Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years
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Federal document released Thursday blends all four ‘alternatives’ in effort to heed public and cooperators’ requests after draft plans blew up. A year after a conservation-heavy draft management plan for 3.6 million acres of public land in southwest Wyoming ignited intense opposition, the Bureau of Land Management has issued a finalized plan seeking more of a balance between landscape protection and development. The final environmental impact statement outlining BLM’s proposed Resource Management Plan for the Rock Springs Field Office was rel...
Twelve-year old law was intended to protect the identity of legal wolf hunters, and that doesn’t fit the description of a Sublette County man who broke the law by taking possession of a live wolf. Wyoming wildlife officials on Thursday released their first public statement about a wolf that was illegally taken captive and then subjected to alleged abuses that have generated outrage around the world. The statement from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department stretched for only six sentences and included no names, dates or locations. The brevity a...
Footage released by Wyoming Game and Fish shows a live wolf was brought into a public space. An accompanying report says a Daniel man admitted to possessing the animal. Video evidence released Wednesday by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department as part of an investigation into a Daniel man who admitted to possessing a live wolf shows the muzzled, listless animal lying on the floor of what appears to be a bar. In two short clips, a gray-coated wolf with what appears to be a commercial tracking and...
After half-century of expansion, bears reach limit of "suitable habitat," federal scientists report. CODY-For nearly five decades the grizzly population emanating from Yellowstone National Park has pulsed farther and farther outward, reclaiming old haunts where humans wiped out their forebears in the early 20th century. No longer. A federal biologist presenting Wednesday to a part of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee for the Yellowstone ecosystem reported that the expansion into new...
CHEYENNE—An “unprecedented” shortage of Wyoming game wardens is adding to angst about a legislative proposal that would attract coyote hunters onto public land at night, adding to the thinned corps’ around-the-clock duties. “Our folks are feeling the pressure of their significant workload that is not shared by as many people as it should be right now,” Wyoming Game and Fish Department Chief Warden Rick King testified last week. “Our folks work really hard and they’ll do the best they can, but that’s really one of the things I worry about: The...
SHOSHONI-Up until the last few years, many residents of this town of 600 people near the east bank of Boysen Reservoir believed their community was dying out. The median age was 55. Businesses had little interest in coming to town. Chris Konija, the town's chief of police, said there was "almost an acceptance of fate" that Shoshoni was on the path to becoming "another Jeffrey City" - a former uranium mining boomtown now home to just a couple dozen people. "It was known as a living ghost town,"...
ABSAROKA RANGE—Andy Pils was silent as he scanned with his Vortex spotting scope, its lens focused on a steep, talus-covered mountainside some 2.5 miles away. Two weeks before, 10 grizzly bears were clustered together in the same area flipping rocks and lapping up moths, but on this early August day, zero grizzlies were visible. Pils soon realized why. “Oh, shit,” Pils said. “I see a guy walking up there.” The longtime Shoshone National Forest wildlife biologist continued scanning. Actually, he said, there were two guys and a dog. It was late m...
Editor’s Note: Please note strong language in second graph that may offend some readers. The man had already left one voicemail on Sen. Larry Hicks’ (R-Baggs) personal cell phone. By the second message, the senator could tell from the caller’s voice he was “crazy mad.” “Do not. Do not. DO NOT fuck with our Second Amendment,” the voice in the message said. “This is not the place to fuck about with our Second Amendment rights. God-given rights. We’re going to vote you out. Later. Sorry. Fuckin’ pussy.” Hicks wasn’t shocked by the threaten...
True to its species’ reputation, the undersized smallmouth bass lacked neither ambition nor aggression: The roughly 10-inch fish attacked a nine-inch streamer. The Montana State University student who hooked it would later regret letting the bronzeback paddle away when he learned that the nonnative warmwater game fish had never been found so far upstream in the Yellowstone River watershed. He’d plucked this one from the Gardner River on the doorstep of Yellowstone National Park, where smallmouth could wreak havoc on native fisheries. Todd Koe...
Wyoming voters’ have retained their right to change party affiliation on election day after a bill to restrict the practice died in the Wyoming House of Representatives. Senate File 97 – Change in party affiliation died quietly when it did not receive a first reading vote in the House by the deadline. As in years prior, the Wyoming Republican Party lobbied heavily in support of the bill, but that did not translate to enough support at the Capitol. Several election reforms supported by the party failed, including a bill to implement a run...
JACKSON — The National Park Service has changed its permitting requirements so that commercial filmmakers no longer have to pay fees or gain clearance as long as shoots are small and not in the wilderness. That nationwide change in regulation, announced Monday, came after a Washington, D.C., court ruled in January that the fees were unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a permanent injunction halting the filming requirements, finding that the fees could have a “chilling effect” for a “wide swath...
JACKSON – Rangers have decided to pull volunteer hunters out of the Tetons early and cease the cull of exotic mountain goats for now. Volunteers killed 43 goats during a six-week effort. Grand Teton National Park Chief Ranger Michael Nash opted to wrap up the operation a couple weeks earlier than planned based on potentially hazardous conditions in the mountains. “With the snow volume, I made the recommendation to … not continue,” Nash told the News&Guide. “The snow’s not going to go away, at this point.” Participants’ safety was his chief conc...
JACKSON - "Mountaineering with a rifle" is how Taylor Glenn summed up his first few hours of pursuing mountain goats in Grand Teton National Park. The morning of Sept. 23, Glenn was soft-spoken and bummed out, having just descended a steep scree slope below Symmetry Spire after an unsuccessful chase that led him over fifth-class terrain. "These things are a lot harder than you realize," he said. "This terrain is full-on." A professional photographer and Jackson resident, Glenn was among the few...
JACKSON — While doing her job to prevent forest fires, Lesley Williams Gomez encountered what she described as entitled attitudes and reckless behavior last Friday night on Shadow Mountain. The Bridger-Teton National Forest fire prevention technician and patroller had heard from a volunteer ambassador that a group of 20-somethings were partying at Shadow Mountain. The group had assembled around a campfire, knowingly lit in violation of the regulations. As Williams Gomez confronted the 16- to 18-person group, a 28-year-old woman from Aspen, C...
JACKSON — The hordes flowing through Yellowstone National Park will be required to wear masks in dozens of areas, indoors and out, this summer. The National Park Service itself has not mandated masks to blunt the spread of COVID-19, but Xanterra, the park’s largest concessionaire, has decided face coverings are a must. The Colorado-based business, which manages lodging, restaurants, gift shops and more in the park, made the announcement Wednesday. “We believe it’s the responsible thing to do, given the current climate with the health situati...
JACKSON — Pat Tenney led a crew that hiked east over the National Elk Refuge foothills Wednesday morning, and members strung out 14 people wide looking for points telling of antlers sticking up through the sagebrush. The team of Bridger-Teton National Forest employees — firefighters, engineers and some randoms — wasn’t used to this gig. But COVID-19 put the kibosh on the usual Boy Scout antler pickup, when kids gather sheds to raise funds for the Scouts and the refuge. Cris Dippel, the refuge’s deputy manager, told his federal governmen...
JACKSON — In an ordinary summer a destination park as famous as Yellowstone brings on some 500 seasonal employees, about tripling its staff, to help handle the crush of 4-million-plus tourists drawn from around the world. In a world changed by the threat of an infectious pandemic, that influx of employees will be whittled down to approximately 200 seasonal employees — a 60% reduction, at least in the early summer. The reason is that those seasonal staffers will each be given their own bedroom and bathroom, a restriction meant to prevent spread...
JACKSON — When Yellowstone wrapped up its telecommunications plan a decade ago, the park specifically designated historic buildings like the Old Faithful Lodge and Lake Hotel cabins as places that wouldn’t be modernized with Wi-Fi technology. Knowing those commitments, National Park Service watchdog Jeff Ruch was baffled when he read a proposal to add more than 500 antennas spread on buildings around the 2.2-million-acre park to bolster Wi-Fi connections. Among the places slated for the improved connectivity were the historic buildings tha...
JACKSON — The Wyoming Game and Fish Department will eliminate the legally embattled Alkali Creek elk feedground in coming years as the threat of chronic wasting disease looms. The Bridger-Teton National Forest feedground, the lowest elevation of three in the Gros Ventre River valley, had been studied and then authorized for long-term use in 2015. But four environmental groups hit the forest with a lawsuit, winning in 2018. Rather than appealing or spending years studying the feedground’s impacts to address the judge’s concerns, the Forest Servi...
JACKSON — Facing legal pressure, a federal agency that kills wildlife deemed to be a nuisance has agreed to reassess its plans for operating in Wyoming. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services will take that step because of a settlement agreement with a coalition of wildlife advocacy groups, which sued last winter arguing that the agency’s current plans are outdated and ignore the best-available science. The agreement also includes a range of “commitments” from Wildlife Services, including not using cyanide-based “M-44” de...
JACKSON — Wyoming and two neighboring states lost decision-making authority over grizzly bears with a federal judge’s ruling more than 10 months ago, but it wasn’t until this week that the federal government formally completed the paperwork to comply. The “relisting” of grizzly bears as a federally classified “threatened” animal under the Endangered Species Act became a done deal Tuesday. The last step was publishing a final rule in the Federal Register, a document that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Principal Deputy Director Margaret Ever...
JACKSON — A Jackson Hole woman’s effort to criminalize running down and running over coyotes with snowmobiles was shot down last week by a legislative committee. Local wildlife activist Lisa Robertson has had the ear of Rep. Mike Yin, of Teton County, who last legislative session unsuccessfully sought to prohibit killing, injuring or torturing predatory animals using snowmobiles. He tried again last week to bring the bill to an interim committee in Thermopolis, but the lawmakers declined in an 11-to-2 vote. Sen. Glenn Moniz, of Albany County, s...
JACKSON — Early every summer, Jackson Hole fishing guides trailer their drift boats to the simmered Green and New Fork rivers to cast for trout while the hometown Snake River is still sediment-choked, running high and all but unfishable. Sublette County Rep. Albert Sommers, whose constituents compete for the same waters, has heard all about the migratory anglers, whose presence is not always welcomed. “Last year, one day there were 24 or 25 boats at one of the state land access points on the New Fork, and nearly all of them were [county] 22,...
JACKSON — A half square mile of sagebrush flats and rolling Gros Ventre Range foothills with remarkable Teton views is being considered for a sale to raise funds for a state agency that’s been bit by Jackson Hole’s housing crisis. The undeveloped swath of land, known as the Teton Wildlife Habitat Management Area, is owned by the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, an appointed board whose members directed the department to explore conveying the land to the federal government. “That WHMA, right now, really serves very little use,” Commissio...
JACKSON — Wyoming wildlife officials gathering in Rock Springs plan to discuss the idea of requiring hunters to carry bear spray in the grizzly-occupied Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Such a mandate is perhaps unlikely. The reason it’s coming up before the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission is because seven environmental activist groups petitioned the state agency and its governor-appointed board. “Bear spray is not ‘brains in a can,’ ” the groups wrote, “and petitioners do not suggest that it alone can substitute for comprehensive best practice...