It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, November 2nd. I’m Mac Watson.
This newscast is sponsored by Lisa Kinney for Congress. Lisa has, Chuck hasn’t. That’s why former Gov. Mike Sullivan has endorsed Lisa Kinney for Wyoming House. Learn why Lisa is the choice for Wyoming’s future at Lisa Kinney for Congress dot com.
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Two Sheridan boys escaped their burning home late last week as 40-foot flames tore through it — one clutching a cat, the other closing doors behind him. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports their mom, Ginia Fraser, says they knew what to do because Sheridan firefighters visited their school.
“Her husband went downstairs to see if someone was breaking into the house, and he saw their camper in the driveway, fully engulfed in flames. He said they had only minutes to get out of the house because it was starting to look like it was going to catch the house on fire as well. Her two sons sleep in the basement, and she said that's always been a concern for her. So they had rehearsed exit strategies if something like this should ever occur. Also, firefighters had gone to the boys' elementary school, and they remembered the things that the firefighters had taught them, including to shut all the doors as they made their way outside, because they were able to get out safe.”
Although the camper was fully engulfed when firefighters arrived, authorities have not publicly announced a cause or final point of origin of the fire.
Read the full story HERE.
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Wild-horse advocates are incensed by what they say was the needless killing of three rare blue-eyed cremello mustangs by the Bureau of Land Management during a recent roundup. Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports the BLM says all three horses were killed because they were blind.
“The BLM is saying it's just one of those things that had to be handled on site as quickly and as humanely as possible. I also talked to a retired BLM official who kind of backed up the BLM narrative, saying, ‘Yeah, it's a decision they make on the ground. If a horse is just blind or just has vision problems, it's just going to be too debilitating. They just put it down right there, and there's just really not time to mess around with it.’”
Wyoming Mustang Institute director Chad Hanson tells Cowboy State Daily he thinks the BLM’s decision to euthanize the horses was a snap decision before a veterinarian could make a full assessment.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Riverton woman who spent a summer in Wyoming's Gas Hills playing in the raw yellow uranium with her best friend and a poodle still sets off Geiger counters. Cowboy State Daily’s Jackie Dorothy reports that Roni Roemmich says, at least "I don't glow in the dark.”
“Roni Roemmich grew up around the Gas Hills and didn't think anything of playing with the yellow tailings left over from uranium mining, There were many other kids just like her who played in the dirt, came home covered in it, and actually had no side effects. While others have said that the uranium mining has definitely influenced their health, for Roni it did not. It was just a curious part of her childhood that she never thought of. Even now, decades later, though Roni says she has not suffered any side effects from the uranium that she knows of, she has been known to set off a Geiger counter.”
Uranium was discovered throughout Wyoming beginning in the early 1900s. It was not until 1948, when the Atomic Energy Commission guaranteed a market for yellowcake, which was processed uranium, that prospecting for the yellow rocks started in earnest.
Read the full story HERE.
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Investigators have sent a human bone found in 1998 in the Bridger-Tetons to the DNA Doe Project for forensic investigative genealogy. Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher reports the Teton County Sheriff's Office is hopeful, with forensic science evolving, this can be a break they've been waiting for.
“They sent the tibia bone to the University of North Texas, and they were able to get a DNA profile for this guy. They thought they had it at that point. They thought they would be able to identify him with the profile. However, when they put it in CODIS, which is the national database run by the FBI, there were no hits on it. So nobody had reported him missing, or he had no criminal record that they could trace. The next step is now a new investigator took over the case, and now it's being sent out. The bone has been sent out to do forensic investigative genealogy.”
What baffles investigators most was John Doe’s IV setup — tube, bag, and needle dangling from a tree limb five feet above where the arm would have been — as though he had been mid-transfusion when he died. The eight or so vials found on the ground yielded no results when tested because they were too degraded.
Read the full story HERE.
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I’ll have more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.
Cowboy State Daily News continues now….
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Wyoming gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Bextel isn't the only moon landing skeptic, as 5% to 12% of Americans agree. Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck reports that the nation's leading skeptic says the best proof is that no one has replicated the feat nearly six decades later despite better technology.
“Bart Sibrel mentions many different, several different things that he says causes him not to believe. One is that there's a radiation field around the Earth that he has a quote from a scientist that says it would, it needs to be overcome. And so his argument is that they really haven't overcome this. They didn't have the right radiation shielding for the Apollo astronauts to go through. And so he believes that's one of the reasons that the space missions were essentially faked and they stayed in an Earth orbit instead of going to the Moon. He also points to photos from the moon that have shadows going in different directions.”
Sibrel said he believes Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step” onto the lunar surface, which had the world transfixed in front of their TV sets on July 20, 1969, actually was shot a year earlier in a secret hangar at a New Mexico Air Force base.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Laramie couple who sold their home so they could live on a cruise ship is stranded in Cambodia after the company ran out of money for fuel. Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that after spending $450,000 so far, Paul and Lynn Montoya are stuck.
“She's kind of running the gamut of emotions from anger to sadness. The other guy really didn't say much about how he's feeling, but obviously they're in a very uncertain situation. Cambodia is not the easiest country to get in and out of. There's some red tape with passports and so on. They were hoping that the company would get enough money together to take them all to Bangkok, which is a little friendlier, a little easier to navigate. This tour would have taken them around the world in about four years. They were hoping to do this to live this lifestyle for the next 15 years. They've only been at sea 17 months. This is a pretty premature end to what they had been hoping for. So many unanswered questions at this point for the couple.”
Paul and Lynn Montoya are two of the 200 passengers left high and dry by Villa Vie Residences, which pulled the plug on their cruise ship, the Odyssey. The company told passengers they’d have to disembark the Odyssey in Cambodia, along with pets and any personal items they could carry.
Read the full story HERE.
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Three Wyoming women have built their own farming and ranching operations from scratch, with little money and no inherited agricultural operation — but plenty of determination. Cowboy State Daily’s Kate Meadows reports the women say the secret is to start small, ask for help and be willing to learn.
“I had one, Holly Romeling, tell me that she and her husband Ben started out with 10 cows, a bull, and nowhere to put them. So she was the first to admit that this is really putting the cart before the horse. Another rancher I spoke with, Sierra Schlenker, she started with less than five acres, a trailer, a cheap horse, a bottle-fed calf, and a small garden. So each of these women who I spoke with had a dream of some sort of being a rancher. None of them came from a ranching background. The closest one I talked to grew up with horses, but even that isn't the same as having a herd of cattle or dozens of acres of land. The dream of ranching isn't easy for these women, and they'll all be the first to say so, because if ranching were easy, everybody would do it. Schlenker said, ‘You have to start somewhere.’”
Across Wyoming, aspiring ranchers face enormous financial barriers to entering an industry where land, livestock, equipment and operating expenses can add up to millions of dollars. The average American farm producer is 58 years old, according to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture.
Read the full story HERE.
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A black bamboo plant located in the University of Wyoming's Williams Conservatory since 1994 has bloomed for the first time and is turning into a corpse. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports that the plant blooms infrequently, but when it does, some people say we’re all doomed!
“The UW Williams Conservatory director Sarah Lemli says that the black bamboo has been there since the conservatory opened in 1994. These bamboo plants only bloom once every 40 to 150 years, and so it was ironically spectacular that she got to witness it bloom, but she cautions that historically this has been linked to plague, famine, and pestilence. This plant is indigenous to northern India. That's where the bad omen comes from. The people in India started observing that after the plant blooms, it dies shortly afterwards, and it usually brings a ton of rodents who come to feast on it. And when there's an abundance of food, they produce thousands of babies. And when the all-you-can-eat buffet runs out, they move on to crops.”
Oncoming catastrophe or not, Lemli says she’s glad to have witnessed the “once-in-a-lifetime” event from the campus conservatory.
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 watching - I’m Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.
