining. Imagine pointing that same muscle forward — not to slow the inevitable, but to pave the way for an industry that can bolster the economic base brought in by coal. We fought like hell to keep what we had. We ought to fight twice as hard for what we could become.

Wanting the industry isn't the same as being ready for it. Roughly 80% of the jobs at the BWXT plant will be operator roles, and the people who pour its foundation and weld its steel are tradesmen, not PhDs. 

The smartest investment Wyoming can make right now is in the welders, pipefitters, electricians, concrete crews and technicians who will build and run this thing. 

The state has already shown it knows how — putting nearly $2 million into Western Wyoming Community College to launch a nuclear science associate's degree. We should do the same right here, at Gillette College. 

The University of Wyoming doesn't offer a full nuclear engineering degree. It rolled out nuclear certificates in 2025, but a certificate you bolt onto another major is not a degree, and the worst outcome is for this industry to fire up here and then import all its talent from somewhere else. Build the degrees and fill it with Wyoming kids.

To be a regressionist now is a sure-fire way to let people who don't have your best interests at heart make your decisions for you. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and if we don't force our seat at the table, we don’t eat. 

Out-of-state interests will gladly make those decisions for us. Look at who's already walking out the door: more than 60% of people born in Wyoming leave before they turn 30 — the highest rate of any state in the nation, according to U.S. Census data — and roughly two-thirds of University of Wyoming graduates pull up stakes after they finish their degrees, carrying the Wyoming values this state raised and educated off to Denver, Fort Collins, Salt Lake and Dallas. 

The young people filling in behind them are increasingly newcomers from out of state, who arrive with their own ideas about what this place ought to become. A state that exports its children and imports its decision-makers will always negotiate from weakness; that weakness only hardens as our talent and our money drain away.

Show up to the meetings, and back the initiatives that put our young people on a path into building a future for Wyoming. Every dollar we invest in our students today is a down payment on a generation that can stay. Build the degree. Invest in these kids now, and we don't just win a plant. We give Wyoming children a reason to raise their families in Wyoming.

Thomas Lubnau III was born in Gillette. Graduated from West Point in 2022 with a BS in Nuclear Engineering, currently serving as an infantry officer at Fort Drum, NY.

Lubnau kid 7 26 26

<title>Guest Column: Coal And Nuclear In Wyoming | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Guest columnist Thomas Lubnau III writes, "Every dollar we invest in our students today is a down payment on a generation that can stay. Build the degree. Invest in these kids now, and we don't just win a plant. We give Wyoming children a reason to raise their families in Wyoming."

Guest Column: Coal And Nuclear In Wyoming

Mac Watson

Daily Video News

It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, July 27th.  I’m Reece Cowan, filling in for Mac Watson

This newscast is brought to you by the Wyoming State Fair. Wrap up your summer at the Wyoming State Fair, August 11th through the 15th in Douglas!

Rodeo, Demolition Derby, live music, entertainment and fair food await. Learn more at W-Y State Fair dot com. See you at the fair! This ad was paid for by Converse County Tourism.

A patient attacked a Rock Springs emergency nurse, breaking his nose and chasing him through Memorial Hospital of Sweetwater County this past week. Cowboy State Daily’s Zakary Sonntag reports that the nurse said "He was fully focused on trying to get me." Health care leaders say this is not unique. 

“A 26-year-old emergency room nurse named Christian was doing a routine medical check on a patient, and within moments of asking the patient if he had taken his medication, he was punched in the face with a closed fist. His nose was broken. The patient chased him to the hospital multiple times. He caught up to him. He threw more punches. He threw knees. It's a pretty extreme example of what is actually not a uncommon phenomenon of violence against healthcare workers. They are statistically a lot more likely to see violence in the workplace than are other workers.”

Wyoming lawmakers have tried to address violence against health care workers.Bills introduced in 2023, 2024 and 2025 would have strengthened reporting requirements, created workplace-safety standards and increased penalties for assaults against health care workers. None became law.

A Douglas man wanted on 72 felony charges alleging sex abuse of minors was released on his own accord by a Colorado court Thursday instead of being held for Wyoming authorities. Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports that the Converse County undersheriff says “We’re out looking for him again.”

“Officials in Converse County were a little surprised when a a a man wanted on 72 child sex and pornography charges was arrested in Colorado near Fort Collins in Laramie County, and when he hit the court, the the judge had to basically let him go. She gave him a $50,000 PR bond. But he already was violating a $250,000 bond he had posted in Wyoming and that was a little unusual too, because someone on his behalf walked into the Converse County Detention Center with $250,000 cash. So people are are upset saying, you know, how does this happen?”

If convicted with maximum concurrent sentences, John Smallbone could face up to 791 years in prison and fines of up to $710,000. The most serious is the sexual abuse of a minor charge, which calls for a sentence of between 25 and 50 years.

A 12-foot-long dinosaur nicknamed Dino that usually stands outside a Sinclair gas station near Gardiner, Montana, was stolen Sunday night. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports it reappeared bolted to a 100-foot cliff face overlooking the Yellowstone River.

“The Sinclair dinosaur was bolted to a concrete pad in front of the Sinclair gas station outside Gardner, they not only unbolted it from the concrete pad and transported it away to a large rock overlooking the Yellowstone River in the Jim Yankee Canyon. They bolted it into the rock so it wouldn't go anywhere. So that's pretty elaborate. So the employees at the Gardner Sinclair assumed that this had to have been planned, and they're actually not planning to pursue any charges or anything like that. They don't know who did it, but clearly someone went through a lot of effort and planning to do what they did, and they said they were just laughing about it the whole time.”

Stealing Sinclair dinosaurs has become a common Western prank. In November 2025, “DINO,” a 300-pound dinosaur standing outside Sloanes General Store in Alcova, was stolen overnight. For Brian Black, it wasn’t a victimless crime.

A Colorado “rain maker” company claims it has used electricity to boost water supplies in two western states by 10-15% and can do it for Wyoming if lawmakers don't conflate their methods with cloud seeding. Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinze reports that Two legislators say they want proof first. 

“There's this there's this company called Rain Enhancement Technologies. They say this isn't cloud seeding where like where they fly planes and and use silver iodide to try to you know enhance the precipitation on the clouds. What they're saying what we do is we actually try to ionize clouds. We we put up these, they just look like gigantic football goal posts, and it's just a really high output antenna that can ionize aerosol droplets in the air and thereby encourage them to converge and form big enough droplets to actually fall as rain. They claim they can guarantee a 10% increase in precipitation at one of their sites.  They think they've cracked the code to generate more precipitation, particularly if we can get more water in the Colorado River Basin.”

Using ground-based electricity to generate more precipitation isn’t a new idea, said Rain Enhancement Technology’s CEO Randy Seidl, but his company is a pioneer in attempting to deploy it on a large scale.   

I’ll have more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.

Cowboy State Daily News continues now….

By the time Rick Knigge died last September, he had spent decades turning 20 acres outside Casper into a gearhead's paradise. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports the oilfield worker spent a lifetime hauling home muscle cars, hot rods and vintage trucks. Now they are all finding new homes.

“A Casper man spent his life collecting more than 220 cars, including Chevelles, race car engines, Corvettes, lifted pickup trucks, and speedboats. When Rick Knigge passed away suddenly and unexpectedly last fall, his widow Stephanie took on the task of finding new homes for all these vehicles. They had 20 acres where most of them were parked in Evansville, Wyoming, and after he died, she decided it was time to find new owners for his collection. And so they had an auction earlier this month. Stephanie said that it was bittersweet. But all of the more precious items and sentimental things did go to family members.”

Stephanie Knigge said her husband was a successful businessman, a devoted husband of 36 years, a father, grandfather and great-grandfather who loved fishing almost as much as fast cars. 

One of the most difficult rivers to gain access to float is the pristine Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The odds are 1 in 55, with 20,000 applicants vying for 350 slots each year. After trying for 40 years, Cowboy State Daily's Jeff Welsch won the lottery.

“I really fulfilled a dream that I've had for 40 years, and that is to run the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in central Idaho. By just about anybody's measure, it is the crown jewel of wilderness rivers in the lower 48 states. But it is so difficult to get a permit. Only seven launches are allowed per day. Middle Fork of the Salmon is renowned because it is 104 miles with 100 rapids, almost continuous, and man barely touches this river. There are no dams. There's no diversions, no pumps for agriculture. Everything. Mother Nature is purely in charge of the flow of the Middle Fork.”

The Middle Fork of the Salmon is born at the confluence of gin-clear Marsh and Bear Valley creeks on the eastern edge of the Sawtooth Mountains. The river carves a serpentine chasm through the craggy Idaho Batholith and, climactically, Impassable Canyon, the third deepest gorge in North America. 

U.S. House candidate Steve Friess concluded the Thursday-night debate by saying polling shows the Wyoming GOP race is really between two people — himself and Chuck Gray. "[Gray's] unfavorable ratings are astronomically high," a campaign spokesman said.

“There was a House debate Thursday evening, and at the end, Steve Freeze, who's one of the nine Republican candidates, said that he believed one candidate was not there. Frank Chapman had dropped out that morning. He believed that candidate was not there because he'd probably seen the polling he'd seen, and he said this is a two-man race now. Friess’ team later told me that they believe that Freese and Secretary of State Chuck Gray are neck and neck. A super PAC that is helping Gray disputes that, showing the secretary with a much higher lead.”

Teton County-based attorney Frank Chapman dropped out of the race that morning, casting it as a waste of multiple people’s money for him to continue in a race with so much “clutter.” 

In an attempt to connect Cody and Cooke City, the Wyoming Department of Transportation built 8 miles of road in 1969 and then stopped. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi reports the "Road To Nowhere" became known as "The Road of Death" after a car with 5 people drove through the road's end.

“In the 1960 s, Cody and the state of Wyoming wanted a route between Cody and Cook City, Montana, to give them access to the northeast entrance of Yellowstone. The debate was where they were going to put it, and the initial effort spearheaded by a Cody resident was to build it through the bottom of the Clark's Fork Canyon, and then use that as a natural route to connect to a road that was being built near Cook City. Ultimately, that didn't happen, but they started and paved the first nine miles of it. So if you go out there today, you can still ride this really nice paved scenic nine-mile route that ends abruptly in a dirt parking lot”

On May 5, 2002, five teenagers were driving the Canyon Road when the pavement ended and the vehicle went off the road and through a barbed wire fence. The vehicle was airborne for 90 feet before landing, rolling several times, and stopping in a boulder field. There were only two survivors. 

And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on 

 - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our 

 channel, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app.  Thanks for watching - I’m Reece Cowan, in for Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.

News image 7 27 26

<title>Cowboy State Daily Video Newscast: Monday, July 27, 2026 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Today's headlines include: 
*Patient Attacks ER Nurse
*Story Behind The Road To Nowhere
*Stolen Sinclair Dinosaur Found Bolted To Cliff

Cowboy State Daily Video Newscast: Monday, July 27, 2026

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily State Government and Politics reporter, Leo Wolfson.

Leo Wolfson For Cowboy State Daily

Wyoming Life

Sports

Wyoming businessman Matt Micheli is worried about the future of University of Wyoming athletics.

With paid deals for NCAA student athletes — often referred to as name, image and likeness (NIL) — becoming a dominating force in college sports, schools with smaller athletic program budgets and alumni bases like UW have found themselves struggling to compete for athletes.

Micheli decided to take matters into his own hands by setting up an NIL partnership with his Casper-based fly-fishing guiding company Cowboy Drifters and two premier UW athletes: football player Tote Harris and basketball player Gavin Gores. 

Like everything Wyoming does to compete at a national level, Micheli said the state must play to its strengths and make moves like these to compete in the world of NIL. 

“There’s some really cool things in Wyoming,” he said. “There’s world-class tourist opportunities. It makes sense to try and combine our great university, great athletic program, and great things about the state. 

"If we lean into our strengths we can make this something positive.”

Cowboy Drifters took Harris and Gores on a fly-fishing trip on the famous Miracle Mile of the Platte River about 50 miles outside Casper this summer. 

In addition to showing them the joys of fly-fishing, highlights from the trip will be featured in a media campaign played at UW football and basketball games and on social media this year. 

The pair had quite the day, both catching brown and rainbow trout.

“Mostly, it’s for people to see Wyoming athletes out having a great time catching really great fish in the Wyoming nature that we all love,” Micheli said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"First Time Fly-Fishing"}]

Cowboy Drifters took Harris and Gores on the Miracle Mile section of the Platte, a remote section chock full of fish, and a bucket-list destination for anglers around Wyoming and the United States.

It was a hot and beautiful sunny day on the river, the type of day many dream about all winter long. Harris said that after spending a few hours with the guides, it felt like he had known them for years.

“Good conversations, good connections, good teachers — it was nice,” he said.

Although the pair of Pokes may be highly skilled in their respective sports, it was not only the first time that either of them had held a fly rod, but for Harris it was also the first time he’d ever fished. 

He caught 16 passes for 184 yards last season on the gridiron, but Harris described catching his first fish as  “mind-blowing.”

“I felt a tug and they told me to pull like I was doing a bicep curl,” he said.

The fish broke from the line and flew straight into the boat, leaving Harris with a smile and a memory he’ll likely never forget.

It took the Cibolo, Texas, native a little time to figure out how to properly reel in a fish, but once Harris did, he was sold on the sport, vowing to bring his dad back to the scenic location.

“It shows you don’t have to be some kind of professional fly-fisherman to go out and have just an absolutely tremendous day,” Micheli said.

Gores, a native of Cumberland, Wisconsin, had fished lake walleye before, but had never tried fly-fishing.

Standing 6-foot-10, the hooper used his large frame to easily reel in his fish, while Harris said he had to tilt the reel over his shoulder to get his catch out of the water.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Wyoming Style "}]

Establishing paid partnerships like these with college athletes will be critical for businesses across the country if they hope to see competitive teams at their local universities, said Micheli, who’s also a well-known Wyoming politico and former chairman of the state Republican Party. 

Micheli believes the state is ripe with opportunities to support a healthy NIL program given the “One Wyoming” mantra UW promotes as the Cowboy State’s lone university.

“For us to be successful as a state and a university, we all need to come together,” he said. “We all need to help each other out. 

"It’s such a great way to help the university, help our athletes and to promote your business. I just think it’s a win-win for everybody.”

The college athletic landscape has been significantly altered by the presence of NIL. 

In most circumstances so far, it has widened the gap between the have’s and have-nots of college sports, with well-endowed programs becoming even more dominant and less wealthy programs less competitive since NIL was legalized.

“Anybody who’s watched college sports and watched what’s happened definitely has some concerns,” Micheli said. “We’re in Wyoming, and we’re the smallest state in the country. You worry about our ability to continue to compete.”

To fight these trends, UW Athletics earlier this year launched a Step Forward campaign to generate $500,000 for football revenue. The men’s basketball program soon followed with its own fundraising venture with a goal of $250,000.

The university also announced in April that it landed a 

, a five-year jersey patch partnership with Tallgrass, a Colorado-based energy infrastructure company that operates thousands of miles of pipelines across Wyoming.

The deal was a huge infusion for UW’s ability to expand its NIL purse by putting the Tallgrass logo on football and basketball jerseys.

At the time the deal was announced, UW Athletics Director Tom Burman said the university needs at least double that, $8 million, to be able to compete with other Division I schools.

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Retaining incoming sophomores Harris and Gores was critical for UW as both athletes will among the most important members on their teams for the upcoming seasons. 

A Casper fly fishing guide company has teamed up with two top University of Wyoming athletes for a name, image and likeness deal they hope will set a precedent for supporting athletes at the school. Wyoming must play to its strengths to compete, the owner said.

Daily Darwin: Tuesday, October 14, 2025

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