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.

The post Trump’s Interior layoffs appear to mostly spare Wyoming, though the workforce is being kept in the dark appeared first on WyoFile .

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.

The post Wyomingites say ‘No’ to kings, show love for USA, Constitution appeared first on WyoFile .

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.

The post Trump’s major coal sales flop in Wyoming and Montana appeared first on WyoFile .

The Department of Interior on Tuesday ordered Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks to remain partly open as the federal government shut down at midnight over a budget impasse in Congress.

“Park roads, lookouts, trails, and open-air memorials will generally remain accessible to visitors,” according to the “lapse plan.” But visitor centers and other facilities that are usually locked after business hours will be closed, according to the agency’s September 2025 contingency plan posted Tuesday evening.

Staffing will be reduced “based on the assumption that the NPS is conducting no park operations and providing no visitor services,” the plan states.

Parks will begin notifying the public today regarding operations, services and which facilities are open or closed. Those notifications could clarify some elements of the plan that may appear confusing, including what visitor services will or will not be provided.

Whether “accessible areas” will have basic services appears to depend on whether fees are collected there.

“Past shutdowns in which gates remained open with limited staff have hurt our parks.”

The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks

“Basic visitor services” to maintain restrooms, sanitation, trash collection, road maintenance, campgrounds, law enforcement, emergency personnel and access through entrance gates will be provided at sites that collect fees under the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, the plan states.

At Yellowstone, campgrounds will be open, WyoFile has learned. Emergency services parkwide, however, will be limited.

Hotels operated by concessionaires can remain open with the blessing of a park’s superintendent and approval by the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.

The Park Service will not provide road or trail conditions and will not maintain websites or social media except for emergencies, the plan states. The Park Service will not open parks that don’t have “accessible areas,” according to the plan.

Former supervisors protest

The plan was put in place over the objections of 42 former park superintendents, including former Yellowstone Superintendent Mike Finley. They wrote Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Thursday under The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks’ letterhead.

“[W]e write to you with an urgent appeal to protect our parks and public lands by closing them if a government shutdown occurs,” the letter reads. “Past shutdowns in which gates remained open with limited staff have hurt our parks: Iconic symbols cut down and vandalized, trash piled up, habitats destroyed, and visitor safety jeopardized.”

The Park Service plan allows closure of areas with sensitive natural, cultural, historic or archaeological resources that can’t be protected — if the closure is approved by the assistant secretary.

The plan expects 9,296 of 14,500 employees to be furloughed,leaving 5,204 workers — about 36% — to run the parks.

In addition to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, the agency operates Devil’s Tower National Monument, Fossil Butte National Monument, the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway and Bighorn Canyon National Recreational Area in Wyoming.

One wildlife tour operator on Thursday shared a letter to Wyoming’s congressional delegation saying uncertainty over a shutdown was plaguing his business.

“Our work, and the experience we provide to travelers from all over the world, relies deeply on the operation, maintenance, and stewardship of our public lands and the National Park Service,” wrote Taylor Phillips, owner of Jackson Hole EcoTour Adventures. “We have already seen the impacts of workforce cuts,” he wrote, worrying about “further reductions that would only weaken the guest experience.

“And when that experience suffers, visitors go elsewhere.”

In 2024, national park sites in Wyoming drew 8.1 million visitors, who spent $1.2 billion in the state, the agency reported Monday. That included $710 million in visitor spending for Yellowstone, $808 million for Grand Teton, $41.7 million for Devils Tower, $1.3 million for Fossil Butte and $1.4 million for Fort Laramie.

A glorious time

Some Yellowstone facilities were scheduled to remain open through Oct. 31, although many shut down for the season before that date due to weather. Whether that schedule changes with limited operations under the shutdown plan remains uncertain.

Plowing roads, for example, will not generally be allowed, according to the plan. Meantime, Yellowstone remains a magical place in the fall, a seasonal ranger said.

Bugling elk and fall colors draw crowds to Grand Teton and Yellowstone this time of year. 

“It’s just a glorious time to be here,” said John Kerr, who works in the summer in Lamar Valley. Now off duty, Kerr spoke for himself and not in any official capacity. “This is a time when bears are in hyperphagia — they are eating as much as possible to prepare themselves for a winter of hibernation. They are more visible.”

The post Yellowstone, Grand Teton ordered to remain partly open as government shutdown begins appeared first on WyoFile .

Every spring, investors flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, where Warren Buffett holds court. Insiders call it Woodstock for Capitalists, and CNBC covers it with the fervor of Fox Sports on Super Bowl Sunday. 

Last year’s meeting held particular weight. Investors were watching closely to see if Buffett, the company’s 93-year-old CEO, would name Greg Abel, Berkshire’s vice chairman, as his successor, and how the company would weather the billions in wildfire lawsuits threatening its energy utilities. Buffett dodged the succession question, but the meeting revealed something just as consequential: the company’s strategy to avoid wildfire liability. 

Two months earlier, the Utah legislature had passed a law allowing utilities to charge their own customers to build a fund for future fire damages. The state also has a 2020 law on the books that capped the amount fire victims could sue utilities for damages. Combined, the two laws mean that if homes in Utah burn down due to a power company’s faulty electrical line, the financial damages residents can seek are limited — and they may already have been paying into the fund that covers them. For utilities, the result is reduced costs.

At the shareholder meeting, Abel singled out Utah as “the gold standard” of utility protection — a model he urged other states to adopt. “As we go forward,” he told the crowd, “we need both legislative and regulatory reform.”

Berkshire Hathaway Energy, or BHE, Buffett’s $100 billion energy arm, operates a vast power grid that stretches across the West. BHE subsidiaries such as Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp are responsible for maintaining more than 17,000 miles of transmission lines that serve roughly 10 million customers across 10 states. In recent years, BHE has been slapped with lawsuits in Oregon worth nearly $10 billion for fires caused by its faulty equipment. For BHE, the Utah laws were a significant win, shielding the company from that kind of liability in at least one state. Across the West, BHE-owned utilities and their lobbyists are now trying to replicate that success, securing laws that both cap wildfire damages and shift costs onto customers. 

“It’s infuriating to me that they are creating these situations,” said Stephanie Chase, a research and communications manager at the Energy & Policy Institute and a former consumer advocate in the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. “They’re not doing a good job at maintaining their power lines. Then when they start fires, they don’t want to pay for them.”

BHE’s infrastructure is aging, and maintaining it is expensive. Climate-proofing measures, like running power lines underground, can easily cost more than $1 million per mile, according to the Institute for Energy Research, and would put the cost of sending all BHE-owned equipment into the ground at well over $17 billion. Other resilience measures, such as trimming branches that grow over power lines and inspecting equipment in rural areas, are also expensive. 

“Vegetation management is not one of the things that they receive a return on investment,” said Chase. State regulatory agencies typically set utility prices using a formula known as the rate base, which excludes routine maintenance like vegetation. By contrast, utilities earn a return when investing in new infrastructure, Chase added. “Utility companies have a much bigger incentive because they’re receiving a return on equity on any funds that they put into capital expenditures: building a new plant, building construction, building new lines,” she said. BHE did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Earlier this summer, the Wyoming legislature passed a law that limits damages that can be awarded to victims of a utility-caused fire, so long as the company followed its own wildfire plan. In July, Idaho also enacted a similar law, shielding utilities from negligence if they prove they adhered to their wildfire plan. According to state regulatory filings, at least one representative for Rocky Mountain Power and other utilities operating in the state lobbied lawmakers in March and April to get the law passed.

One state senator who voted against Idaho’s law, Bruce Skaug, told Grist that it leaves little regard for residents who may have legitimate grievances. “We don’t want to bankrupt utilities,” Skaug said. “At the same time, if they burn down your house, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting the claim through a jury trial.” Yet, the law could do just that, he said. Skaug hopes to tweak the law to better protect residents during the next legislative session, which begins in January.

PacifiCorp is also running the same playbook in Washington. The company has petitioned state regulators to start tracking the cost of insurance increases and wildfire liability, which Chase calls a “stepping stone to getting those costs included in customer rates.” From there, utilities could begin to press regulators or legislators for permission to pass those costs on to customers.

In Utah, Rocky Mountain Power’s lobbyists benefited from a friendly legislature. Carl Albrecht, a co-sponsor of the two bills, spent decades working for utilities — including 23 years as CEO of a small electric cooperative — and takes several thousand dollars in political contributions from the energy utility industry and Berkshire Hathaway each year, according to campaign finance disclosures. Perhaps most crucially, Utah hasn’t had any major wildfires in recent memory. 

That’s not the case in Oregon. In September 2020, fires enveloped hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, burning down 4,000 homes — including a state senator’s — and killing 11 people. In the aftermath, PacifiCorp became the state’s arch-villain — and a chance at the perks it won in other states vanished.

Soon the public learned that at least some of the half-dozen fires burning across Oregon that Labor Day stemmed from downed power lines owned by PacifiCorp. A subsequent investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an agency that oversees energy markets and transmission,  found that the distance between vegetation and power lines did not meet safety standards and that some of these violations were so severe that “at least 45 percent of PacifiCorp’s BES lines” should not have had any power running through them at all. 

Public outcry turned into class action lawsuits against PacifiCorp, which turned into a costly lesson for BHE. Since 2020, juries have awarded more than $300 million to several dozen plaintiffs. Yet the fate of thousands of other claimants remains unresolved as the lawsuits drag out in court. In the end, the company may be on the hook for around $8 billion more in potential damages. 

But the lawsuits may not bring much relief to the victims. 

“Warren Buffett is not just going to dump billions in to settle,” said Bob Jenks, executive director of Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. More likely than meeting the claimants’ demands, Jenks predicted that “the company will go into bankruptcy.” 

Despite its pariah status in Oregon, PacifiCorp has been trying to secure the same protections that it has in Utah. Earlier this year, when state representatives introduced utility-friendly bills in the Oregon legislature, they were dead on arrival. “I didn’t expect the degree of anger at PacifiCorp that’s out there,” Jenks said. “I understand. Your house burns down, and PacifiCorp is playing hardball and doing everything they can to prevent liability.” 

The notion of offering some financial support to utilities in the form of ratepayer funds isn’t inherently problematic, experts acknowledge. For example, utilities in California rely on wildfire funds to pay for damages caused by their fires. As in Utah and other states, ratepayers contribute to the pot. But unlike other states, a government entity called the California Earthquake Authority — and not the utilities — oversees the distribution of that fund when it’s needed. After a tree felled a PG&E power line in 2021 and sent the Dixie Fire burning across Northern California, the fund has provided $445 million in support to the utility.  As a result of the program, utilities like PG&E can avoid bankruptcy, but aren’t allowed to pass on the costs directly to their own customers.

So far, catastrophic fires haven’t hit states where PacifiCorp has won liability caps since they’ve taken effect. But with the track record of BHE subsidiaries and rising temperatures drying out Western forests, experts believe that it’s only a matter of time. 

“The risk is there,” Jenks said. “Climate change has made our forests so much drier than they used to be, and we don’t have the same June rain. Our forests weren’t designed for this.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who pays for wildfire damage? In the West, utilities are shifting the risk to customers on Sep 19, 2025.

There’s been virtually no interest in a new state program to provide financial relief to stockgrowers whose rangelands are grazed by overpopulated elk herds, according to Wyoming wildlife officials. 

The payment program’s slow uptake took some members of the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission by surprise at a Tuesday meeting in Lander. 

“I guess I’m shocked,” Ken Roberts said.

The Game and Fish commissioner from Kemmerer noted the “urgency” portrayed by “a lot of folks” who were “adamant that this had to be done.” Most of the pressure for the compensation came from landowners who’ve struggled to run cattle amid overpopulated elk herds in central and eastern Wyoming. 

Game and Fish’s deputy chief of wildlife, Craig Smith, led the conversation and was quick to note that zero claims were filed in the first year of the new policy. Some landowners had inquired about how it works, he said.

Adjustments to Game and Fish’s compensation for “extraordinary damage to rangelands” trace back to summer 2023, when there was a tense Wyoming legislative meeting about elk damage. The following legislative session, the Agriculture Committee brought an unsuccessful but controversial bill that would have mandated compensation rates for grass on dry rangeland lost to elk inside overpopulated big game herd units. Then in fall 2024, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission voluntarily updated its compensation regulations in an effort to placate ranchers and keep lawmakers at bay.  

The compensation plan is specific to non-cultivated livestock rangeland, and there are several requirements: 

• Landowners can receive “extraordinary damage to grass” funds when a big game herd is overpopulated by 20% or more for three or more consecutive years and the species is consuming 15% or more of the estimated forage on private ground. (Payments are still possible when herds are not overpopulated if more than 30% of the forage is being consumed.)
• Landowners must also allow a “sufficient number of hunters” on the property. That means the necessary number of hunters to offset the “recruitment,” or the number of animals born into the population that survived one year. 

When the new rules were being vetted with the public, they proved widely unpopular with sportspeople — 46 of the 48 public comments on the draft regulation that stated a position opposed the new payment program. The unpopularity stemmed partly from worries that the damage claims could exacerbate an emerging Game and Fish budget crunch. 

“It was supposed to be a substantial amount,” Roberts told WyoFile. 

Although perplexing, the lack of interest is also a relief, he said: “I’m glad to hear it.”

Wyoming Stock Growers Association lobbyist Jim Magagna, who was a major proponent of the legislation and Game and Fish policy change, shared the view.

“I’m certainly glad it didn’t result in a flood of demands for compensation that would overwhelm the available funds,” he said. 

Magagna partly attributed the absence of claims to unfamiliarity with the new funding stream. 

“Landowners are not yet fully aware of that opportunity,” Magagna told WyoFile. “As an organization, we try to keep people aware of things, but we certainly didn’t put anything out encouraging people to apply for damages— it’s an individual decision.”

Wyoming Game and Fish, he added, has also come through in helping frustrated ranchers address overpopulated elk herds via other efforts. 

“The Game and Fish have been responsive with granting licenses to landowners, and they’re even bringing in professional hunters to remove elk,” Magagna said. “If the wildlife populations can be appropriately managed and the claims go away, that’s better for everyone.”

The post No one is using a controversial compensation program for grass lost to overpopulated Wyoming elk appeared first on WyoFile .

GREYBULL—“They’re gutting our little community,” Chelsea Yates of Deaver said, holding back tears, as she addressed the Big Horn County Library Board at its Aug. 12 meeting.

The Big Horn County library system faces a $70,000 cut in county funds this year, 20% of last year’s budget. As a result, the county’s three largest libraries — Lovell, Basin and Greybull — have faced reduced hours and the removal of benefits for all staff members. 

Its smallest libraries, Frannie and Deaver, were closed permanently Monday.

Next year, property tax cuts are expected to deplete the budget even more.

Commission cuts

“Why are we getting these cuts this year? That is something I have asked, and [the commissioners] don’t have an answer… They told us 10% and we could have dealt with that… and then they said 20%,” library board member Lea Sorensen said at the August meeting.

Commissioners made cuts across the board this budget season, with elections taking a 59% hit, emergency management down 55% and local emergency planning down 30% — to name a few. Grant money overall, including American Rescue Plan Act funds, has been reduced, leaving Big Horn County Search and Rescue with almost $57,000 less in its budget.

The commission did not reply to requests for comment by the Greybull Standard’s deadline.

“We have cut to the bone. I don’t know where else we can cut,” Sorensen said of the library budget.

Library board president Nikole Greene and board member Cari Waterworth attended the Big Horn County Commissioners’ Aug. 5 meeting to address maintenance costs on the county-owned library buildings in Basin and Lovell, amounting to $9,419 covered through the library’s budget.

Currently, the Lovell library pays $1,292 a year in grounds maintenance.

Library Director Tina Ely reported to the board that in Basin, utility bills range from $700-$800 a month. Custodian wages amount to $7,377 for both libraries. 

The library board asked for county assistance in covering maintenance costs and, in turn, was presented with a lease proposal. Lovell and Basin libraries have operated out of county-owned buildings with no lease in place since their implementation. 

County Maintenance Supervisor Jeremy Pouska said that in the past, the county has been happy to help the libraries with maintenance when requested. However, there is no written agreement as to what each entity is expected to address. 

Upon notification of the library board members’ attendance, the county drafted a lease agreement for the Basin library “in an effort to be equitable” to all the organizations that lease county buildings. Leadership was uncertain of the Lovell building’s status at the time and, therefore, unprepared to propose a similar agreement for that building.

“Everybody’s hurting, and unfortunately, we just think next year is going to be even worse with the property tax stuff.”

Deb Craft, Big Horn County Commission Chair

The lease would require the library to maintain the building’s day-to-day upkeep, while the county maintains the grounds. The suggested rent would be $1 a year.

“I mean, you need to come up with $9,500, I don’t know where we would get it. We just cut everything back,” Commissioner Mike Jolley said to the library board members.

County Commission Chair Deb Craft added: “Everybody’s hurting, and unfortunately, we just think next year is going to be even worse with the property tax stuff.”

Librarians take a hit 

On top of reduced staff hours — Lovell losing 10 a week, Greybull and Basin down 12 — librarians in all three counties have agreed to take on some janitorial duties to reduce that part of the library budget.

“There’s so much that these women, because they’re all women… are doing other than checking books in and checking books out,” Ely told the board. “Their hours are considerably cut, and we’re just hoping they can still continue to get all of that programming done and get all of that stuff done with less hours.”  

“While asking them to maintain buildings,” Greene added, with no workers’ compensation. 

Three library managers and Ely agreed to give up their Wyoming retirement benefits, amounting to $24,000. Commissioners requested confirmation on the legality of this concession; should it prove faulty, that money will have to be cut elsewhere.  

In addition, all library employees gave up their three personal paid days off. 

Ely forfeited reimbursement for her mileage driving between towns. Troy  Butler, who handles the library’s bookkeeping, agreed to a 20% decrease in the fees for his accounting services.  

Before cuts, Lovell salaries were $51,000, Basin $50,000 and Greybull  $45,000 for three employees in each branch.  

Commissioners suggested a cut to Ely’s $42,000 salary to add hours for payroll and grant writing to managers’ positions.  

“When this county ran into having to cut people before, the people within the departments agreed to cut their wages so that a person didn’t get cut. (Those were) sacrifices that this county’s departments have made before,  so I think they can look a little deeper here,” Craft said.

Grants and Friends of the Library donations are not able to cover salaries or operating expenses. 

“It’s our ox that got gored and died.”

Melvyn Wambeke

Frannie and Deaver

Frannie and Deaver’s libraries are run out of town-owned buildings at no charge to the county. 

Between the two of them, the county budgeted $8,000 for salary. The library board voted to cut this funding, essentially shuttering the libraries, effective Monday.  

Several members of the Deaver community attended the August library board meeting.  

“It’s our ox that got gored and died,” citizen Melvyn Wambeke told the board.  

Previously, Melvyn and Sally Wambeke had proposed a 25% cut in Frannie and Deaver’s library hours — already only operating four hours a week —  to be equalized by cuts in the larger libraries’ hours. This would prevent a 100% shutdown, the Wambekes suggested.  

However,  the closure decision had already been finalized, and the library board did not double back, noting concerns that even more cuts would have to be made to the budget. 

Board members apologized to the Deaver and Frannie communities, saying that they did not want the closures.  

“By statute, we have one library to provide per county,” Commissioner Craft said Aug. 5.

She added that due to the size of the county, she believed a north and south library are needed.  

The library board voted to close the Frannie-Deaver bank account, which put roughly $200 back in the library’s general fund. The towns of Frannie and Deaver have stepped up to keep their libraries open without county assistance.

They will lose roughly 60 books between the two towns but maintain the library donations their communities have generated over the years, the majority of their shelves.  

The Town of Deaver voted last month to keep the library open with volunteer help, pending approval from the town’s insurance provider. This should add no additional costs to the town’s budget.  

“I think there’s a lot of people and kids that use it. I know there’s not a lot of heavy traffic, but the library is a value added, an asset to our community,”  Deaver Mayor Bill Camp said in an interview with the Greybull Standard.

“We value education, which it’s a part of, and encourage everybody to use it in some way,” he said. 

The Town of Frannie has instated a similar system. The library board has requested a bookmobile from Park County be brought to Frannie, as it spans county lines.  

Deaver and Frannie residents will still be able to use county-owned books, but no longer through their local libraries. Libraries will lean heavily on volunteers to ease the burden on librarians this year.  

“Even with doing this, we are a sinking ship of volunteers trying to keep our county with some sort of library system, period,” Sorensen said.

The post Big Horn County closes two libraries, cuts staff salaries and benefits appeared first on WyoFile .

Josue Rodriguez Perez joined the line outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office near Miami for his annual check-in on June 5.

Three months later, the Cuban national found himself languishing in the Natrona County Detention Center, 2,000 miles from home, increasingly hopeless as his detention felt increasingly endless. 

“You want to die. You pray to God you don’t wake up in the morning, when you’re isolated like this,” Rodriguez told WyoFile over a set of phone interviews from inside the jail. 

Rodriguez’s journey from the Florida coast to the middle of Wyoming is a result of complicated immigration law that made him vulnerable to the mass deportations pursued by President Donald Trump and his administration. While some communities around the country are resisting, Rodriguez’s time in Casper shows how some sheriffs are willing to place their jails in service of the president’s agenda. 

In 1993, Rodriguez and his father fled Cuba, where an authoritarian government squashes independent political activity, tightly controls the press and limits freedom of speech. They were granted legal U.S. residency. But in 2012, felony convictions for credit card fraud sent Rodriguez to a Louisiana state prison for five years. It’s a period in which he says he found religion, found himself and emerged to build a new life. But the crime cost Rodriguez his green card, and a judge ordered his deportation.

Cuba, however, with its fraught history with the United States, does not accept deportees. So Rodriguez stayed, working legally, for eight more years. He built a family in Florida and a career as a commercial truck driver. 

Each year, he went to visit ICE and renew the work permit issued to people in his particular situation. But this year, agents detained Rodriguez and more than a dozen other Cubans standing in line with him. 

Under Trump, ICE is trying to deport people whose home country won’t take them to a third country — regardless of whether the person has ties there or, in many cases, even a guarantee of safety. The administration is also seeking third countries when a judge has ruled a migrant can’t be sent to their home country because they’ll face torture or persecution. 

In Rodriguez’s case, ICE appears to have detained him without a plan for what to do with him — or at least without one that held up.

Federal agents shuffled Rodriguez from one place to another. Over the course of roughly six weeks, he was held in detention centers in Miami, El Paso; another place in Texas he can’t quite remember the name of; then Aurora, Colorado; then back to El Paso and then back to Aurora, according to an accounting by him and a sister he was able to check in with via intermittent phone calls. 

WyoFile asked ICE why the agency detained Rodriguez without a clear plan for his deportation. “They are criminal illegal aliens,” an ICE spokesperson wrote in response. “President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem are reversing the previous administration’s policies that allowed millions of illegal aliens to remain in the United States consequence free.”

Rodriguez made each trip, on both plane and bus, shackled by his wrists and ankles. He stayed in crowded cell blocks, he said, where he could rarely shower. He sometimes slept on the floor and used a toilet in view of others. 

His account aligns with how ICE increasingly is treating the immigrants it detains, two attorneys told WyoFile. 

“We’re seeing people moved around so much they lose track of what day it is … they don’t know time and place,” Laura Lunn, of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, told WyoFile. “People [end up] detained in Aurora, Colorado, and don’t know there’s a giant mountain range outside their front door.” 

On July 18, Rodriguez and 45 other migrants of various nationalities were transferred from Aurora to the Natrona County Detention Center in Casper. 

WyoFile asked ICE about Rodriguez’s case on Wednesday and asked the agency’s media office to respond by Friday afternoon. On Thursday evening, after holding Rodriguez in the Natrona County jail for 40 days, he and six other ICE detainees in the Casper jail were transferred out of the jail, according to inmate rosters. ICE’s detainee tracker indicates Rodriguez was taken to Aurora for a third time.

It’s unclear what prompted the latest move – ICE declined to comment on why Rodriguez was pulled back to that facility.

According to Lunn and other immigration attorneys interviewed by WyoFile, Rodriguez’s case — with no ongoing court proceedings or clear end to his confinement — is typical of the detainees they’ve seen transferred to county jails like Casper’s, though the number of detainees with legal representation at all is slim. In a federal case for a different ICE detainee, agency officials testified that they were sending people with “inactive” cases to Natrona County, to maintain room in Aurora for people who had pending court hearings. 

The detainees’ confinement in Casper raises the question of whether jails could become de facto immigration prisons, as temporary holds drag into lengthy stays. Thirty people who entered the facility with Rodriguez on July 18 remain incarcerated there, according to Friday morning’s inmate roster. 

Other immigrants in the Casper jail told Rodriguez they had successfully appealed their cases, which prevented deportation to their home countries, he said. But once released, ICE officers arrested them again, so the agency could try to deport them to a third country. 

Rodriguez is no longer fighting his deportation. He wants to be sent to México, though he doesn’t have family there or ties to the country. “With Trump, they can do whatever they feel like,” he said. “I don’t want to be in this country anymore, and they’re keeping me here.”

Life in limbo

In Casper, Rodriguez did not see sunlight for 40 days, he said. He spent the majority of each day locked down in his cell, he said.

While inmates receive different classifications, the minimum time out of the cell is five hours a day, according to a sheriff’s spokesperson. 

Sheriff’s deputies are monitoring ICE detainees and the lengths of their stay, Natrona County sheriff’s spokesperson Kiera Hett told WyoFile in an email. “We always keep a watchful eye,” she wrote. “These detainees have been processed through immigration courts and have been ordered to be detained.” 

She did not respond to a question about whether the sheriff had a limit for how long he would keep ICE detainees in his jail. WyoFile has requested interviews with Sheriff John Harlin to discuss the ICE detainees but has not received one. 

Rodriguez says the courts ordered him deported, not imprisoned. 

The detainees in Casper tie Wyoming to a nationwide detention system that critics say is putting due process — and the basic humanity of immigrants — into question, even as the Trump administration works to scale up detention and deportation even further. Flush with a $75 billion budget expansion, the administration hopes to expand its capacity in county jails, including in Wyoming, The Washington Post reported this month. 

But México isn’t the only possible destination for Rodriguez and other immigrants in similar positions. There are scarier possibilities afoot for Latino immigrants.  

With the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump administration has been pursuing deportations to African countries including Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda, where Rodriguez worries he would be imprisoned or worse. The U.S. State Department, for example, warns American travelers away from Sudan, citing kidnapping and armed conflict. 

In Florida, Rodriguez’s wife, two daughters and sister worry for him and struggle with the loss of his presence and income in their lives. Rodriguez is growing increasingly desperate and depressed, his sister told WyoFile. Rodriguez himself told WyoFile he was considering a hunger strike. 

Earlier in his confinement, Rodriguez says he signed paperwork allowing his deportation to México. ICE shackled him and bused him to El Paso, he said. 

Rodriguez sat in limbo in a detention center on the border. He saw crying women, separated from their families, and tent facilities swelled by detainees, he said. “It’s bad,” he told WyoFile. “I can’t compare it with anything because I’ve never been through something like that.” 

Eight days after arriving in El Paso, Rodriguez was taken back to Aurora and then to Casper. He never got an answer as to why he couldn’t enter México. He was also never told what ICE might try next. Instead, he spent 40 days in a Wyoming jail cell. 

“He already did his years in prison,” sister Monika Rodriguez said, “so he doesn’t need to do more years in prison. If he needs deportation, OK, go ahead. Deportation.”

Prison and redemption

Rodriguez was 16 years old when his father brought him and Monika to Miami to escape Fidel Castro’s communist government. Today, he is 52 and has two daughters of his own. They’re 33 and 28 years old, he told WyoFile. 

He once had a third daughter. 

In 2005, he was driving his family from Naples, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, across the state to Miami to board a cruise ship. Rodriguez lost control of the vehicle. His first wife, his daughter and his niece died in the resulting crash. Rodriguez was cleared of any legal wrongdoing, he said, but those official inquiries couldn’t clear him of his own guilt.

He used cocaine and drank and committed credit card fraud to pay for it. “I was running from the guilt,” he said. He went to prison once in Florida, and then again in Louisiana — that time for five years. Court records in both states support Rodriguez’s account of the charges. His sister, interviewed by WyoFile separately, also described the accident. 

In the Louisiana prison, Rodriguez’s life changed, he said. He connected with a priest and learned to forgive himself for the fatal crash. He earned a GED, worked as a caretaker for elderly inmates, played football and boxed. “I felt free, inside the prison, believe it or not,” he told WyoFile. “It was beautiful.” 

Indeed, Rodriguez came home changed, Monika said. “It was difficult at the beginning, trying to put his life back together, but he did it,” she said. “He put his life back in line.” He started doing lawn care, she remembered, building patios, and then got into commercial driving and financed his own semitruck. 

He remarried and supported his surviving daughters. WyoFile found no record of additional convictions for Rodriguez after his release from prison in 2017. WyoFile asked ICE if the agency had any additional record of criminality, and officials did not provide a direct answer.

“Eight years of being good,” Monika said.

Then came Trump’s reelection in November. 

Then came Rodriguez’s ICE check-in on June 5. 

Swept back in

The Cubans standing in line that day did not leave home knowing they would be suddenly swept into the immigration detention system and separated from their families, Javier Falcon, another immigrant arrested that day, told WyoFile. 

Had he known, Falcon would’ve said a very different goodbye to his family, he said. Rodriguez too. 

Falcon spoke to WyoFile by phone from México, where the government deported him, though he is also Cuban.

After their arrest, the men were taken to the Krome North Service Processing Center, an ICE facility in Miami. There, both men said, they slept on the floor of a cell that was designed to hold 25 people, but was holding 60 or 70. During the days the Cubans were in Krome, National Public Radio reported on overcrowding and a lack of food at the facilities. 

Falcon and Rodriguez bonded amid the brutal conditions, they said. “We developed a very strong friendship,” Falcon said. 

Both men were sent to Texas. But they were separated. On July 12, ICE agents took Falcon across the border and handed him to Mexican authorities. Not knowing where to go, he made his way to Cancún, hearing it was safe and stable. 

Falcon has no friends or family in México, he said, and so far, no work. He has not seen his wife since June. His voice choked with emotion as he discussed his predicament. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. 

But both men agree: Of the two, Falcon is the luckier one. 

Rodriguez called his friend in México from the Casper jail. Like Rodriguez’s relatives, Falcon worried the confined man was growing more desperate there.

“I give him strength, I give him encouragement,” Falcon said. “I can’t do anything else.” 

Pining for the unthinkable

Four hours south of Casper, Aurora’s detention center is managed by a sprawling for-profit prison company (and significant donor to Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign) called GEO Group. Detainees and attorneys have repeatedly accused the company of maintaining poor conditions there through insufficient health care, overcrowding and other allegations. 

But while still in Casper, Rodriguez longed for the Aurora facility. There is an outdoor area where inmates could feel the sun and breathe fresh air each day. And there is more time to socialize outside their cells, he recalled. 

The notion of missing Aurora is worrying and yet understandable to Elizabeth Jordan, director of the Immigration Law & Policy Clinic at the University of Denver. 

“Aurora is a deeply, deeply problematic place but at least there’s a psychologist on staff and a yard where people can play soccer,” she said.  

Jails are not built for long stays — they’re built, usually on the local taxpayer’s dime, to hold people arrested on suspicion of crimes until their case can be adjudicated or to serve short sentences. If found guilty of felonies, Wyoming criminals are moved to a state prison, where there are facilities to ensure a level of physical and mental well-being as people serve out longer sentences.

Prolonged stays in jail, coupled with mental health issues or less access to health care, can lead to depression and in the worst cases, suicide — a problem that has plagued Wyoming jails at high rates. There’s a legal risk for Wyoming counties that go down the fraught route of holding people for ICE, Jordan said. Though Natrona County has an agreement with ICE to hold detainees, the local government remains liable for their well-being while they hold them.

Ultimately, a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case found that the government can not keep immigration detainees confined indefinitely. If, after six months in detention, the government can’t show it’s likely to deport the detainee, the justices ruled, they should be released. But the federal government won’t necessarily just kick Rodriguez loose if he hits that threshold, said Jordan, the immigration clinic director. 

“ICE’s practices have always been fairly chaotic, and right now, with the high-pressure agenda, they’ve gotten more chaotic,” she said. 

Even if Rodriguez gets released, ICE could choose to detain him and try deportation again if they think they’ve found a destination. “It’s pretty precarious,” Jordan said. 

As for Rodriguez, he mourned not just for himself, but for the United States. “It’s not the same country, it’s not the same freedom that I used to know,” he said. “I feel a lot for this country. This is home.” 

Or at least it was. Now, he’s ready to leave — if he can just get out of Wyoming and reach a place that will offer him a chance to rebuild again.  

The post Without a country to take him, Cuban immigrant spends month in limbo inside Wyoming jail appeared first on WyoFile .

The remarkable seasonal flow of thousands of bison into and out of Yellowstone National Park is both a relic of an earlier, pre-settlement era and a source of great debate — Montana’s even sued in pursuit of fewer bison.  

But there’s now less debate about the ecological good the herds of native herbivores bring to the landscape. A new study published in the journal Science shows that the migratory herds of bison effectively function as nature’s fertilizers, providing an astonishing 2.5-fold bump in crude proteins growing into the grasslands that blanket Yellowstone’s Northern Range. 

“It’s mainly coming from urine and feces,” said Jerod Merkle, a professor of migration ecology and conservation at the University of Wyoming. “What happens is it goes into the ground, and it lights up the microbial ecosystem in the soil.

“It’s a circle,” he added. “Bison graze, pee and poop. That facilitates the insects and the microbes, which then creates better soil, which then the plants take up again.” 

Bison and other critters, in turn, benefit. 

Merkle, along with co-authors Chris Geremia of Yellowstone National Park and Bill Hamilton of Washington and Lee University, even estimated the net benefit migratory bison add to the landscape in terms of crude protein. There’s not actually more grasses growing — even though they’re heavily grazed, the volume sprouting off the landscape stays about the same. 

“It’s not biomass,” Hamilton told WyoFile. “It’s more productive — the nutritional quality is improved. There’s more nitrogen and crude protein in the forage.”

Across Yellowstone’s Northern Range, researchers calculated that the bison stimulation effect added 3,549 tons of crude protein to a 329-square-mile region, which pencils out to an estimated 37-pounds-per-acre bump in nutrition. 

The benefits aren’t uniform. There’s a “mosaic” of bison grazing’s influence on the landscape, Merkle said, both in terms of space and time due to seasonal migrations. Grazing provided 156% more crude protein in the lawn-like habitats like the Lamar River valley and 155% more in high-elevation landscapes. In dry areas, the effect was slightly more subdued, with a 119% increase. 

To make those calculations, the research team assessed grazing and nutrient dynamics at 16 sites from 2015 to 2022. They used fenced exclosures moved every five weeks and kept track of datapoints including plant consumption, plant growth and plant composition, nutrient cycling, plant and soil chemistry and soil microbial populations. 

Merkle, Hamilton and Geremia did not detect overgrazing, which can result in declining plant productivity and diversity and soils becoming compacted. Rather, they detected the opposite and a lot of variation across the landscape, Merkle said.

“There are spots that bison hit hard, and places they don’t touch at all — and that can change over the years,” he said. “The cool thing is that allowing these bison to freely move across the landscape at a big scale, creates the heterogeneity.” 

On the broader western landscape, it’s an effect that’s largely been lost. Although there are a few exceptions and efforts to grow more free-roaming herds, bison are generally not allowed to behave like wildlife in the modern world. 

In Wyoming, for example, bison are classified as a big-game species where the roughly 500-animal Jackson Herd roams and in the unoccupied Absaroka herd unit east of Yellowstone. But elsewhere, they’re not considered wildlife and instead considered “privately owned or bison running at large.”

That’s not particularly unique. Today, about 95% of the 400,000 bison that exist are privately owned or commercially raised for their meat. The few “conservation herds” that exist average just 300 animals, and they’re “almost universally managed in constrained areas with strict limits on numbers and movements,” according to the Science paper. It’s a far cry from the 20,000-strong bison herd that early explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark encountered in South Dakota in 1806, which was just a sliver of the tens of millions that existed before white settlers hunted the American bison to near extinction.

Yellowstone is one of the very few exceptions. The herd-oriented, migratory plant-eating megafauna  — and their quantifiable ecological effects — have been lost almost everywhere else. 

“The closest relatable ecosystem is the Serengeti, where we have big herds of wildebeest and zebra moving and migrating in a similar way and creating a similar nitrogen and ecosystem cycle,” Merkle said. “It’s kind of cool for Yellowstone to be on par with a Serengeti-type place.”

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In the middle of winter — starting in 2018 stretching into 2021 — contracted helicopter capture crews managed to subdue 42 cow elk from what’s known as the Rawhide Herd. GPS collars adorned the new southeastern Wyoming research specimens, amassing data that subsequently answered many basic biological questions. 

The branch of government that commissioned the work might come as a surprise: the Wyoming Military Department. It’s because a good chunk of the Rawhide Herd’s habitat doubles as Camp Guernsey Joint Training Center. These Platte County wapiti not only have to avoid hunters’ bullets and arrows each fall. They also have to cope with aerial training missions, artillery explosions, gunfire on the range, and the bustle of hundreds of soldiers sharpening their skills. 

The military and, in turn, state wildlife managers learned a lot, according to a Western EcoSystems Technology report that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department published in its annual update for the Laramie Region. Military training activities displaced elk, especially in winter, and during those times they sought out rugged areas. Surprisingly, animals tended to choose higher elevations during the coldest months of the year. But largely, the herd summered and wintered in the same region — they didn’t migrate. 

“There’s really no traditional migration or seasonal movements like you’d see in a mountain herd, where they’re getting pushed down because of weather,” Game and Fish biologist Keaton Weber said.

The insights Weber and colleagues gained during their research are giving them a leg up in an unrelated change underway for the Rawhide Elk Herd. It’s among a handful of Wyoming elk herds that are being counted for the first time. 

“We’ve never managed this based on population,” Weber said. “It’s because it’s 90-plus percent private land. It’s a really difficult herd to manage that relies on access, just like the Laramie Range herds.” 

According to Game and Fish Deputy Chief of Wildlife Justin Binfet, four other hard-to-count elk herds were in this same position. They include: the Targhee Herd, residents of the western Tetons along the Idaho state line; the Uinta Herd, which straddles the Utah state line in far southwestern Wyoming; the Petition Herd, denizens of the southern Red Desert; and last, the Pine Ridge Herd, which calls ranchland north of Casper home. 

“It really is meaningful to have estimates for herd numbers, where you can,” Binfet said. “But it’s also really challenging. It is not nearly as easy as some folks think it is. Elk can move long distances, they respond to pressure, they’re pioneering into new spaces — and they can quickly move in and out of the state.” 

The changes in how to manage these herds stem in part from the state’s dissatisfaction with the current approach, which is based on “satisfaction.” 

“I think it was a good idea to start with,” Binfet said. “But [satisfaction-based objectives] proved problematic in their practice, a decade and a half later.” 

It’s a system that Game and Fish started using with seven elk herds and several other pronghorn and mule deer herds starting around 2010. All were problematic or costly to estimate because of diffuse distributions, lots of private land or factors like ungulates that cross state lines, Binfet said.

The way it’s worked is that herds are considered to be achieving the objectives when more than 60% of landowners and hunters report being satisfied with the herd’s status. But administering that system has been a challenge, Binfet says. Surveying enough landowners in a herd area annually can be a ton of work, he said, and lacking satisfaction scores can have multiple meanings — it can mean both perceptions of too many, or not enough elk.

Another cause for the change was Wyoming’s recently revised compensation program for grass that’s eaten by elk and other ungulates, Binfet said. The new payment plan, which was preceded by a legislative fight, uses calculations that change if a herd is under or over its population objective.

Establishing population targets for the first time can be complicated, even “scary,” he said. There’s no existing hard data to go off of. And in places, like the Petition Herd’s habitat in the Red Desert, there are “massive geographic expanses” with elk at low densities. 

“If you classify or don’t classify one giant group of 900 elk, it can really skew your assessment,” Binfet said. 

Wildlife managers are leaning into technology to help. In the Petition Herd area, for example, pilots flew over the region at roughly 3,000 feet off the ground and used infrared technology to help with counting. Artificial intelligence is also being used to help with tallying elk captured in aerial images. 

But it’s still a work in progress. 

North of Casper in the Pine Ridge Herd, the state agency is set on proposing a first-ever population objective of 1,500 elk, Binfet said. But assessments for other herds aren’t yet finalized, he added. 

In the Rawhide Herd, in and around Camp Guernsey, a recent aerial survey estimated 830 elk, factoring in an adjustment based on animals’ “sightability” on the landscape, according to Weber, the Game and Fish biologist. 

“We use that number with caution,” he said. “Due to these sightability designs and this herd being so unevenly dispersed across the herd unit. It was challenging. We think the number is low.”

The first-ever proposed population objective for the Rawhide Herd that Game and Fish rolled out to the public was 1,800 elk. It’s a number — along with the other herd goals — that the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission will review at its September meeting in Lander. 

Wherever the number ends up, it likely won’t have much bearing on operations at Camp Guernsey, said Amanda Thimmayya, the Wyoming Military Department’s natural resource program manager. There’s an annual hunt at the training center — it doubles as the Broom Creek Hunter Management Area. But there are constraints to dialing the hunting pressure up in a place where it’s easy for savvy elk to take refuge, she said.

“We can only provide so much opportunity when we’re surrounded by private lands,” Thimmayya said.

The post Five Wyoming elk herds have remained relatively unknown and uncounted — until now appeared first on WyoFile .