The pine tree on Lisa Evers' Casper Mountain property was one of her father's favorite places. When he died in 2011, she scattered half his ashes beneath it, just as he'd wanted.
Her parents bought the property in the 1980s, and Evers has lived there and cared for it for 16 years. Now she worries the tree, and everything it holds for her family, is next in line for the chainsaw as Rocky Mountain Power moves ahead with a wildfire mitigation project that's putting power lines underground and clearing trees across the mountain.
“It meant so much to my father,” Evers told Cowboy State Daily. “And now ACRT, who is a subcontractor of Rocky Mountain Power, came by and they're like, ‘Well, you need to get rid of these trees.’”
Rocky Mountain Power announced the project in June, when officials told the Natrona County Board of County Commissioners it would spend multiple years and millions of dollars overhauling the electrical grid on Casper Mountain.
The plan calls for replacing wood poles with steel or fire-wrapped alternatives and swapping bare conductors for covered ones, work split into six phases across the mountain's two main circuits. Some of that line is being buried, while other stretches are being rebuilt overhead.
‘You’re not touching it’
Clearing trees along both types of line is part of making room for the new infrastructure.
Rocky Mountain Power owns the project, but ACRT, an independent utility vegetation management consulting firm, is the one carrying it out on the ground. Evers said that when a representative from the company inspected her property earlier this month, he told her that several of her trees and five feet of her deck would interfere with new wires being installed and needed to go.
Her response was simple.
“I said no,” Evers said. “I'm telling you, you will not cut trees. None of them are coming down. My dad's ashes are under that tree. You're not going to touch it. And the subcontractor just seemed kind of flippant about the whole thing.”
In an email to Cowboy State Daily, Jona Whitesides, a spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Power, emphasized the purpose of the construction is to mitigate wildfires. She said company representatives look forward to meeting directly with the property owners at an informational meeting in Casper on Tuesday.
“We appreciate the patience of Casper Mountain residents as this work continues,” Whitesides said. “We are committed to completing the project safely, responsibly and with respect for property owners and the surrounding landscape.”
ACRT did not respond to Cowboy State Daily’s request for comment by publication.
Evers said that conversation with the subcontractor took place Sept. 8, when she told him her answer was an absolute no. The next day, she left home around 1 p.m. for a meeting in town. When she came home, about 10 trees on her property, including her beloved pine, had been marked for removal.
Since then, she’s taken matters into her own hands.
“I have it flagged off right now with no trespassing signs and caution tape and everything from the corner of my deck all the way out to that big pine tree,” Evers said. “I said, ‘I don't know what part you're not getting of ‘You're not touching the tree,’ but you aren't touching it.’”
As a homeowner, Evers said she takes fire mitigation seriously. But she doesn’t see how her trees are in the way of any work ACRT needs to do.
“It's a beautiful, huge tree,” Evers said. “It’s very healthy, and it's nowhere near their power lines.”
‘Best News Ever’
Other Casper Mountain landowners, like Katie Lijewski, are happy to see ACRT clear trees from their property. Lijewski, who is losing 50 trees on her land, described it as a weight off her shoulders.
“I am so excited about it,” Lijewski said. “When I got the notice, I was like, ‘Yes, awesome! This is the best news ever. These are trees that we have wanted to take down for 30 years but, because they are right on the utility line, you have to find a certified tree removal company to do it because of the safety issues and federal guidelines.”
Beyond sparing her the hassle and cost of hiring a removal service, Lijewski said the cleared trees make her property safer. She saw the danger firsthand two summers ago, she said, when a storm knocked a small tree onto a nearby power line, causing it to spark.
Now, with those trees cleared, the area around her property feels less like a tinderbox.
“We all know that it's not if there’s a fire for the center of our mountain, but when,” Lijewski said. “This doesn't erase the fire fears, but it does give some more ease because of all the safety features that Rocky Mountain Power will be installing.”
While Casper Mountain hasn't seen a destructive wildfire since the 2012 Sheep Herder Hill Fire, which burned nearly 16,000 acres and destroyed 37 homes and cabins, Chris Cody, fire marshal for the Natrona County Fire Department, said the mountain always stands at an elevated risk during fire season.
“It always is, just from the concentration of homes up there,” Cody said. “Some of the roadways are tight and the foliage up there continues to grow.”
But he said he can’t recall any fires sparked by power lines or electrical infrastructure on the mountain in at least five years.
“The most we’ve gone up there for fires has been from thunderstorms and lightning holdovers,” Cody said.
Divided community
Lijewski said her neighbors remain split on the construction.
Some, like her, see the improvements as making the area safer for everyone. Others feel ACRT is infringing on their property. At the root of that divide, she believes, is misinformation and misunderstanding spreading on social media.
“It snowballs, because one person gets pissed off, then the next person gets misinformation,” Lijewski said. “It is lack of accurate, correct Information, both legal and scope of work, from Rocky Mountain Power. And Rocky Mountain Power is correcting that with their meeting (Tuesday) evening.”
Rocky Mountain Power is set to address some of that confusion at a community information meeting from 5-7 p.m. Tuesday at the Casper Mountain Trail Center, where company representatives, project leaders and contractor partners will answer questions about the wildfire mitigation work, vegetation management, property access and contractor roles on the mountain.
David Mowry, another Casper Mountain property owner, said he’ll be there, and he hopes representatives from Rocky Mountain Power can answer the questions he and others have about the easements that supposedly allow ACRT to do the work.
"A lot of the property owners are having a problem,” Mowry said. “They’re not against the lines running across their property. They're not against trimming trees for maintenance. They're against Rocky Mountain Power coming in and taking a big swath through their property.”
Mowry said his concerns center on the main high-voltage corridor, where he believes Rocky Mountain Power lacks a recorded easement to remove trees, as opposed to the smaller utility easements most subdivision lots already have and that he said aren't in dispute. He's hoping the meeting will get everyone on the same page because he and his neighbors, he said, keep getting conflicting information from the subcontractor.
“They'll tell one person one thing, tell another person something else, and post something else on their website,” Mowry said. “And when you have inconsistent stories being told to people, people talk.”
Lijewski said many of her neighbors feel left in the dark, in part because they weren't aware of the mitigation plan when it was presented to the Natrona County Commissioners in June. She also pointed to the easements themselves as a source of confusion because they aren't available online and property owners have to go to the courthouse and pay for a copy just to find out what applies to their own land.
“To find your easements, it's a very difficult process,” Lijewski said. “This has been confusing for all of us involved as well.”
Mowry said he hopes this dispute can be cleared up at the community meeting. If not, he fears that the standoff could escalate if construction moves full speed ahead while his neighbors refuse to budge.
“People have a right to defend their person and their property in the state of Wyoming,” Mowry said. “Is that going to end up that somebody gets hurt because you got somebody there with a chainsaw that's going to go cut the tree down and the property owner comes out with their pistol?”
Emma Jane Jackson can be reached at emma@cowboystatedaily.com.
