A massive helium production and carbon dioxide-sequestration project in western Wyoming cleared two major permitting hurdles this week, one federal and one state.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday approved Blue Spruce Operating’s Dry Piney project, located about 10 miles northwest of LaBarge on a site that commingles federal mineral and surface estate, as well as state and private land.

The project also won a construction permit Tuesday from the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council, according to this 67-page order. Colorado-based Blue Spruce, which has an office in Pinedale, was awarded a $6 million Energy Matching Funds grant from the state in 2024. The project is expected to cost about $737 million, according to state documents.

The BLM’s approval advances the company’s plans to construct a helium and natural gas processing plant, drill up to nine production wells, access roads and federal rights-of-way and use “acid-gas” injection to “permanently sequester excess carbon in federal pore space deep underground,” according to the agency.

At full capacity, the production field and processing plant would produce about 2.3 million cubic feet of liquid helium per day — about 10% or more of the world’s helium supply, according to testimony provided to the ISC. That rivals ExxonMobil’s neighboring Shute Creek gas plant, which is estimated to provide nearly 20% of the world’s helium supply.

The facility would also produce natural gas and permanently store “up to” 4.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which “would otherwise be emitted” by the operation, according to the company’s testimony. That’s roughly equivalent to the carbon dioxide emitted by about 4.9 million small cars, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Permanently sequestering the greenhouse gas qualifies for a federal tax credit, according to the company.

The operation will contribute an estimated $1.7 billion in taxes over the 40-year life of the project, according to testimony provided to the state.

The approximately two-year construction project is expected to begin in May, with an initial workforce of 209 workers, with only about 10 local hires, according to the Industrial Siting Council. It will support about 45 permanent jobs.

The council’s role was to determine whether the project would “pose a threat of serious injury to the environment or to the social and economic condition or inhabitants or expected inhabitants in the affected area,” according to the state agency. 

Among concerns raised were potential impacts on crucial winter range for mule deer and known big-game migration corridors that are not yet enshrined in Wyoming’s protection of migration corridors.

“We wanted to make sure that we raised those issues with the BLM and with the Industrial Siting Council, and make sure that they were considering what kind of mitigation could be done to not disturb wildlife at critical times of year,” Wyoming Outdoor Council Wildlife Program Manager Meghan Riley told WyoFile.

The council did impose several stipulations to ensure compliance with existing state wildlife and habitat regulations, according to the agency.

Though Riley had barely reviewed the council’s order when she spoke with WyoFile, she said Blue Spruce did give the impression that it was attentive to such concerns.

“They were definitely responsive to things that the state raised,” Riley said.

The council also plays a unique role in administering “impact assistance payments” to local governments — essentially a mechanism to fast-track sales tax from large construction operations back to counties and municipalities, while adding extra from the state’s portion of revenues. The intention is to help local governments cope with an influx of workers and demands on local resources from large construction projects.

The agency determined it would distribute between $14 million and $15 million in impact assistance payments to local governments.

The post Feds, Wyoming greenlight new helium plant, among world’s largest appeared first on WyoFile .

POWDER RIVER BASIN—Brian Mealor scanned the prairie east of Buffalo, but his mind drifted west to a haunting scene in northern Nevada. 

In the burn scar of the Roosters Comb Fire, a single unwelcomed species had taken over, choking out all competitors. Mealor saw few native grasses or shrubs, scarcely a wildflower. 

Not even other weeds.

“Literally everything you see is cheatgrass,” Mealor recalled of his June tour of the scar. “I just stood there, depressed.”

Mealor already knew plenty about the Eurasian species’ capacity to decimate North American ecosystems since he leads the University of Wyoming’s Institute for Managing Annual Grasses Invading Natural Ecosystems. But he was still shocked walking through the endless cheatgrass monoculture taking over the 220,000 once-charred acres northwest of Elko. 

The same noxious species, he knew, is steadily spreading in Wyoming.

The ecological scourge made Silver State officials so desperate that they were planting another nonnative, forage kochia, because it competes with less nutritious cheatgrass and offers some nourishment for native wildlife, like mule deer. 

“They’ll just die, because there’s nothing there,” Mealor said. “That’s why we have to do stuff. Because we could turn into that.” 

Scientists, rangeland managers and state and county officials are doing everything in their power to prevent Wyoming from becoming another landscape lost to cheatgrass. There’s a powerful new herbicide that’s helping. And funds enabling the spraying of hundreds of thousands of acres are being secured and raised. Yet, Wyoming is still losing its cheatgrass fight, and ultimately far more resources are needed to turn it around.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Bob Budd, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “The magnitude of the need is utterly staggering. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade. That’s daunting.”

Budd voiced that warning Tuesday while addressing a statewide group that focuses on bighorn sheep, which depend on seasonal ranges being invaded by cheatgrass. A recent study co-authored by Mealor underscores the need to act soon to protect Wyoming’s wildlife. UW researchers concluded that cheatgrass, which is only edible in spring, could cost northeast Wyoming’s already struggling mule deer half their current habitat in the next couple of decades.

On Nov. 6, the Sheridan-based professor joined fellow academics, biologists and volunteers on a field trip to a mixed-grass prairie. Like the Nevada burn scar, this was a Wyoming landscape on the mend from wildfire. In fact, it wasn’t a grassland until last year. 

Before Aug. 21, 2024, the ground where they stood had been considered the best of what’s left of northeast Wyoming’s sagebrush biome. 

Transformation

A lightning storm that sparked a conflagration abruptly ended that era. Over the course of two days, the House Draw Fire tore a 10-mile-wide, almost 60-mile-long gash into the landscape, inflicting over $25 million in damage. In a fiery blink, the native plant community mostly disappeared. 

Once-prized sagebrush within roughly 100,000 acres of the burn area is basically gone, a worrisome loss of habitat for the region’s already struggling sage grouse. What grew back isn’t a monoculture, like in Nevada. Native species are easily found. But portions of the Powder River Basin’s rolling hills are now dominated by big densities of cheatgrass and Japanese brome, another invasive annual grass. Without mature sagebrush shrubs to compete with, there’s reason to believe the invaders, which flourish with fire, will expand their grip. 

“It’s not like you have a fire and all of a sudden you’re just completely covered with cheatgrass,” Mealor said. “There’s a lag.” 

The Johnson County Natural Habitat Restoration Team is throwing everything it can at the fire scar to try to prevent invasive grasses from taking over. Armed with $12 million in state funds, crews will aerially spray some 120,000 acres with a cheatgrass-killing herbicide. Aerial sagebrush seeding is also underway on 3,000 acres of burned-up sage grouse nesting habitat. And there are even funded plans to build hundreds of simple erosion-controlling Zeedyk structures to protect the wet meadows within the fire scar. 

Yet, on a broader scale, Mealor is a realist about the immense challenge of keeping cheatgrass and its noxious counterparts at bay in Wyoming, let alone enabling sagebrush to stage a comeback — a costly, complicated feat. 

“If we were talking about a 25,000-acre fire here and there,” Mealor said, “it would be a little different.” 

About a half-million acres of northeastern Wyoming burned in 2024, the state’s second-largest fire year in modern history. Wyoming lawmakers agreed to carve out $49 million for wildfire recovery grants statewide, less than half of Gov. Mark Gordon’s requested amount. Optimistically, Mealor said, the awarded sum might be enough to treat a million acres. That sounds significant — it’s half the acreage of Yellowstone. But cheatgrass is spreading just about everywhere in a state that spans 62 million acres.

“If you think about it from a statewide level, it’s not a lot,” Mealor said of the funding. “That’s not an attack. I’m not downplaying the importance of the money that was set aside by the Legislature for this. It’s a lot of money. But it’s also not enough.” 

The governor, who’s a rancher by trade, has voiced the same concern. Pushing for $20 million in cheatgrass spraying funds during the Legislature’s 2024 budget-making process, Gordon acknowledged Wyoming is “losing the battle” against invasive annual grasses. Lawmakers ultimately agreed to $9 million, less than half the requested amount, according to the budget. 

‘Best of the best’

The incursions that cheatgrass, Japanese brome and fellow invasives medusahead and ventenata are making into Wyoming rangelands are significant because of what’s at stake. The Equality State is the cornerstone of what remains of the sagebrush-steppe biome, a 13-state ecosystem vanishing at a rate of 1 million-plus acres per year.  

“Half of the best of the best is in Wyoming,” said Corinna Riginos, who directs the Wyoming science program for The Nature Conservancy. 

The Lander-based scientist is spearheading a Camp Monaco Prize-winning project that seeks to safeguard the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from cheatgrass. The flanks of the ecosystem, such as the Golden Triangle, southwest of the Wind River Range, contain some of the most expansive unbroken tracts of sagebrush remaining on Earth. Distribution maps show that almost all of those areas are in Wyoming. It’s no coincidence that the same places also host remarkable biological phenomena, like the world’s largest sage grouse lek and longest mule deer migration. 

Riginos’ research is focused on defensive measures to catch and kill cheatgrass early on, when it exists at low levels. Keeping the invasion out of core tracts of sagebrush, she said, is a more efficient use of funds than trying to shift heavily contaminated landscapes back to what they used to be. 

“Maybe we live with what they are, we cope with it, rather than trying to recover from it,” Riginos said of cheatgrass-dominated areas. 

Within Wyoming, invasive grass experts don’t have to go far from the world’s most unsullied sagebrush stands to find heavily infested landscapes. In June 2024, Riginos toured cheatgrass treatments in the Wind River Indian Reservation’s Washakie Park area. Although they stood about 40 straight-line miles from the Golden Triangle, scientists, wildlife managers and weed experts on the tour were surrounded by hillsides purple-hued from cheatgrass. 

“You have to respect it, as an organism,” Riginos said. “The adaptability and just kind of sheer ability to get a toehold and take over is pretty remarkable.”

Cheatgrass gets its name from its ability to “cheat” surrounding vegetation out of moisture and nutrients. Its mechanism for success is essentially a head start. It germinates in the fall and starts growing in cold temperatures. Then it overwinters, matures, throws off prolific amounts of seeds and dies by midsummer when native grasses and forbs are much earlier in their life cycle. 

On top of the advantageous life cycle, the West’s ever-increasing, climate-driven wildfires help cheatgrass flourish. When a cheatgrass-infested area burns and becomes more cheatgrass dominant, it’s more prone to burn again, creating a vicious feedback loop. 

Giving cheatgrass yet another advantage, research has shown the plant in North America adapts well to different locales. That trait enables it to flourish in a wide range of temperatures and moisture conditions across the West, Riginos said.

“I feel that this is the most existential, sweeping threat to our western ecosystems.” 

Corinna riginos

“I don’t want to see the West become a wasteland of cheatgrass, I really don’t,” she said. “I feel that this is the most existential, sweeping threat to our western ecosystems. It really concerns me.” 

Closing in

All those traits have enabled an impressive, though foreboding, expansion. Since its introduction from Europe in the 1800s, cheatgrass has spread to all 50 states and parts of Canada and Mexico. There are signs it’s not slowing down. Rangeland ecologists have detected an eightfold increase in cheatgrass across the Great Basin since the 1990s, according to the National Wildlife Federation. 

Simultaneously, sagebrush-dominated landscapes have sustained a decline. A 2022 U.S. Geological Survey report found that an average of 1.3 million acres are being lost or degraded every year. That’s an area larger than Rhode Island.

Although the spread of Wyoming cheatgrass hasn’t been as overwhelming as in lower-elevation, drier western states, the invasion has, and continues to be, successful. A whitepaper distributed by the Wyoming Outdoor Council in the state Capitol during the 2024 funding fight reported that invasive annual grasses already affect 26% of the Equality State’s landmass, which pencils out to over 16 million acres.

Historically, Wyoming land managers believed that much of the nation’s least-populated state was too high and too cold for cheatgrass to gain much ground. But the climate has tilted in its favor, according to Jeanne Chambers, an emeritus U.S. Forest Service research ecologist who has studied cheatgrass for decades.

“Cooler temperatures, especially those cold nighttime temperatures, used to keep cheatgrass at bay,” Chambers said. “But now that things are warming up and people and livestock and animals are all over the place, the propagules — the seeds — are getting everywhere.” 

As a result, slightly lower-elevation reaches of Wyoming, like the Bighorn Basin, are seeing more and more cheatgrass, she said. The same goes for where the salt desert transitions into sagebrush in the state’s southwestern corner.   

“Those areas are pretty vulnerable,” Chambers said. 

Wyoming specialists in those communities corroborate the claims.

“Cheatgrass is moving into our county, primarily on the south end — but it’s not exclusive to the south end,” Sweetwater County Weed and Pest Supervisor Dan Madson said. “There are hot spots throughout the county invading mule deer, antelope and elk habitats, as well as sage grouse core areas.” 

Some of the encroachments are well north into the Green River Basin and Red Desert, noted sagebrush strongholds. North of Rock Springs, north of Superior and in the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge are all places being actively invaded, Madson said.  

Sweetwater County is scaling up its response, Madson said. The county is spending about $750,000 to spray nearly 12,000 acres of cheatgrass this year and plans to treat more like 15,000 acres in 2026. 

But money is a limiting factor. Wyoming landscapes have been the recipient of many millions of federal dollars, including from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which have complemented the state’s contributions. 

Still, the pace of infestation statewide and in Sweetwater County far exceeds the total resources available. 

“We could easily, easily triple that [15,000 acres] in a year,” Madson said, “and still have enough to do for the rest of my career.”

Funding issues aren’t only due to federal government turmoil. One potential pot of $11 million that would have been directed toward spraying evaporated when the Wyoming Senate opted to forgo a supplemental budget. 

“That money got lost,” said Budd, at the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “It actually hurt some parts of the state that were doing a very good proactive job, managing to keep cheatgrass down.”

‘Defending the core’

The upper Green River Basin is one example of a landscape where cheatgrass advances have been reversed. Its remoteness, harsh climate and high elevation helped, but those factors alone didn’t prevent a slow incursion of the virulent vegetation early in the century. By 2014, for example, hues of red and purple — hallmarks of cheatgrass — were painting the ridges rising over Boulder Lake. 

The Sublette County Weed and Pest District fought the invasion with repeated treatments. In 2018 alone, some 30,000 acres of the western front of the Winds were aerially sprayed. It worked. 

By the summer 2020, no cheatgrass was being detected at Boulder Lake, once a hotspot, District Supervisor Julie Kraft said. Nowadays, she said, no major problem areas remain in Sublette County.

Kraft even felt “good” about the future of her cheatgrass fight, expressing uncommon optimism for those grappling with an organism overtaking so many places. 

“A couple of years ago, I might not have said the same thing,” Kraft said. “But with this new tool, and particularly because of the influx of money that came [during] the [Biden] administration, it allowed us to do so much more.” 

That new tool is an herbicide, Indaziflam. It’s a product, also known by its trade name, Rejuvra, that provides far more enduring protection against cheatgrass than any previous chemical treatment. It works by attacking the seedbank and shallow root structure of cheatgrass, while not infiltrating the soil deep enough to kill perennial native grasses and plants like sagebrush. 

“It depletes it down until there won’t be a seedbank of cheatgrass anymore,” Kraft said. “We’ve seen that on our sites. Year one, you can go out and grab handfuls of cheatgrass seed off the top of the soil. Year two, you can’t find those handfuls anymore. By year three, you can’t dig [cheatgrass seeds] out of the bottoms of sagebrush.”

The June 2024 outing that drew Riginos, the Nature Conservancy scientist, to Washakie Park along the east slope of the Winds included a stop at an experimental Indaziflam treatment plot. 

Although a mix of the herbicide had been misted over strips of cheatgrass nearly four years earlier, its effect remained obvious and unmistakable. Curing, purple drooping brome blanketed untreated strips, and native green grasses filled the niches between. 

“It’s holding still,” said Aaron Foster, Fremont County’s weed and pest supervisor, who led the cheatgrass treatment tour on the reservation. “It’s been holding now for four growing seasons. Pretty impressive.”  

Indaziflam is a relative newcomer to Wyoming’s cheatgrass-killing battle. The Environmental Protection Agency didn’t clear it for use on rangelands until 2020. Some federal authorizations came even more recently, with the Bureau of Land Management approving its use in July 2024, after years of urging from western states including Wyoming. 

“With this approval, Indaziflam will be eligible for application on 18 million acres of BLM land in Wyoming,” Gordon said in a press release, noting the policy change would have been “even more welcome” if BLM had made the announcement before states and counties were planning their spraying season.  

Judicious spraying

Out of necessity, Wyoming’s weed and pest districts and federal land managers are extremely strategic about where to put Indaziflam. It’s notoriously costly. Typically, time in the air is the biggest expense in aerial weed spraying work. But that’s not the case with the Envu-produced chemical. At Washakie Park, Foster reported paying $42-$43 per acre in product alone, adding up to about triple the cost of the helicopter. 

Kraft, in Sublette County, didn’t mince words about why Rejuvra’s so pricey. 

“It was a specialty herbicide used on specialty crops — almonds, I believe,” Kraft said. “They found out it worked on cheatgrass and now they have this western monopoly on this herbicide that works great. It’s expensive, and it goes up every year.” 

A Wyoming sales representative for Envu stood behind its breakthrough chemical’s high per-ounce cost. Compared to competing herbicides that need to be sprayed more often, in the long term Rejuvra is a bargain, David Collins said. 

“It’s actually the cheapest product to utilize,” he said. “You’re applying it once instead of every year or every other year, and you’re also saving on application cost.”

With limited resources, Fremont County’s spraying plan is to focus on swaths of the landscape that haven’t been extensively invaded: the Absaroka and Winds foothills toward Dubois and the Red Desert are two examples. But the “core problem area” — the cheatgrass-infested county center, which has lots of human disturbance — is considered a much lower priority, Foster said.  

“I think you have to kind of accept that we’re going to have cheatgrass forever.”

Aaron foster

“I think you have to kind of accept that we’re going to have cheatgrass forever,” he said. “And areas like that are going to be impacted by it most severely forever, too.” 

Out where the House Draw Fire burned, the Johnson County restoration team is planning to spend big on Indaziflam — spraying burned areas that are now grasslands and unburned sagebrush to the tune of $9.3 million, consuming more than three-quarters of its state grant.    

Ultimately, those tending the fire’s scar opted not to spray immediately. Instead, they took a breath, collected data on where cheatgrass and Japanese brome now dominate and where native vegetation grew back.  

“If we were to spray in the black, without knowing that any of the perennial vegetation was going to survive, it could have just been bare ground for four or five years,” said Jaycie Arndt, a University of Wyoming assistant research scientist. 

Now, more than a year after the House Draw Fire burned, its scar also hosts big concentrations of some native grasses, too. Western wheatgrass and blue grama were two species that also surrounded the weed scientists and landowners on their recent tour. 

Healthy native grasses can be one of the best defenses against cheatgrass.

“Sometimes the focus needs to be more on maintaining and increasing our perennial grasses and forbs as competitors,” said Chambers, the longtime Forest Service researcher. Cheatgrass, she added, is “naturalized” into a lot of western landscapes and is “always going to be there on one level or another.” Retaining native vegetation helps maintain resiliency to the attack. 

The House Draw Fire recovery plan also calls for facilitating the return of the ever-depleting sagebrush biome. Ultimately, the state sunk $2.5 million into aerial sagebrush seeding — a technique that’s never been used in Wyoming. 

“This whole thing was an experiment,” said Todd Caltrider, a terrestrial habitat biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “I looked for literature on aerial seeding for sagebrush in the Northern Great Plains, and there wasn’t any.” 

Caltrider spoke from a private land monitoring plot southeast of Buffalo, where sagebrush seedlings, reaching a few inches skyward, could be seen sprouting from the soil. They were among the cherished few. Results were worse than anticipated, with seedlings growing back at an average rate of one plant per acre. 

Even without cheatgrass to compete with, sagebrush comes back painstakingly slow. Individual plants can take decades to mature. But after a wildfire, the ecosystem evolved to recover even more slowly than that: Wyoming big sagebrush takes as long as 200 to 350 years to return to dense stands of mature plants, research has found. 

“If that’s the case, of course we’re not seeing any [recovery],” Mealor said. 

The UW weed scientist’s feet lingered in the burn scar of what was once the Powder River Basin’s best sagebrush. Because of the House Draw Fire, it might functionally be a grassland for the rest of his life. The hope, of course, is that it won’t be a sea of cheatgrass.

The post Inside Wyoming’s fight against cheatgrass, the ‘most existential, sweeping threat’ to western ecosystems appeared first on WyoFile .

If not for a series of tones broadcasting her location, no one would’ve known she had died.

Like dozens of other Yellowstone National Park wolves involved in a three-decade-long study, researchers collared wolf 1331F as a pup in 2021 to track her movements. Gray with ribbons of brown fur fading into her pale muzzle and legs, the young wolf lived with the Wapiti Lake Pack, one of the largest in Yellowstone. 

Wildlife photographer V.C. Wald watched 1331 supervise black wolf pups hunting a wounded bison on the shore of the Gibbon River in the winter of 2023-’24. Easily visible from the road, the pups tried to take the bison head-on, only to scatter as it bluff charged. Then, 1331 demonstrated how to approach the massive ungulate more safely from behind, nipping at its hind quarters, Wald recalls, “[she was] a teacher, of young wolves, and of me.” 

The scene isn’t out of the ordinary for the Wapiti Lake Pack, whose territory encompasses Yellowstone’s sagebrush-covered Hayden Valley in the center of the park. They chase elk and bison. They play and sun themselves on cold winter days. Much of this activity occurs under the gaze of humans. But every now and then, pack members leave the park. 

In late 2024, Yellowstone Wolf Project telemetry data suggest 1331 started a journey away from her pack. She headed north. First, she spent time around Mammoth Hot Springs. Then she crossed the park’s boundary into Montana. While tourists often lined roads to watch 1331 and her packmates inside the park, wolf watchers are sparser in the rugged and mountainous mix of public and private land just north of Yellowstone. Wolf 1331 had no way of knowing, but she’d crossed an invisible line where the national park gives way to state rule. It’s a consequential threshold: Wolves are protected from hunting on one side, but can be legally killed by gun, trap or snare on the other. 

Park officials don’t know if 1331 was permanently leaving her pack or if she would have eventually returned to Wapiti Lake’s territory; it’s not uncommon for female wolves of her age to disperse for days or even weeks leading up to breeding season in February — sort of a lupine rumspringa. But they do know she’d left the pack far behind. On Jan. 24, 2025, staff with the Yellowstone Wolf Project drove north of the park, wielding bulky telemetry equipment to listen for collared elk and wolves. They heard 1331’s signal, indicating she’d moved farther into Montana than ever. But, the beeps suggested, she hadn’t budged in at least 12 hours. 

Park staff turned the information over to Montana’s fish and game agency. Wolf 1331 would ultimately be found dead in a trap set by a prolific wolf hunter who manages a large ranch about 10 miles north of Yellowstone. The man who trapped 1331 would receive a warning for violating state trap-check laws and no other punishment. Her journey had come to an end roughly a month after it began. 

The Yellowstone bubble

Wolf 1331F’s fate was unusual only in that she made it so far north. When wolves leave the park, they die — often, quickly.

Yellowstone’s roughly 100 wolves are among the most famous and beloved in the world, attracting throngs of wolf-admiring tourists who spend tens of millions of dollars in the region every year. However, protected by federal law and tolerant of their adoring fans, Yellowstone wolves are uniquely vulnerable to hunters and trappers in surrounding states where killing wolves is legal. Their destinies are often shaped by which of the three surrounding state boundaries they cross. 

“When we look at the fate of collared wolves that leave Yellowstone, most commonly they don’t survive the next hunting season,” Yellowstone Wolf Project leader Dan Stahler said in a May 2024 interview.  

Heading into Wyoming, wolves encounter wilderness and tightly controlled hunts, but greater danger beyond. Step into Idaho and it’s a free-fire zone, though few wolves go that way. Journeys north into Montana are the most common and have proven the most deadly, despite some state efforts to take it easy on park wolves.    

Yellowstone’s wolves die from hunting and trapping outside the park every season, but things seem to be getting worse. From 2009-2020, about 4.3 wolves from Yellowstone were killed legally by hunters and trappers each year, according to National Park Service data. From 2021-2024, that number nearly tripled when an average of 12.75 wolves died annually, according to Yellowstone Wolf Project data. 

It was clear to Doug Smith, retired lead of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, that the park’s porous boundaries would be an issue almost immediately after wolves were reintroduced in 1995. “This is a long-term problem for wildlife management, and particularly wolves,” Smith said in an interview this fall. 

Inside Yellowstone, wolves are managed “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,” the now-famous language adorning the top of Roosevelt Arch, a striking stone gateway often surrounded by selfie-taking tourists at the park’s North Entrance. The sentiment springs from the 1916 act creating the National Park Service and stops at the park’s border. Outside Yellowstone, the states take over wolf management. There, wolves can get into trouble. They kill livestock, the occasional pet, and lots and lots of elk. And they’re especially naive to the many dangers in the new world around them.

Even in the early days of reintroduction, Smith remembers phone calls urging him to do the impossible: keep wolves inside the park. Back then, wolves had federal protections both in and out of Yellowstone. Hunting them was illegal, whether in Montana, Wyoming or Idaho, or inside Yellowstone itself. But within a month of releasing the park’s first wolves from their enclosure, a hunter named Chad McKittrick illegally shot and killed a male wolf, numbered 10M, after it left the park and ventured onto private land near Red Lodge, Montana. 

Fast-forward nearly 30 years and death also awaited 1329M, a striking green-eyed black male wolf, when he left Yellowstone. Researchers captured and collared 1329, born into the Wapiti Lake Pack just like 1331F. He was caught and joined the ranks of research wolves in 2021, the same year they collared 1331F as a pup. A year later, park scientists documented the young male, with a touch of silver on his chin, getting into a scuffle with other males, which could have spurred a dispersal. His collar’s GPS data shows he left Yellowstone on May 14, 2022, heading south. “[1329] beelined it all the way down through the trophy game wolf area,” said Stahler, the current Yellowstone Wolf Project leader.

The state of Wyoming tightly regulates wolf hunting in an area where wolves are managed as “trophy game” adjacent to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, with the area closed to hunting in the spring. But 1329 kept moving. GPS data shows his route, loping straight through the heart of Jackson Hole, then south, looping through the Wyoming and Salt River ranges. The black wolf headed into a valley where, three years later, Sublette County resident Cody Roberts would fight a felony animal cruelty charge for allegedly making a public spectacle of a wounded, juvenile wolf in a bar before the animal died. The incident made international news and divided the small Western Wyoming community. Wolves are fewer here. There’s a reason. 

Within two weeks of leaving Yellowstone, the roughly 2-year-old 1329 crossed another boundary and left Wyoming’s regulated wolf “trophy game” area for its “predator zone,” which covers 85% of the state and where there are virtually no regulations on how wolves can be killed. Running down and bludgeoning wolves with snowmobiles here is legal. The departure meant he could be killed any time of year, by almost any means, and without a license.

Toward the end of June 2022, wolf 1329 stopped moving in the mountains near Salt River Pass, near where the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem transitions into the Great Basin. He’d stepped into a steel-jawed leghold trap. “It had been in the trap about four days,” Stahler says, “based on the location and movement.” By June 26, the trapped wolf was dead. The Yellowstone biologist’s best guess is that 1329 was exposed to the elements and died of dehydration. States surrounding the park require trappers to frequently check their wolf traps to reduce animals’ suffering and minimize harm to non-target species. Negligence is illegal. 

‘Risky life choice’ 

Wolves in the Northern Rockies are no strangers to controversy. Indeed, politicians in all three states surrounding Yellowstone have long seized on wolves as a prime example of federal overreach. “I remain seriously concerned with the uncertainty that continues to surround Yellowstone wolf reintroduction as it moves forward,” former Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer wrote to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt in 1995, after wolves were already on the ground. Former Idaho Gov. Butch Otter said he’d be the first to bid on a wolf tag back in 2007. And Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte was issued a warning for killing a Yellowstone wolf without the proper trapper education in 2021. 

Death by hunting, trapping or wildlife management official is the most common fate for wolves that leave Yellowstone National Park. Even in a natural system, the act of dispersing is already a “risky life choice,” according to Stahler. Solo wolves end up in territories of other wolf packs, where they clash and get killed. In fact, within Yellowstone, wolves are the leading cause of wolf death. 

While the number of wolves that spend the vast majority of their time inside Yellowstone has stayed relatively static for more than two decades, wolf populations outside the park have grown by leaps and bounds. That’s in part because some Yellowstone wolves successfully dispersed and survived. At the same time, other wolves reintroduced in Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness established and bred. And yet more wolves filtered down from the north, crossing the Canadian border into the U.S. Today, populations of animals as reclusive as wolves are tough to estimate, but the most recent figures for Montana and Idaho wolf populations are roughly 1,100 and 1,200, respectively. In Wyoming, which has less mountainous, treed habitat, there are fewer wolves — about 350 — and they’re counted with much greater precision.

While those wolf populations outside the park grew, the human population inside Yellowstone expanded, too. Park visitation hovered around 3 million annually at the time of wolf reintroduction in 1995. Today, that number is closer to 5 million, evidenced by the sprawl of souvenir shops in the Yellowstone gateway towns of Jackson, Wyoming and Gardiner, Montana where tourists snap up T-shirts, stuffed bison and elk toys, and art emblazoned with wolves. This increased visitation, wolf biologist Smith says, is the biggest issue facing Yellowstone National Park as a whole.

“It’s the best place in the world to view wild wolves,” says Smith, adding that in the early days of wolf reintroduction, finding wolves inside the park was exclusive, inside information. That’s changed nowadays, he says, with the influx of eager, wolf- and grizzly-watching tourists. “There’s no inside tips anymore. Just look for the traffic jam.”

Wolf-watching tourism alone contributes at least $82 million annually to communities bordering the park, the most recent data show. However, all those people lining the roads and hillsides of Yellowstone come at a cost. “[When wolves] leave the park,” Smith says, “they get shot because they stand there and look at a hunter.”

Some wolves become so accustomed to people that they become habituated, according to Smith, meaning they walk up to humans in search of food or become so bold that they run off with tripods. In rare instances, park officials have euthanized habituated wolves.

The Wapiti Lake Pack, a major draw for wolf watchers and tourists, has been susceptible to human conditioning. These Yellowstone interior wolves, considered bison-killing specialists, often use groomed park roads to get around in winter, at times walking right by snowmobilers buzzing down the road on their way to places like Old Faithful or Tower Junction. They’ve even been hazed with paintballs as a result.  

But the vast majority of park wolves aren’t habituated, Smith says. Rather, they’re tolerant of people. “A wild wolf is avoidant,” he says. “They flee, they run. They know what humans mean: death. That’s not a park wolf.” Tolerance is the curse that leaves them vulnerable outside the park. 

Justin Webb, executive director of the Foundation for Wildlife Management, says Yellowstone should do more to instill its wolves with a healthy fear of people.

“Wolves in the park should be given the respect of space, and I think that those wolves shouldn’t be conditioned to people,” says Webb, whose nonprofit makes bounty-like payments to trappers who kill wolves.

On occasion, Yellowstone wolves face circumstances that make them especially prone to human conditioning. The Junction Butte Pack, for example, often dens within eyeshot of Slough Creek, a popular trailhead for hikers and anglers. Tourists and Yellowstone guides have learned about the highly visible location, potentially dooming those pups. 

“Why don’t they close the trailhead down?” Webb asked. 

Yellowstone wolves leave the park for all kinds of reasons. Some, like 1331F, might take a temporary solo hiatus from their pack, while 1329M was likely in the midst of a more permanent dispersal, searching for new territory or a mate. However, the vast majority of Yellowstone’s wolves spend about 96% of their time inside the park, collar data shows. With no time to learn a healthy fear of humans, the 4% of the time they unwittingly leave their protections behind proves deadly. Instead of other wolves, people — either hunters or poachers — become, by far, the leading cause of death for wolves that depart Yellowstone, Stahler said. 

No fear

For the first decade and a half after wolves returned to Yellowstone, the Endangered Species Act outlawed hunting wolves throughout the Lower 48. Protracted legal battles meant the first lawful hunt didn’t occur until 2009, and it revealed the risk facing wolves that spend most of their lives inside Yellowstone. 

“They aren’t showing any fear,” one Montana wolf hunter told the Los Angeles Times after a successful hunt that year. “But they will, I’m sure.” Another hunting guide told the outlet about a wolf his client killed: “He was no more afraid of [the hunter] than the man in the moon.”

In 2011, wolves were permanently “delisted,” or stripped of federal protections under the Endangered Species Act, in Montana, Idaho and portions of three other western states by an act of Congress. In Wyoming, the change came more slowly because of litigation. Wolves were most recently delisted there in 2017. 

After years of hunts in surrounding states, the story hasn’t changed much. In late 2024, members of the 8 Mile Pack crossed the park boundary into Montana. Three hunters were waiting. They left with four dead wolves. A fifth was found days later, dead in nearby bushes. That many wolves dying at the same time rather than fleeing at the sound of a gunshot, Smith says, likely means they had no fear of people. “Killing multiple wolves at once is a sure sign of that.”

In this way, 1331 and 1329 are outliers. According to Yellowstone National Park data, over the last few years, approximately 81% of wolves that lived in Yellowstone and were killed by hunters died in Montana. That’s largely due to terrain. Think of the Gardiner Basin just north of Yellowstone like a funnel: Elk migrate to the lower-elevation, arid area in search of forage in winter. Wolves follow. Of all those wolves killed by hunters in Montana, nearly 9 in 10 died within just a mile of the park boundary. The forays of 1331 and 1329 outside Yellowstone — clocking about 10 miles and over 100, respectively — mean they traveled much farther than most of their kind before meeting the same end. 

The lives of long-distance travelers, like the two Wapiti Lake pack members that died in traps, are less understood. Smith attributes the dearth of data to a simple reason: They die. 

“A wolf dispersing has a higher mortality risk because it doesn’t know the landscape,” he says. “So that makes it more vulnerable to getting shot because they’re wandering around going, ‘I don’t know where I am; I don’t know where it’s safe and where it’s unsafe.’” 

Montana and Wyoming’s respective wildlife management agencies investigated the trappings of 1331 and 1329. Both were found only because of their collar mortality signals, and both trappers were found to have violated state “trap-check” laws. Wolf traps must be checked every 48 hours in Montana. Leghold traps must be checked every 72 hours in Wyoming’s predator zone, the only place in the Equality State where wolf trapping is allowed.

The Wyoming trapper, a Cokeville resident named Ezra Cluff, was cited and fined $250 on June 30, 2022. “Cluff stated that he had got busy and had indeed failed to do his trap checks on time,” the warden wrote in a citation slip. Cluff did not respond to an interview request. 

Nearly three years later and on the opposite end of the ecosystem, 1331 was found in a trap about 10 miles, as the crow flies, north of Yellowstone. The trap was registered to Matt Lumley, who was at the time president of the Montana Trappers Association and vice president of the National Trappers Association. Lumley also has close ties to political leadership in Montana. He helped Gov. Gianforte trap and kill another collared Yellowstone wolf in 2021. Gianforte later described Lumley as his wolf hunting “mentor” in an interview with Lee Enterprise’s Statehouse Bureau. In addition, Lumley is a founding member of the Outdoor Heritage Coalition, a group currently suing Montana, arguing that state wildlife managers aren’t setting policy aggressively enough to reduce the wolf population.

Lumley did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But his comments in the Helena Capitol building are in the public record. “I’ve killed a lot of wolves,” he testified at the Montana Legislature just days before Wolf Project staff heard 1331F’s mortality signal. “I’ve never killed a Yellowstone National Park wolf. I’m killing all my wolves in Montana.”

Yellowstone park officials estimate that 1331 died on Jan. 16, 2025. Park staff detected her mortality signal on Jan. 23, and her remains were recovered even later. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks submitted a “request for prosecution” for a trap-check violation to Montana’s Park County Attorney’s Office. Despite the state’s 48-hour trap-check regulation for wolves, the county attorney declined to prosecute. 

“After a careful review of the reports, supporting documents, and available evidence, we determined that the facts did not establish a criminal offense that could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” Park County Attorney Chad Glenn said in an email to Mountain Journal and WyoFile. 

Glenn did not respond to follow-up questions or provide the documents he cited as the basis for his decision. Ultimately, Lumley walked away with a formal warning from FWP. Gianforte also walked away with a warning in 2021 after running afoul of trapping regulations while killing a wolf with Lumley on the same ranch, owned by Robert E. Smith, a co-director of Sinclair Broadcasting Group and contributor to Gianforte’s 2017 congressional campaign.

Elk, livestock and wolves

The saga of Wapiti Lake’s wandering wolves reflects the complexity of managing Yellowstone wolves when they leave protected areas like the park. Over the last few decades, the region has transitioned from an economy based on resource extraction to one heavily reliant on tourism and recreation. Outside the national park, wildlife managers are tasked with balancing hard-to-reconcile viewpoints in states where hunting and ranching have deep roots and large landowners hold sway. 

The overpopulated elk herds of Yellowstone’s Northern Range numbered around 15,000-20,000 in the years leading up to the 1995 wolf reintroduction. Counts are now closer to 5,000, much to the dismay of many a hunter who relied on the area’s abundance of ungulates for meat or trophies. 

“I’ve got an 18-year-old son that I want to get to experience elk camp in the backcountry,” Webb, the wolf-hunting advocate, told a Wyoming audience in 2022. “I want him to sit on a mountaintop on a ridge and listen to bulls bugle below him as the sun comes up, and I believe that if we don’t do something to control wolf populations, he won’t have that experience.”

Meanwhile, Lumley the trapper called the decline of southwest Montana elk “the greatest loss of hunting opportunity in the world” during the same legislative hearing he touted killing “a lot of wolves.” Decades before wolf reintroduction, elk were so numerous in the area that Yellowstone sometimes culled thousands of the animals in a single year. Later, the park took a more hands-off approach. Elk hunting outside the park became the primary management tool to deal with the overpopulated ungulates. Locals recall a “firing line” of hunters as elk moved toward winter range outside the park’s protections. 

Wolves were a factor — but not the only factor — in the region’s decline in elk numbers. Mountain lions and bears eat elk, too. And so do people. A long-running late-season elk hunt in the Gardiner area also played a role in the elk population’s shrinking size. Despite a drastic decrease in numbers from the days before wolves, elk populations north of Yellowstone still remain at or above the state-set goal for elk numbers. Access to elk is yet another important part of the hunting puzzle. Some hunters say the wary ungulates that remain in the area often take shelter from wolves and hunters alike on private land, making them next to impossible to pursue. 

Part of the tension around hunting both wolves and elk also centers on economics. While wolf-watching brings millions of tourist dollars into communities surrounding the park, outfitters north of Yellowstone have lost business as elk herds declined after reintroduction. The lawsuit filed by the Outdoor Heritage Coalition features outfitter Craig Neal, an outfitter in Townsend, Montana, as a plaintiff. Neal, the brief contends, “has been negatively impacted by restrictions on wolf hunting in Montana from a personal and economic perspective … his business opportunities are limited by the insufficient wolf quotas and reduced elk available for hunting.” 

Elk aren’t the only hooved creatures wolves impact, either. Outside Yellowstone, they also occasionally kill livestock. Although wolf-killed cattle and sheep are a drop in the bucket among the many factors that kill domestic livestock, the impacts aren’t trivial for individual ranchers in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.   

In Wyoming and Montana each year, wolves typically kill at least a few dozen of the more than 3 million cows in the two states — though many ranchers argue that wolf kills can go unproven since remote carcasses are consumed before the kill can be documented. Depredation numbers in Wyoming notably spiked from 2014 to 2017, topping out at 121 wolf-killed cattle — a pulse of conflict that coincided with the three years Wyoming wolves were relisted under the Endangered Species Act. While those federal protections prohibited hunters from killing wolves at the time, wildlife managers trying to avert conflict could do just that. And they did, killing a record number. In Montana, complaints about wolves eating livestock peaked at 233 in 2009. Since then, in the wake of delisting, the number of reports has dropped off drastically, hovering at 100 or fewer annually from 2015 to 2024.

Pressure cooker 

To control the wolf population and mitigate their impact, hunting has become a fixture of wolf management in the Northern Rockies. Since legal seasons began earlier in the century, some animals that spend most of the year in Yellowstone are always lost to hunters’ bullets and traps outside park boundaries. 

In an attempt to resolve the tension between the park and surrounding states, Montana carved out small areas with more limited hunting called “wolf management units” directly north of the park. Wyoming tightly controls its hunts immediately adjacent to Yellowstone and Grand Teton, and has had minimal overall impact on Yellowstone populations. Idaho takes an aggressive, statewide approach to wolf hunting and trapping, but the topography and location of Yellowstone packs have limited its influence on park populations. 

The vast majority of harvested Yellowstone wolves die in Montana, where tensions continue to flare over setting the state’s wolf season. In 2021, the Montana Legislature mandated a reduction in the state’s overall wolf population, numbering roughly 1,177 at the time. The new law simply set a minimum of 15 breeding pairs (corresponding to 450 wolves). In the years since, setting policy to reduce wolf numbers has fallen to the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission, a citizen board appointed by the governor, currently Gianforte. The commission has considered a slew of ways to meet the mandate: lengthening hunting and trapping seasons, instituting a statewide quota, night hunting on private land, and neck snaring, among other approaches. Some of those aggressive tactics have taken effect. Others haven’t. Yet today, four years after the legislative mandate took effect, Montana still hasn’t seen a meaningful reduction in its wolf population. 

In 2021, about six months after Gianforte trapped and killed a Yellowstone wolf north of the park, the commission also removed quotas in the wolf management units, or WMUs, just outside Yellowstone. That winter, hunters killed at least 25 wolves that spent the vast majority of their lives inside the park. Roughly 1 in 5 park wolves perished — more park wolves than in any hunting season before or since. Yellowstone biologists worried about the impact of the hunt on their three-decade-old research project — some packs dissolved due to the hunt, and others formed. Behavior and reproductive rates changed, too. Wildlife guides were furious, concerned they’d lose business or wolf-watching opportunities altogether. 

Ultimately, the quotas were restored. But over the next two years, outcomes for Yellowstone wolves only marginally improved. At least 13 park wolves were killed in the 2023-2024 hunting season. Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly voiced his concern to the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission in a 2024 letter. “Wolves that primarily live within Yellowstone are exceedingly valuable to a great number of people across Montana, the country, and the world,” he wrote. “The park generates hundreds of millions of dollars in additional economic activity to Montana economies and wolves and other wildlife rate as a top reason why people visit the park and region.”

The pressure cooker of hunting policy around Yellowstone hasn’t let off steam. At the January 2025 legislative hearing, Lumley complained that the Fish and Wildlife Commission was setting policy that was too protective of wolves and listening only to out-of-state interests, particularly Yellowstone. Just 3% of the national park lies in Montana. “That’s what you are elected to do, protect Montana’s interests,” Lumley testified. “Not Yellowstone National Park’s.” 

In a Fish and Wildlife Commission meeting months later, Chris Morgan, Lumley’s successor at the Montana Trappers Association, made similar claims. He alleged that policy safeguarding wolves in the region around Yellowstone is a “political ploy” and touted the state’s responsibility for wolf reduction rather than wolf watching.

“We don’t have any state mandate that requires us to make sure that ecotourism thrives,” Morgan said. “Our mandate is to reduce the state’s population of wolves. Plain and simple. Period.” 

Wolf advocates were just as fired up in the day-long meeting. Cara McGary, a Yellowstone guide and cofounder of Wild Livelihoods Business Coalition, argued that plenty of Yellowstone wolves — like 1331F— die even outside the protective boundaries of the wolf management units. Southwest Montana receives far more wolf hunting pressure than anywhere else in the state, despite a lower overall wolf density than Montana’s northwest corner, according to Montana FWP data. It’s also the only area in the Treasure State where the wolf population was already on the decline. In 2024 alone, at least six wolves from the park died legally in the Yellowstone-adjacent WMUs and another five outside their boundaries. “That’s almost 10% of the product that our businesses depend on,” she testified. 

At the time of publication, wolf hunting season in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho is well underway. The heat over wolf hunting regulations around Yellowstone in that August commission meeting led to something of a middle-ground approach. But already this year, a Montana hunter legally killed a Yellowstone wolf beloved to the wolf-watching community, which described the dark black 1479F as playful and tolerant of crowds.

“She was one of the few wolves in the park that would walk right through a crowd of people to reach her destination,” wildlife photographer Deby Dixon told Cowboy State Daily.

The National Park Service has two chief goals: preserving and protecting natural systems, and visitor enjoyment. Wolves figure into both, and the scientific gains from studying Yellowstone packs are unparalleled: They’re both uniquely visible and, at least in theory, uninfluenced by humans. But as wolves deal with such direct mortality when they set paw outside the park, Smith wonders: “Do you have a natural wolf population or not?”

Some data suggests not. A 2023 peer-reviewed study led by then-University of Montana PhD student Brenna Cassidy found that Montana’s wolf-hunting regime has a clear effect on the overall survival of Yellowstone wolves. Without hunting, park wolves have a nearly 90% chance of surviving any given year, but the rate falls to about 80% when hunting occurs with quotas. When there’s unlimited hunting outside the boundary, Yellowstone wolves’ chances of surviving a year dip closer to 70%. 

Smith, Yellowstone’s retired wolf biologist, wants to be clear: He’s a hunter as well, and a self-described “gun guy.” At times, though, he worries that all the focus on Yellowstone’s wolves has an overlooked downside. It sucks the air out of the room in wolf management conversations, leaving too little focus on the thousands more wolves in Montana and the rest of the Northern Rockies that don’t have the same vocal proponents as animals in and around the park. Those wolves die too — often very quickly or brutally. In Montana, hunters and trappers can take a total of 458 wolves this season, including six in the WMUs outside Yellowstone and 60 in the larger region where 1331 met her end. There are no limits in Idaho, and it’s a wolf hunting free-for-all in Wyoming’s predator zone, where 1329 died in an illegally monitored trap. 

Thinking about intense hunting pressure throughout the Northern Rockies, Smith thinks wildlife managers should consider a bigger question: “Where do wolves get to be wolves?”

The post What happens when wolves leave Yellowstone appeared first on WyoFile .

Since 2022, four Wyoming hospitals have closed labor and delivery wards, leaving 16 birthing hospitals for a state spanning 97,000 square miles. Medical workforce shortages, onerous on-call doctor schedules and mounting affordability challenges have only exacerbated the state’s growing maternity care gaps. 

The problem is not unique to Wyoming, but the state lags behind others in embracing and implementing solutions, according to a new Wyoming Women’s Action Network white paper. 

Wyoming, for example, is the only state not to participate in the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, an initiative to support best practices that make births safer and improve maternal health outcomes. 

“There are tools that are available to us that really haven’t been a focus of discussion, and could maybe start to make a significant difference,” said Jen Simon of the Wyoming Women’s Action Network. Like so many complicated issues, Simon said, “there’s no silver bullet. It’s going to take [multiple] efforts to really address it. And so, let’s start to identify what low-hanging fruit might be.”

That was one goal of the white paper, titled “The Equality State’s Growing Crisis: What maternity deserts mean for Wyoming and how we can turn the tide for moms and babies.” 

By collecting baseline data and policy directions, Simon said, the hope is to underscore an array of steps — even small ones — that can lead to more robust maternity care. 

“We do in fact have options,” she said. 

Along with joining the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Care, “low-hanging-fruit” strategies range from distributing low-cost alert bracelets to new mothers to convening an annual summit for sharing best practices. 

Rising challenges, falling births 

A dearth of maternal health care has made pregnancy and childbirth increasingly tricky in widening swaths of Wyoming, a 2023 WyoFile investigation found. 

This is evident in Fremont County, where moms are opting to temporarily relocate to places like Denver and even the East Coast to deliver babies. It is evident in Rawlins, where families have to travel Interstate 80, a notorious stretch of highway that closes frequently in the winter, to deliver in Laramie. And it is evident in Teton County, where overflow patients from elsewhere in the state are straining OB-GYN providers. 

Lawmakers made maternity care a top issue of study for the 2024 legislative off-season and began to identify a complicated mix of challenges for providing such care in rural places, though they didn’t pass any policies. 

Meanwhile, births continue to fall in many Wyoming hospitals, and a fifth facility, Platte County Hospital in Wheatland, temporarily shut down its delivery services in October.
For the Legislature’s Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee, maternity care was the No. 1 priority again during the 2025 off-season, or interim. 

Committee members discussed the issue in depth in October and acknowledged the problem’s scope is daunting. Proposed measures, such as one they advanced to authorize freestanding birth centers to get Medicaid coverage for midwife births, are merely “band-aids” that could perhaps keep maternity care limping along in its current state, lawmakers said. 

That leads to Simon’s point that Wyoming doesn’t have to focus on large-scale state-level reforms for solutions. 

“It’s such a significant challenge to move things through the legislature in every state, not just this state,” she said. The intent of the white paper is “to really be thinking about what would be accessible for hospitals and providers, and what are some best practices that are really simple and straightforward.”

Training, sharing, legislating

The paper’s more accessible recommendations include instituting an annual, statewide maternal health summit — an effort already underway. There are also training approaches, such as the Obstetric Patient Safety Program, commonly known as OPS, which is designed to help medical providers prepare for obstetrical emergencies. 

Postpartum birth alert bracelets, meanwhile, represent a simple and inexpensive tool that alerts health care providers to patients who have delivered within the previous six weeks. That can help ensure recognition and response to complications such as hemorrhage, hypertensive crises or infection — leading contributors to postpartum maternal mortality.

There are also local-level models, such as a community-wide prenatal access program developed in Teton County, as well as inclusion in national expertise pools. 

“Participation in [Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health] would give Wyoming access to resources, technical assistance, and collaborative partners to better collect and report data, implement strategies to address identified issues, and ultimately improve maternal outcomes,” the white paper reads. 

It also identifies more-involved strategies aimed at improving local capacity, affordability and workforce recruitment. These include initiatives like expanding physician access to remote support from maternal-fetal medicine specialists, administering matching-funds loan-repayment programs for health care professionals or boosting reimbursement for providing maternity services to Medicaid patients.

The Labor Committee in October voted down draft legislation that would provide for increased Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement for OB services and critical access hospitals.

Even though government can play a vital role in improving maternity care, Simon said, she hopes to convey that other meaningful avenues exist. 

“Here’s some things that can be done, that hospitals can decide, that communities can decide, that individuals can decide,” she said. 

Advances 

The paper also highlights some positive steps and strategies that are rolling out in the maternal health realm. 

This year, for example, Megan Baker of St. John’s Health in Jackson became the first Wyoming Section Chair for the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, which connects her with resources for training and improved obstetric outcomes for Wyoming moms.

Baker, the manager of women’s services at St. John’s, has spearheaded initiatives to bolster the hospital’s maternal health offerings. St. John’s recently became Wyoming’s first hospital to gain a “maternal level of care” designation. She also helped obtain a statewide grant for OB safety courses and acquire alert bracelets for her facility. 

Wyoming medical professionals and hospitals will need to work together to combine resources to create a stronger network, Baker said. She is also a proponent of small-cost, big-impact programs like the alert bracelets. 

“I think we have to look at things differently,” she said. “Share resources, share people and figure out how others are doing it.”

If Wyoming’s trend continues, experts worry that mothers will put off or forgo prenatal care, travel long distances in difficult weather or give birth in emergency rooms with nurses who aren’t trained in labor and delivery, which could have dangerous or even deadly results. 

The erosion in care also poses existential threats to communities, as adequate health care is crucial to attracting young families to rural towns, state leaders say. 

“Being able to have a baby, safely, in Wyoming is a harbinger of our state’s present and future prospects,” Wyoming Women’s Action Network Board Member and Teton County Commissioner Natalia Macker said in a release. “The health of our moms, babies, and families is a clear indication of how healthy our hospitals, communities, and economy will be.”

The post Wyoming lags on solutions while maternal care crisis grows, report finds appeared first on WyoFile .

When the Affordable Care Act marketplace, where roughly 42,000 Wyoming residents get their health insurance, opened enrollment Saturday, customers likely faced a double whammy: higher prices and fewer resources.  

The landscape looks different this year between federal changes to the marketplace’s administration and the ongoing government shutdown — caused in part by a deadlock over ACA tax credits designed to make insurance cheaper for consumers. 

As things stand, consumers are generally experiencing less help in navigating the system, seeing higher premium costs for plans and facing new reporting requirements. In some cases, people could find their health insurance costs spiking by thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars annually. 

Wyomingites have two months to shop for a plan before open enrollment closes Jan. 15. WyoFile reached out to experts and gathered information and tips for residents to keep in mind through the process: 

Costs may rise drastically 

The Affordable Care Act marketplace is available to people who don’t qualify for Medicaid and don’t have insurance through an employer.

Open enrollment is the annual window when individuals and families can sign up for health insurance through the ACA, adjust their plans or cancel coverage. 

Price jumps aren’t uncommon as insurers do raise premiums over time, but this year those increases will be larger due to the expiration of some enhanced premium tax credits. 

“Health insurance has always been and continues to be very, very expensive,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor with Georgetown’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “But going into 2026, it’s only going to get more expensive.”

The tax credits were created in 2021 to essentially lower monthly out-of-pocket costs for ACA consumers, in some cases, all the way to $0. Congress did not extend them in the One Big Beautiful Bill in July, and an attempt to extend them now is one of the factors driving the government shutdown. 

The average ACA marketplace consumer will likely pay about 100% more for coverage in 2026, according to a fact sheet from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

In Wyoming, the impacts will vary depending on income, demographics and other factors. According to Healthy Wyoming, a 60-year-old couple with an annual income of $82,000 will face an increase of $37,422 in annual health care costs due to the tax credit loss. The premium increase for a 45-year-old who earns $62,000 annually could be upwards of $6,000.

Less help, more paperwork 

In the past, health “navigators” — professionals who guide customers through what can be a confusing open enrollment process — have been available largely thanks to federal funds. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, however, slashed that funding by 90% this year. 

As a result, Enroll Wyoming, which offered free navigator help to those looking for insurance, experienced a significant budget cut. Despite paring down its staff from 10 individuals to just one full-time and one part-time employee, Enroll Wyoming will still offer services. 

“Enroll Wyoming stresses that it will be still around to educate and empower consumers,” reads an August press release. Consumers can learn more about accessing those services here. 

The nonprofit will have more emphasis on online and phone communication in its new iteration, the release says. “At the same time, Enroll Wyoming is building a statewide network of partners to provide more referral support.”

Consumers will also have fewer options. Mountain Health Co-op announced in August that it will no longer offer health plans in Wyoming at the end of the year. That means Wyoming will be down to just two providers.

Finally, people should brace for more paperwork, Corlette said. That can include filing extra forms or submitting paperwork to reflect any changes in income. 

Stay informed, don’t rush

Enrollment opened Saturday. To get coverage starting Jan. 1, consumers must enroll in a plan by Dec. 15. If they enroll between Dec. 15 and the closing date of Jan. 15, coverage will start Feb. 1. If people are already enrolled and do nothing, they will be automatically re-enrolled in their plans.

The ACA marketplace only opened up what’s called “window shopping” two days before enrollment began, Corlette said, which means that it’s been hard for customers to suss out their new options.

“Also, the federal government told insurance companies that for this year only, they don’t have to include premium information in the notices that they send to consumers, which usually go out in October,” she added. That could further veil price changes. 

“I can imagine some people will be taken by surprise,” she said. “This will be a uniquely challenging year.”

So what can people do? 

First, Corlette said, they can contact their members of Congress to urge them to find more affordable solutions and let them know “the delay is not helping anyone.” 

Next, she said, they should stay informed. “If you see your premium is unaffordable, don’t lose hope. There is still a chance that Congress will strike a deal here and provide premium relief.”

Folks can hold off until Dec. 15, Corlette noted; they don’t have to rush into anything. 

If they do decide to leave the marketplace and look elsewhere, Corlette said, they should have caution. 

“There’s a lot of junk out there and a lot of aggressive marketing, so just be careful,” she said, adding that using a local insurance broker who can meet in person is generally a good way to help sort the quality plans from those that don’t offer much financial protection. 

What Corlette fears at this point is that “a lot of people will check their accounts, see their premium, get sticker shock, and say, ‘I can’t afford this,’ and walk away.

“And once they walk away, it’s really, really hard to get them to come back,” she said. “I think there’s still time for Congress to act, but probably too late to be sure that everybody stays insured.”

If people opt out of marketplace insurance, it would likely trigger even more cost increases. According to BlueCrossBlueShield Wyoming, when healthier people leave the marketplace, those who remain often require more care. That drives up costs for everyone.

The post Sticker shock? Wyomingites could see skyrocketing bills on ACA health insurance marketplace appeared first on WyoFile .

Headlines flooded media outlets around the country this week detailing the Trump administration plans to permanently “abolish” 2,050 jobs at the U.S. Department of the Interior, but how the layoffs will impact Wyoming remains unclear. 

An accounting of the “reduction in force,” or RIF, became public in a court document filed Monday. The disclosure was required by a federal judge out of Northern California who issued a temporary restraining order in response to a federal labor union lawsuit. Although the Interior Department has a large presence in Wyoming — a state that’s half federal land — the legal filing only revealed two clearly in-state positions that are being eliminated. 

Both those “abolished” positions are with the Bureau of Reclamation’s Wyoming Area Office. The filing does not specify which jobs are being removed from the office, which manages irrigation, flood control infrastructure and associated land in river basins west of the Continental Divide in Wyoming and parts of Colorado and Montana. A WyoFile inquiry yielded no response or information from the office, which is only partly operational due to the federal government shutdown. 

The attempted layoffs are coming at a time when many federal government employees have been furloughed because of the shutdown. The funding lapse, now in its third week, is the second longest in history, though many federal functions and properties, such as the national parks, are still going or being left open.

President Donald Trump has said he’s laying off federal workers because of the shutdown, which he is blaming on Congressional Democrats. But Interior Department officials wrote in court filings that the layoffs are unrelated and have been in the works for months. 

Notably, court filings disclose only a subset of the jobs U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is planning to eliminate — positions covered by labor unions that are plaintiffs to the lawsuit. It is “likely” that other layoffs are slated for other offices, but so far the judge has not required the Interior Department to disclose the entirety of its RIF plans, according to Aaron Weiss, deputy director for the Center for Western Priorities.

“We know they are playing games and trying to hide the full scope of whatever the RIF plan is,” Weiss said. “Just because they haven’t said they aren’t planning RIFs for Wyoming does not mean that there aren’t RIFs coming.” 

Interior Department agencies with a major presence in Wyoming include the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs, among others. 

Employees at the Bureau of Land Management’s Wyoming headquarters in Cheyenne, for example, are not unionized. That status likely explains why the office’s staff wasn’t listed in the recent legal filing that discloses hundreds of layoffs for BLM state offices in Oregon, Utah, California, Idaho, Arizona and Colorado.

BLM-Wyoming employees have not been informed of any mandatory layoffs, according to a source who’s not authorized to speak on the matter. 

It’s a similar story for the national parks, like Yellowstone and Grand Teton. Although Interior’s legal filing lists 272 National Park Service positions slated for elimination, no jobs tied to Wyoming parks have been disclosed and staff have not been informed of any pending layoffs, according to another source also not authorized to speak about the matter.  

Weiss, at the Center for Western Priorities, attributed the secrecy around Interior’s RIF plans to their unpopularity. The layoffs will cost local jobs and inhibit permitting of commercial activities on federal lands, like grazing and oil and gas drilling. 

“It will harm local communities across the West,” Weiss said. “They know that this is indefensible. Rather than own up to it, they’re trying to hide what they’re planning.” 

Slashing Interior’s workforce is part of the Trump administration’s overall effort to make the government smaller and more efficient. The downsizing has been organized under the Department of Government Efficiency, formerly helmed by billionaire Elon Musk.

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Hundreds of Wyomingites rallied in streets and parks, on sidewalks and boardwalks in the nationwide No Kings Day of protest Saturday, declaring love for their country and saying “No!” to what they characterize as President Trump’s monarchical ambitions.

Singing songs and carrying signs, rally goers gathered in Cheyenne, Casper, Laramie, Lander, Cody, Torrington, Pinedale, Gillette, Worland, Sheridan, Rock Springs and Jackson in crowds some estimated to be as large as 500 or so. The protesters challenged what they see as Trump’s consolidation of power, erosion of democratic checks and balances, and authoritarian acts.

“No kings! No kings!” many chanted, some recalling the land’s last king — George III — and the 1776 revolution that showed him the door.

Little Snake River Valley folk traveled from Baggs to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to join a mile-long line of protesters, according to a post on the Wyoming Democratic Party’s Facebook page. A social media post from Riverside, population 66, showed four protesters — some 6% of the inhabitants, not counting the photographer.

Signs ran the gamut.

“Love everyone, save our democracy.” “ The only orange monarch we want is a butterfly.” “I heart America.” “Stop pretending your racism is patriotism.” “Don’t tread on our democracy.” “Hate will never make America great.” “No faux-king way.”

In Jackson, Jenny Landgraf’s inflatable costume had her riding a giant chicken while she carried a sign, “A president most fowl.” Other inflatable costumes, apparently intended to counter notions that the gatherings might be riotous, included dinosaurs, cartoon characters, frogs, a raccoon and a person in a pickle suit.

“We are in a pickle,” read their sign.

A large inflatable red Jeff Koons balloon dog carried a placard declaring “Nobody is eating the dogs,” pushing back against Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets. 

On the contrary

On Thursday before the rallies, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso called the planned protests “radical” and “anti-American.” He spoke in the Senate.

Democrats are beholden to far-left activist groups with names like “hashtag resist Trump” and “American Atheists,” he said. “All will be calling on the Democrats to keep the government closed.”

I saw people loving America and showing their commitment to the ideals established 250 years ago.

former Wyoming Rep. Andy Schwartz

Barrasso echoed House Speaker Mike Johnson, saying some are calling the protests “I hate America” rallies.

“On the contrary,” said former Wyoming Rep. Andy Schwartz of Teton County. “I saw people loving America and showing their commitment to the ideals established 250 years ago.”

He carried a sign near Jackson’s elk-antler arches that read “We the people,” and was decorated with American flags.

“It’s not perfect,” Schwartz said of the country’s record of achieving its ideals, “but we are getting a glimpse of what an alternative looks like.”

Fox News reported roughly 2,500 protests across the country with only a few arrests. Organizers estimated 7 million people rallied nationwide. Strength in Numbers, an independent data-driven political-analysis Substack column, calculated a median number of participants at 5.2 million with a high estimate of 8.2 million.

Author G. Elliott Morris headlined his conclusion that the No Kings Day saw “the largest single-day political protest ever.*” The asterisk notes that 1970s Earth Day events, not necessarily political and arranged much further in advance than No Kings, had more participants.

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Federal officials indefinitely postponed a Wyoming coal lease sale scheduled for Wednesday, apparently in response to what many observers consider a lowball bid on another federal coal lease on Monday in Montana.

Navajo Transitional Energy Company, the only bidder, stunned coal market watchers with an offer of $186,000 for 167 million tons of federal coal associated with its Spring Creek mine in southeast Montana — a fraction of a penny per ton and woefully low compared to past federal coal lease sales in the region. The last such major sale in the region, in 2012, netted $793 million for 721 million tons, or about $1.10 per ton, according to federal data.

Navajo Transitional was also in the queue to bid on the 441 million-ton West Antelope III federal coal lease associated with its Antelope coal mine spanning Campbell and Converse counties in Wyoming. 

Bureau of Land Management and Interior Department officials are still reviewing the Spring Creek bid, and those close to the process expect that another date will be set for the West Antelope III coal lease sale.

“While we would have liked to see stronger participation, this sale reflects the lingering impact from Obama and Biden’s decades long war on coal which aggressively sought to end all domestic coal production and erode confidence in the U.S. coal industry,” the Interior wrote in an email responding to a WyoFile inquiry. “Fortunately, President [Donald] Trump and his administration are rebuilding trust between industry and government as part of our broader effort to restore American Energy Dominance.”

But others say market forces — including cheap natural gas and increasingly efficient wind and solar energy — are bigger factors. 

Others note that the coal industry itself sees the writing on the wall. If a fraction-of-a-penny bid is any indication, some critics say, the thermal coal industry — which relies on U.S. coal-burning power plants — isn’t yet confident that Trump’s policies will turn around years of market decline.

“It tells you that there’s no competition for that coal in the ground, and it’s not worth very much money,” Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis Energy Data Analyst Seth Feaster told WyoFile on Wednesday. “It points to the fundamental, structural decline the coal industry is facing — for thermal coal — and that story hasn’t been reversed, despite all the things that they’re talking about.”

The postponement in Wyoming and lackluster offer in Montana come just days after the Trump administration touted sweeping regulatory rollbacks and $625 million in federal spending to revitalize “clean, beautiful coal.” 

Navajo Transitional tried to set expectations regarding Powder River Basin coal’s market value back in September, urging the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to set its minimum bid requirement for the West Antelope III coal lease much lower than comparable leases in the past. Neighboring Powder River Basin coal operator, CORE Natural Resources, echoed that sentiment and told BLM officials, “the fair-market value of coal in the Powder River Basin will remain soft for the next number of years.”

Gov. Mark Gordon has said recently that Trump’s efforts to revive the coal industry will take some time to bear fruit. He has also underscored the administration’s notion that expanding the coal industry is necessary to meet increasing electricity demand, mostly driven by artificial intelligence and other computational facilities.

The Wyoming Mining Association declined to comment on Navajo Transitional’s Spring Creek coal lease bid, but acknowledged the industry still must reckon with 15 years of drastic market and policy shifts.

“It tells you that there’s no competition for that coal in the ground, and it’s not worth very much money.”

Seth Feaster, energy industry analyst

“As we’ve not seen a lease sale in over a decade, there may be a bit of a learning curve between the agency and industry to determine value given the current market conditions, projected demand and the shift in public policy,” Mining Association Executive Director Travis Deti said.

Regardless of what coal bidders and federal officials ultimately decide is the “fair market value” for Powder River Basin coal, Deti said, it’s vital to resume leasing new tracts of coal.

“If you don’t have the coal leased, you can’t mine it and you don’t have the jobs,” Deti said.

Conservation groups have noted that existing coal leases allow mining in the region to continue at pace through 2041. 

There’s a danger in the Trump administration’s narrative around coal making a comeback, particularly for coal-reliant communities, according to Mijin Cha, who grew up in Laramie and studies energy transition and social justice strategies. 

“It creates false hope and increased distrust between community members and government officials — you know, the folks that actually could help them,” said Cha, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It delays help for energy communities, and I think that what they’re doing [selling more federal coal] is so much more detrimental.”

Though the industry has seen slight upticks in demand recently, Wyoming coal production — primarily in the Powder River Basin — has shrunk by more than half since its heyday in the mid-2000s. The state scooped about 191 million tons of coal last year, according to federal data.

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