More than 450 people have so far lost health coverage through Wyoming Medicaid or Kid Care CHIP as the state moves away from pandemic-era measures, the state health department reported at the end of June. Thousands more are expected to lose coverage over the next nine months. 

The largest factors in losing eligibility were age, residency and income, according to Wyoming Department of Health spokesperson Kim Deti. 

The health department has estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 residents could lose access to Medicaid programs this year as it conducts a yearlong renewal process. Some free medical clinics expect the increase in uninsured residents to further strain resources. 

That annual process was put on hold during the pandemic to ensure coverage for more people in exchange for a temporary increase in federal funding. Starting in April, Wyoming health officials began removing people who no longer qualify, but a more complete picture of these “procedural removals” is expected to come out next month.

Early reports from Montana show more than 70% of those at risk of losing coverage simply didn’t provide requested information to health officials.

Wyoming’s health department started updating people’s contact details back in March, the agency stated, to make sure those who are still eligible get the renewal notice. 

“Because of the pause, our clients have not received these notices by mail over the last three years,” Lee Grossman, state Medicaid agent and senior WDH administrator, said in a March press release. “We know living situations may have changed during that time for many people.”

Income has been one of the largest factors in losing eligibility so far, but thousands of Wyomingites already fall into a “gap” where they make too much to qualify for Medicaid in the state but too little to afford private insurance. To shore up this gap, 41 states have expanded Medicaid, but Wyoming lawmakers have yet to do so, often citing concerns that the federal government won’t hold up its end of the bargain to help pay for it.

The state estimates Medicaid expansion would insure about 19,000 people over two years. 

To ensure they get a renewal notice, Wyoming Medicaid enrollees can update their contact information at www.wesystem.wyo.gov or by calling 1-855-294-2127.

The post Hundreds lose Wyoming Medicaid and Kid Care coverage appeared first on WyoFile.

As campers continue to flood into national forests — often towing large trailers, side-by-sides or outdoor gear — districts across Wyoming are taking steps to increase capacity, regulate use, protect resources and generate revenue for upkeep.  

Visitation and participation data indicates outdoor recreation’s popularity is here to stay, prompting overburdened staff to rethink camping management with both human behavior and the health of the landscape in mind. 

Here’s a look at three initiatives taking place across Wyoming’s vast acreage of national forest. 

New rules in the Bighorns 

On the 1.1-million-acre Bighorn National Forest, Supervisor Andrew Johnson recently signed an updated order with new rules aimed to address long-standing dispersed camping problems in the popular northern Wyoming forest.

“We were hearing loud and clear from members of the public, forest users, county commissioners, members of our communities that addressing the dispersed camping challenges was important to folks,” Johnson said at a June steering committee meeting. The long-simmering problems mostly revolve around users “saving” spots by parking empty vehicles there or overstaying their limit. 

The district has extended the forest’s 14-day stay limit to year-round. In addition, when visitors hit the stay limit, forest regulations will require them to move any personal property five road miles before establishing a new campsite. Wildlife attractant storage is also required, prompted by increasing bear conflicts, Johnson said.

The problems stretch back decades, Johnson said, and stem from issues like diminishing availability of sites in light of growing crowds, an inadequate ability to enforce camping limits and resource damage caused by overuse and rogue trails. 

One of the biggest “complaints our front desks and our employees get,” Johnson said, “is all of the unattended property.”

Compounding the issue, Johnson said, has been under-staffing, which hampered the agency’s ability to enforce the stay limit. The district recently secured funding to hire a number of patrol positions, which he said should help to educate users and enforce the rules. Staff will also make a concerted effort to remove abandoned property from the forest, he said. 

The new rules are the result of a process initiated around 2016 that led to the creation of a dispersed camping task force, which issued recommendations to the forest in 2020. Those recommendations also included: creating a sticker program to authorize dispersed camping, identifying designated dispersed camping sites and expanding a trailhead to allow overnight camping. Those could still be considered down the line, Johnson said, noting the forest will reevaluate the rules at the end of the year. 

A new court-ordered fee schedule calls for higher penalties for violations of the rules, Johnson added. Violators will now be charged $100 after the 14th day, with a $30 processing fee plus an additional $20 per day over the limit. “And that adds up,” he said. “So there’s a much better deterrent I think for folks overstaying the 14-day limit.”

Improving a hard-hit area in the Bridger-Teton 

Bridger-Teton National Forest is midway through plans to improve a campground that’s been hit particularly hard by visitation. Curtis Canyon Campground sits less than 10 miles from Jackson Hole and butts up to Grand Teton National Park and crucial winter wildlife range. 

“That proximity makes it a really valuable area,” said Linda Merigliano, U.S. Forest Service recreation wilderness program manager. “And then also, the views are spectacular.”

Hordes of campers have flocked to Curtis Canyon in recent years. A heavy concentration of dispersed camping and off-highway vehicle use combined with a lack of road maintenance have resulted in serious road deterioration as well as vegetation loss, human waste issues, poor visitor experience and public safety concerns, according to the Forest Service. 

So when the Bridger-Teton secured access to $500,000 in federal Infrastructure Act funds, Curtis Canyon was an obvious candidate for improvements, Merigliano said. The agency in January released a scoping document proposing several upgrades to the area.  

They include: repairing the access road; expanding the first-come-first-served campground with 22 new campsites and a pit toilet; restoring damaged areas such as unauthorized road spurs; and relocating the popular Goodwin Lake trailhead.

The forest had already implemented a designated site program, added signs and recruited a camping ambassador to educate and assist visitors at Curtis Canyon. 

“These actions have helped reduce impacts but have not kept pace with increased use,” the scoping document reads. “The time for repeated band-aids has passed.” 

The forest accepted comments through March 3.

Merigliano was part of a site visit last week, and said the road to Curtis Canyon has only worsened under recent rainy conditions. Gullies and deep ruts thread through the road, and pond-sized puddles necessitate high-clearance vehicles, she said. 

More field survey work needs to occur to inform projects like campground expansion and trailhead work, she said, but the agency is likely to issue a decision soon on the road repair in order to get started on drainage improvements ASAP. 

“It’s pretty bad right now,” she said of the road condition.

Of the 32 comments submitted for the scoping document, many supported the general concept of improvements. One commenter wondered, however, where the cycle of crowd-fueled damage ends. 

“What has happened there in the past decade-plus is disheartening to say the least,” Franz Camenzind wrote. “What is being proposed is a good start to better manage in the area and slow its degradation. Ironically, what is being proposed will only bring more visitors to the are (sic) and bring more impacts and challenges.”

The Bridger-Teton is also planning improvements to trailheads and trails in the busy Granite Creek corridor. 

New fee proposal in the Med-Bow 

The Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests and Thunder Basin National Grassland are proposing fee increases at 93 day-use and campground sites in the 2.9-million-acre system spanning eastern Wyoming and northern Colorado.  

The increases will allow the agency to keep up with demand, address deferred maintenance and “be able to put a good product out for the American public,” said Aaron Voors, a public affairs officer for Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests and Thunder Basin National Grassland. 

The move is overdue, he said. “We have not done a good job with that for a variety of reasons over the last 20-plus years since we increased the fees back in 2002,” he said. “We’re trying to just catch up.”

Wildfires, the bark beetle epidemic and other issues have dominated the agency’s work in recent years, he said. In the meantime, maintenance work has accumulated, and sites need upgrades to accommodate evolving needs like the ubiquity of camper trailers. The fee proposal also folds into a larger strategy of accommodating growing use. 

The Med-Bow proposal would hike fees at 67 existing sites and institute them at 26 others — 60 are in Wyoming. At Vedauwoo Campground, for example, fees would increase to $20 per site from $10, while use of the gazebo would increase to $75 a day from $50. Funds will be used for everything from road improvements to toilet services. 

National forest visits are increasing, Voors said, and Med-Bow district managers want to point people to developed recreation sites, partially because “it helps take some of the impacts of dispersed recreation off of the forest.” 

Comments will be accepted through Nov. 1. The district will hold public open houses, including several in July. 

The post As campers flood forests, officials aim to manage evolving needs appeared first on WyoFile.

Hundreds of workers escaped serious injury, though six required hospital treatment, when a tornado ripped through the North Antelope Rochelle coal mine in northeast Wyoming during a shift change Friday evening. The mine — the largest in the nation — was not as fortunate, suffering serious damage that temporarily halted production operations.

As crews continue to clean up and repair facilities, mine operator Peabody Energy says it will likely resume loading trains by Tuesday. But it’s unclear how long it may take to return to full production capacity.

“Initially, focus will be on restoring the train loading dock and the NARM North facility, where some power has been restored,” Peabody said in a statement Sunday. “Other parts of the mine will require power line restoration before they can return to operation. Rail cars that were blown over and derailed in the storm will need to be recovered.”

Any persistent supply disruption from the Powder River Basin coal district could threaten scores of coal-fired power plants across the nation. NARM, located in the southern portion of the basin, accounts for approximately 25% of Wyoming Powder River Basin coal production. The mine shipped 63 million tons of coal in 2021, about 13% of U.S. coal consumed for electrical generation that same year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Texas is the largest consumer of Powder River Basin coal, according to the EIA, relying on the Wyoming product for approximately 16% of its electrical generation capacity in 2022. The Lone Star State is currently experiencing an intense heat wave, driving near-record demand for electrical power, according to reports.

Some experts say a temporary slow-down in NARM deliveries won’t likely seriously impact customers in Texas, however.

Coal-fired power plants typically maintain a stockpile of coal onsite to buffer against potential supply disruptions. Power plants burning sub-bituminous coal — the type mined in the Powder River Basin — kept an average stockpile of “126 days of burn” in March, according to the EIA.

Coal plants also typically increase their stockpiles ahead of the high-electrical-demand summer and winter seasons, University of Wyoming energy economist Rob Godby said. “Normally, this would not pose a huge issue unless [a supply disruption is] sustained for quite a while.”

The disruption, so far, should not have an impact for coal customers in Texas, according to Steve Piper, Director of Energy Research at S&P Global Commodity Insights. “This isn’t a sufficient disruption to cause a concern about coal supplies at Texas power plants,” Piper said.

Peabody hasn’t commented on the full extent of the damage or the scale of coal-delivery disruptions for its customers, which span several states.

‘Massive job to clean up’

The tornado measured as a 2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, given estimated wind speeds of 120 to 130 miles per hour, according to Rapid City National Weather Service meteorologist Susan Sanders who was onsite to assess the storm event Saturday.

A tornado warning was sent to cell phone users in the area about 10 minutes before the tornado struck the mine, Sanders estimated.

The tornado — along with damaging hail and torrents of rain — apparently struck the main operations center of the mine at about 6 p.m. Friday, according to Campbell County Emergency Services Agency Coordinator David King. Though the mine’s operations span many square miles — larger than most Wyoming towns — there’s a cluster of buildings and operational facilities at its main entrance. This area took the brunt of damage, King said over the phone while assessing the damage on location.

“I’m sitting here looking at aluminum and tin off of buildings wrapped around poles and things,” King said. “It’s just a massive destruction.”

Eight people were injured and six of them were transported from the remote location to nearby hospitals for non-life threatening injuries, according to King. The drive north to Gillette takes more than one hour, and it takes nearly an hour to drive south to Douglas. All six of the injured had been released from the hospital by Sunday morning, Peabody stated.

A roof was ripped off the mine’s “change house” — a locker room-type of facility where crews prepare before each shift and meet to discuss operational plans. Bay doors were torn from the mine’s fire and emergency station building, which may be “totalled,” King said. Tin siding was peeled away from atop a set of cement silos that are used to load coal into trains. More than a dozen coal cars were blown over on a railroad line in the vicinity. One “coach” bus that transports miners was flipped onto its side while several other vehicles were scattered into one another, according to reports.

“It’s going to be a massive job to clean up,” King said. “It looks like a typical tornado, especially when it hits a whole lot of steel buildings.”

The timing of the tornado strike couldn’t have been more precarious, King said. Between 150-200 workers are typically on location to ensure 24/7 operations, he estimated. But that number was nearly double when the tornado struck due to a shift-change that occurs between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Given the number of people in the vicinity and the severity of initial reports, emergency responders from multiple agencies in Campbell and Carbon counties prepared for the worst.

“Everybody responded as if it was a mass casualty incident,” King said.

The post Tornado strike causes severe damage at nation’s largest coal mine appeared first on WyoFile.

Only about 35 miles separate Yellowstone’s relatively small, isolated grizzly bear population from the expansive contiguous population of Montanan, Canadian and Alaskan grizzlies that numbers in the tens of thousands.

Bridging the gap, and diversifying the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem bruins’ genepool, has been a longstanding goal, a centerpiece of the debate over bear management and thus far, a vexingly elusive accomplishment. 

Yet, grizzly researchers expressed hope last month that population “connectivity” may soon be within reach, despite also reporting at the same meeting in Cody that Yellowstone region bears have stopped expanding their range.

“I’m optimistic,” Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team leader Frank van Manen told WyoFile. “The reality is we are really close.”

Why, after a half century without any interpopulation exchange, and in the face of a stagnating range, would connectivity happen now?

Biologists have assembled something of a Yellowstone-region grizzly family tree by capturing, extracting blood from and mapping the genes of more than 1,000 bears over the decades. The project has yet to produce firm evidence that even one animal has trekked south and mingled its genes with the locals.

But at least one grizzly has gone in the opposite direction. 

In 2021 a 5-year-old male was caught and killed for preying on cattle near Montana’s Little Snowy Mountains, far to the east of the grizzly population swelling into the plains from the Glacier National Park-anchored Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. Surprisingly, the itinerant bear came from somewhere else. From the grizzly family tree, van Manen and other biologists deduced that the boar moseyed 110 miles from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s Beartooth Mountains, where it was likely born and raised. 

“It’s in the wrong direction, but it shows the potential of connectivity,” van Manen said. True connectivity, from a wildlife biology perspective, requires an influx of fresh genetics into the more isolated population — in this case the Yellowstone Ecosystem bears — meaning a bear trekking north doesn’t check the box. But, the opportunity is “there, if we just had a bear do the opposite. And there’s no reason to think that would not be possible, right?”  

Biologically, yes. But 21st century grizzlies inhabit a human-dominated landscape in which politics, policy and the behaviors of people arguably have as much influence over connectivity as biology.   

Conflict conundrum

Montana’s grizzly bear management plan “basically says we are going to allow for connectivity,” said Cecily Costello, a research biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

But can the bears avoid deadly conflicts as they head south? The prospect of conflict is much lower in the ecosystem cores than in the intervening landscapes. Some 84% of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem’s grizzly recovery zone is public land, and the figure is a whopping 98% within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. But only 54% of the connectivity area is publicly managed ground, according to data Costello presented at the Cody meeting. 

Conservation groups are mounting efforts to create more bear-friendly landscapes in the connectivity areas, but that’s a long-term and costly endeavor. It might take 20 years of hard work, guessed Gary Burnett, a managing director for the Missoula-based Heart of the Rockies Institute. 

“From a connectivity perspective, we think there are two things in particular you need to have,” Burnett said. One, he said, is an “open landscape” — achieved through means like conservation easements. The other component is diminishing the harmful “attractants” that come with humanity, be they agricultural or residential. 

Some causes of grizzly mortality are easier to eliminate. 

Former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator Chris Servheen believes Montana’s management plan doesn’t do enough to safeguard grizzlies in the connectivity areas. He’s also optimistic that a Montana grizzly will successfully disperse south — it’s likely to occur within “three or four years” — but worries state management could jeopardize the chances of such a movement occuring. 

“Every year we see bears further and further out and closer and closer together,” Servheen said, “but that’s happening while they’re listed [under the Endangered Species Act] and that’s happening without any hunting in that connectivity area.” 

Factoring in hunting, Servheen said, the three- or four-year estimate for a successful disperser “would be completely out the window.” 

“In my mind, hunting would put connectivity at grave risk,” he said. “I really object to the tone of intolerance that exists in many of these state plans. They look at grizzly bears as a competing interest with everything else.” 

“In my mind, hunting would put connectivity at grave risk.”

Chris Servheen, Former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grizzly bear recovery coordinator

Montana officials, he said, are talking out of both sides of their mouths by prioritizing connectivity while simultaneously saying they would allow hunting in linkage habitat.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is weighing whether to attempt a third go at delisting grizzlies — a process Wyoming is suing over to move it along. 

Ahead of the federal agency’s analysis, the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho forged a pact that outlined the parameters of grizzly bear hunting — potentially with few restrictions along the ecosystem’s periphery —  and other aspects of management. That agreement called for a 13% reduction in the grizzly population within a monitoring area where bear numbers are counted. There would likely be even heavier hunting and no firm requirements to maintain grizzlies at all outside that zone. Roughly 40% of occupied grizzly range is outside of the monitoring area. 

Just passing through

If hunting were layered atop other conflicts already constraining the grizzly range, bears would have an even tougher time establishing and persisting in the most people-packed connectivity areas of west-central Montana. 

Connectivity, however, does not require persistent habitation. 

“That’s sometimes misinterpreted by some people: That you need occupation,” van Manen said. “You don’t. You don’t need resident bears to connect genetically.” 

A single dispersing male that successfully makes the trek south and spreads his genes would do the trick, he said. 

Costello shared preliminary findings at the Cody meeting from research investigating potential Yellowstone-to-Glacier region grizzly bear corridors. U.S. Geological Survey ecologist Sarah Sells, University of Montana biologist Paul Lukacs and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks employees Lori Roberts and Milan Vinks collaborated on the study. 

There are several primary linkage paths, according to maps Costello presented and discussed with WyoFile. The two most direct routes shoot more or less straight northwest to southeast. The easternmost corridor skirts Helena and Bozeman, Montana by way of the Big Belt, Bridger and Gallatin mountain ranges, while another direct linkage route runs from the Boulder and Highland mountains down the Tobacco Roots and into the Madison Range. 

“We have observations of bears in all of the mountain ranges I just mentioned except for the Tobacco Roots and the Bridgers,” Costello said. “So they’re halfway there.” 

The modeling predicted grizzly bear use of linkage areas based on several habitat qualities, but foremost was the greenness of the landscape. Mountains, forests and riparian areas rank higher, whereas sagebrush steppe and high plains environments rank lower. 

Another component tracked the “forest edge,” Costello said, which is a particular productive part of the landscape that grizzly bears prefer. 

The model also factored in the habitat preferences of real-world Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem grizzlies. 

“The way that we ran the analysis is we simulated each bear’s model on the landscape,” Costello said.

Similarly, the model accounted for habitat qualities that grizzlies tend to avoid: roads and housing. The likelihood of conflict nearer to humans is another important factor for predicting where grizzly bears can persist in the currently grizzly-less void.

Island life

Even without connectivity, van Manen said, the Yellowstone ecosystem population is on good ground genetically. “With the current population size,” he said, “that concern is decades away — and probably more than decades.” 

In the absence of a successful grizzly bear dispersal south, wildlife managers have pledged to force the issue. The tri-state pact commits the states to translocating “at least two” bears from outside the Greater Yellowstone into the region by 2025 unless migration is detected in the interim. 

That’s not an ideal outcome, in Servheen’s view: “Allowing this to happen naturally is really important,” he said.

Moving bears from one ecosystem to another is dependent on “political whims” and agency administrators. Having that fallback option also deprioritizes good planning, he said. 

“The end result is really poor conservation and poor management,” Servheen said. “I don’t think driving them around is a good solution.” 

If a grizzly bear does bridge the 35-mile gap it will have to cross interstate highways, settled valleys and other human obstacles. Those barriers, van Manen said, inhibit the already sluggish expansion of a species that biologically has a slow “life history strategy. 

“They live longer, and can afford for that process to take a longer time,” he said. 

Even so, due to decades of conservation and range expansion, connectivity might have already occurred. There is a time delay in crunching data and completing parentage analyses from grizzly bear bloodwork, van Manen said. The bear that showed up in the Snowy Mountains, for example, was sampled in 2021, but biologists didn’t realize it came from the Beartooths until this year due to normal delays in processing its genetics.

“For all we know,” van Manen said, “we might already have genetic connectivity, but have just not documented it yet.” 

The post Will Yellowstone’s grizzly bears remain forever isolated? appeared first on WyoFile.

After 15 years of planning and permitting, construction will begin this year on the TransWest Express high-voltage transmission line — a milestone expansion of Wyoming’s electric power export industry to markets in the American Southwest and one of the largest transmission upgrades to the western grid in decades.

The Bureau of Land Management granted TransWest Express LLC a “notice to proceed” in April, culminating years of work and millions of dollars invested in a “vision” to bring Wyoming’s renewable energy potential to the rest of the West, according to company officials.

“It’s a day that’s been long coming,” TransWest Express Executive Vice President and COO Roxane Perruso said. A groundbreaking event will take place Tuesday, she said, with a special appreciation for the Carbon County community’s integral support. That support represented a leap-of-faith for a region with its cultural and economic roots in coal.

Power project

While TransWest Express LLC was mired in planning and a painstaking bureaucratic permitting process that included obtaining rights-of-way from hundreds of entities across the 732-mile route, its affiliate Power Company of Wyoming was already doing preliminary construction work on the wind farm that will energize the line. The Anschutz Corporation owns both companies. 

The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind energy project will span some 320,000 acres in Carbon County and generate 3,000 megawatts of electricity — representing about 28% of Wyoming’s current electrical generation capacity today, according to U.S. Energy Information data. It will be the largest onshore wind energy facility in North America, according to Power Company of Wyoming.

Phased construction of the 732-mile TransWest Express high voltage transmission system will begin later this year, according to company officials. The first phase includes a new substation in Carbon County. From there, crews will erect towers and string high-voltage lines to a station in Delta, Utah. That portion of the project will initially begin moving up to 1,500 megawatts of wind-generated electricity via direct current by December 2027. 

The second phase includes an alternate current line to connect with other powerline systems in southern Nevada. By the end of 2028, the final phases of the system will ramp up to 3,000 megawatts and four system interconnections in the Southwest, according to TransWest Express officials.

“These components will provide important new bulk transmission capacity and connectivity with the PacifiCorp system in Wyoming, with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and Intermountain Power systems in Utah, with the NV Energy system in Nevada and with the California Independent System Operator,” Perruso said. 

New dynamic

Aside from transporting power from Wyoming’s Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind facility, TransWest may also serve as an onramp for other energy projects, such as the hydrogen energy proposal at the Intermountain Power Project in Utah, and potentially new nuclear power facilities, according to TransWest officials.

“As Wyoming looks at more carbon-free [energy] resources, we are going to be that pathway that allows those resources to get to the market,” Perruso said. “We’re opening up the new market for renewables and also creating a pathway for future carbon-free resources.”

Some clean energy and climate advocates hail the TransWest Express project as a vital step forward in “decarbonizing” the western grid. Once completed, the transmission line will serve as a “backbone,” increasing connectivity between large demand centers — southern Nevada, Utah and southern California — and rural areas that can generate commercial-scale renewable energy, such as Wyoming’s abundant capacity for wind power generation.

“This is an example of infrastructure that is needed and should be built,” Western Resource Advocates Deputy Director of Regional Markets Vijay Satyal said. “It is definitely very important for the West.”

Together, the TransWest line and CCSM wind facility represent a new dynamic — as well as a gamble that too few entities have been willing or able to take on, according to Satyal and other utility market watchers. It’s a rare move that requires a lot of patience with the permitting process, according to one TransWest Express official, as well as deep pockets, according to others.

Going independent

Most consumers don’t get to choose their electricity provider, whether they’re powering a home in Casper or a chain restaurant in Evanston, but the TransWest project diverges from that paradigm. For example, PacifiCorp, which also operates as Rocky Mountain Power, is one of several electric utility monopolies in Wyoming. It serves captive customers in certain areas because, generally speaking, it owns the power infrastructure exclusively.

As a monopoly, PacifiCorp is regulated by the Wyoming Public Service Commission, as well as service commissions in the five other states it operates. It is required to justify and win approval for its electricity rates. In return, it has a guaranteed, captive ratepayer base to finance system operations and necessary upgrades.

There are variations, such as rural electric co-ops that work under different sets of rules and authorities. But the same geographically limited market for grid infrastructure plays out all over Wyoming, the West and the nation. Although utilities like PacifiCorp are shifting from burning coal to cleaner forms of electric generation within their own service territories, Satyal said, it isn’t enough to achieve the level of connectivity between hundreds of individual service systems to allow for new sources of renewable and low-carbon energy.

The strategy behind Power Company of Wyoming and TransWest Express is to operate as independent merchants, selling and delivering renewable and low-carbon energy to any utility it can reach via the three major operating regions that TransWest will connect to on the western grid.

“We’re broadening the [Wyoming and western] market to include these new interconnections and new customers,” Perruso said. “We’re not constrained by a service territory.

“That also means it’s risky,” Perruso continued. “This is why you don’t see [a lot of] developers doing this, because it’s a risky and an entrepreneurial proposition.”

Big gamble, deep pockets 

Unlike a regulated utility, neither TransWest Express LLC nor Power Company of Wyoming have a captive ratepayer base to leverage upfront financing or a guaranteed paying customer base for ongoing operations. That’s where both the gamble and the deep pockets come in.

Both companies are affiliates of the Denver-based Anschutz Corporation. The worldwide oil, investment, sports, real estate, entertainment and publishing company headed by Philip Anschutz is worth some $10.8 billion, according to Forbes.

“Thanks to the deep pockets or the financial muscle the owners had, they survived a long [permitting] process to comply with all the environmental requirements,” Satyal said. “This is a good example of a company seeing the value proposition and the economic benefits of exporting Wyoming-rich wind and moving into the decarbonization of the future.”

TransWest Express doesn’t yet have customers contracted to take the power it plans to deliver from Wyoming. But, Satyal said, the rush to renewables to meet self-imposed carbon emission standards — particularly in the Southwest — is a good bet with a potentially lucrative payoff.

“God forbid California has a reliability crisis. This line will be a very important lifeline in providing energy — and at high [profit],” he said. “That’s competition at work, which I think is what Wyoming wants to support — a competitive market.”

Wyoming Energy Authority Executive Director Rob Creager agrees.

“Our state is in the business of producing and selling world-class energy,” Creager said. “So projects like TransWest Express opening up entirely new consumer markets for our energy products have tremendous potential for Wyoming.”

The post TransWest Express poised to expand reach of Wyo renewables appeared first on WyoFile.

Four Missouri hunters who successfully fought criminal and civil trespassing cases after they corner crossed to hunt public land in Carbon County described disbelief, shock and fear experienced during their nearly three-year ordeal.

They didn’t set out to prove a point when they stepped through the airspace above a corner of the Elk Mountain Ranch to hunt public land beyond. They never expected to be criminally cited because they never set foot on the 22,045-acre Carbon County property.

They were scared and sweating as they stood before a Carbon County jury that then declared them not guilty. Then billionaire ranch owner Fred Eshelman sued them in civil court, claiming $7.75 million in damages for devaluing his property.

They stalked elk in 2020 and 2021 across some of the 6,000 acres of public land enmeshed in a checkerboard of square-mile parcels on Elk Mountain Ranch. In corner crossing, they stepped across the point where two public parcels and two private ones met, all without touching the private land.

“The message to the public is: ‘It’s your land.’”

Bradly Cape

It’s unsettled whether corner crossing is illegal, so the cases could influence public access to 8.3 million acres of public land considered “corner locked” across the West.

The hunters, from the day they set out from Steelville, Missouri three years ago, held that Eshelman can’t block the public from the public land that’s just a step away, keeping its bounty to himself.

“The message to the public is: ‘It’s your land,’” said Bradly Cape, one of the hunters who owns a fence building company. “It’s your land — go hunting and don’t be bullied.”

The 2020 hunt

During a hunting trip to Wyoming in 2019, Cape, his employee Zach Smith and Phillip Yeomans, a military veteran and traveling mechanic, took a side route past intriguing Elk Mountain. The peak rises to 11,156 feet, its ridges and draws climbing above sagebrush and hayfields in a sweeping pine-clad ascension. 

The 51-square mile ranch, including public and private land covering Elk Mountain is “equivalent to a national-park like landscape,” according to a real estate agent’s description posted before Eshelman bought the ranch in 2005. The land, littered with arrowheads, is home to 950 elk. History took place there, too. Big Nose George Parott’s Powder River Gang murdered two lawmen on Rattlesnake Creek in 1878, a shootout that lead to his vigilante lynching on Rawlins’s Front Street.

The odds of drawing a license for Elk Mountain Hunt Area 125 were good, too, in part because of the preponderance of private land and a longstanding practice of deterring corner crossing.

Driving around the mountain in 2019, “we ran into a local elderly lady that said they had problems with the elk getting in their hay piles,” Cape said. “She talked about how nobody goes up on the mountain because the rich guy won’t let them.”

As the owner of the airspace above his property at the corners, “we should have control of who crossed the private land,” Eshelman, a North Carolina pharmaceutical businessman, said in a deposition. The hunters, however, believe an 1885 federal law prevents him from blocking the public from corner-crossing.

Back home in Missouri in 2019, “nobody could fathom that crossing without touching land could be an issue,” Cape said. Yet, the real estate listing stated that two settled lawsuits “protect the ranch from public access.”

Cape found both suits irrelevant.

“There was no such case,” he said. “There really wasn’t a law against it. It was just people’s opinions.”

So the three men set off for Wyoming in 2020, planning to corner cross in bishop-like chess moves from public to public sections. They would use the onX Hunt GPS app to locate corner monuments, then cross without touching Elk Mountain Ranch.

From their camp on public land just off a county road they could see their first corner in the sagebrush a few hundred yards away. Two fence T-posts and no-trespassing signs straddled the common point of federal sections 14 and 24 and private sections 13 and 23.

Ranch manager Steve Grende had erected the T-posts a few feet apart from one another on the private parcels and chained them together about chest high. Sticking out of the ground a few feet under the chain, a monument about the diameter of a soda can bore a cross marking the infinitesimally small point common to the four sections.

The men grabbed the posts, swung around them, and went hunting.

The mother of all corners

One hundred forty-two years before the three Missourians crossed their portal, surveyor L. M. Lampton and his crew set a granite cuboid about the size of two shoeboxes to mark the corner. A single notch faced east while three notches marked the face looking south.

Regardless of whether Lampton was nervous or rushed — he heard the Powder River Gang’s murderous fusillade eight days earlier — the stone marked a point that would never change. The marker stood until 1967 when federal surveyors replaced it with a thick stake topped by an inscribed brass cap. They buried the original stone beside it.

Camo-clad, the hunters in 2020 stepped over the threshold, breathless for a chance at a wary, six-point, 700-pound ungulate that would yield 150 pounds of meat. By the end of their hunt they downed three elk, one five-point and two six points. They quartered their animals and stepped and swung their way back to camp.

Grende encountered them and said they had trespassed. Authorities showed up.

“You’re invading the airspace,” Deputy Roger Hawks said. But, “I can’t say anything’s going to come of this.”

“There was no citation,” Cape said. “They told us we were good to go.”

Before they returned in 2021, this time with John Slowensky, Cape’s brother-in-law, the fence builders went to their shop.

“We got pieces of pipe and started laying them out on the floor,” making two A-frames,” the beginnings of a ladder, Cape said. “Then we discussed how wide the steps needed to be. We welded … and we had ourselves a stile.”

They built the portable structure “so we didn’t have to touch the T-post,” Cape said. They only needed it at the first corner and laid it down nearby.

The group spent several days in 2021 hunting with bows and then rifles, had new confrontations with Grende and were questioned by a game warden and sheriff’s deputy.

Grende lobbied for authorities to act, asking the lawmen: “do they realize how much money my boss has … and property?” A game warden wrote a report, and Grende took his case to County Prosecutor Ashley Mayfield Davis.

“At that point we had our own knowledge and research,” Cape said, “plus we had the law tell us that what we were doing was good. We all are faith-based men and tried to do what’s correct.”

Prosecutor Mayfield Davis ordered criminal trespass citations. “We never thought we were gonna get cited until we did,” Cape said.

Each faced a misdemeanor charge of trespassing, counts that carry sentences of up to six months in jail and $750 in fines. That brought a reckoning.

“We actually considered for a fair amount of time whether or not we would fight it,” Yeomans said. “We’re not attention hounds.”

An avenue opened, however, as Wyoming Backcountry Hunters and Anglers launched a fundraising drive for their defense. Podcaster Steven Rinella advanced their cause on The MeatEater.

“Things just started falling in place,” Yeomans said.

Facing Carbon citizens

Summoned back to Wyoming for their misdemeanor trial in the spring of 2022, the Missouri four faced 58 potential jurors during voir dire. Lottery drew the citizens from towns that saddlebag the Continental Divide, separated by the North Platte River and stretching from the Seminoe Reservoir to a 12,015-foot Snowy Range summit.

They assembled in Rawlins, a windburned interstate crossroads of western agriculture and energy development, home to the state penitentiary and Frontier Prison. A few of the prospects could have ridden out of pages of “The Virginian,” Owen Wister’s Western set a half-day’s ride up the trail in Medicine Bow.

Many wore jeans. There were rodeo belt buckles, embroidered snap-button shirts, hoodies, Filson vests, Carhartts, Stetsons and Resistols. Some had on work boots, others battered tennies, high heels. There was a skirt, a tie. Judge Susan Stipe silenced a blabbermouth, dismissed a rancher with corner-crossing entanglements. One prospective juror didn’t believe in a defendant’s right to remain silent. 

“It was pretty intimidating having all those people watch you,” Smith said.

What would Carbon County justice look like to this pool?

“You could sure tell the ones that you didn’t want on the jury,” Cape said. Looking at the sea of faces, he wondered: “do these people think I’m a bad guy?”

Prosecutor Mayfield Davis opened the trial saying, “In life there are boundaries everywhere.” Hunters’ attorney Ryan Semerad likened Eshelman, a hunter himself, to a feudal lord claiming “the king’s deer”  when that wildlife actually belonged to the state.

After two and a half days of trial, the jury of six — “good, normal people,” as Cape saw them — began deliberating. Faster than a hungry man could eat a taco salad from Rose’s Lariat café down the street, they returned with a verdict.

“My heart was in my throat and I was sweating like crazy,” Slowensky said.

The suspense debilitated Yeomans. “I couldn’t think,” he said.

“You’re standing there in a room full of people in front of a judge and a jury of your peers and you don’t know,” Cape said. “It’s scary.”

Slowensky had come to some peace before the hunters’ acquittal of all charges. “People know who I am in my heart,” he said, “and [that] I would never put myself in a knowing position to ever do anything wrong or, especially, illegal.”

$7.75 million in damages

While they were facing the criminal charges, Eshelman filed a civil suit against the men, claiming their corner crossing caused $7.75 million in damages by devaluing his property.

“That was a shock to me,” Cape said about the civil filing. “I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“My worry at that point was we’re gonna have to go through this all over again,” he said. The potential penalty, “it scared some of the others but it never scared me. It was an unrealistic number.”

A federal judge on May 26 granted most of the hunters’ summary judgment dismissal requests against Eshelman’s suit. The ranch owner owns the airspace above his property, Chief U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl wrote, but that ownership comes with some restrictions.

“Where a person corner crosses on foot within the checkerboard from public land to public land without touching the surface of private land and without damaging private property, there is no liability for trespass,” he wrote.

The checkerboard runs in a band 20 miles on either side of the Union Pacific rail line across much of Wyoming, a relic of the railroad grant era. Skavdahl’s decision has implications for public access to 8.3 million acres across the West that are considered corner locked by any interpretation that corner crossing is illegal.

Those implications have yet to shake out. Attorneys and observers anticipate an appeal of Skavdahl’s decision and the hunters will continue to fight, they said. Resolution of that would be necessary before the case sets a precedent across states in the federal 10th Circuit — Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah.

The legal wranglings “just instilled a bigger trust in how it all works,” Yeomans said. The hunters don’t hold a grudge, they said.

“We understand [Eshelman’s] point as far as wanting to protect what’s precious to him,” Yeomans said. “We respect his private property. That was the intent of the ladder.

“There’s no animosity,” he said. “I’ve got no ill will toward Mr. Eshelman or his team of lawyers.”

Eshelman’s attorney did not respond to a request for an interview with the landowner.

Cape remains curious about the gulch separating the parties. “I would still like to meet Fred and just sit down and talk with the guy.”

The case drew national interest, and Cape said credits the support it engendered with helping the hunters.

“We stood up for ourselves a little bit in the beginning,” Cape said, “but we would have never been able to do it without support.”

When you’re on the right side of something and win, he said, “that’s the way that America is supposed to be.”

This article used as reference court records, Government Land Office documents and “Big Nose George; His Troublesome Trail” by former Wyoming State Archeologist Mark E. Miller.

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Biologists once found a crayfish with an entire garter snake and several fish inside a female bullfrog near Sheridan. That may sound like an impressive amount of food for a two-pound frog, but it’s actually pretty standard for the voracious amphibians. Wendy Estes-Zumpf, the state’s herpetological coordinator, once saw a picture of a bullfrog that choked to death trying to eat a duck. 

Bullfrogs consume nearly every living thing they find.  Their menu is limited only by the size of their mouths — as the aforementioned duck would suggest, sometimes not even that —  and they are wreaking havoc on the West’s native species. 

To make matters worse, once introduced to an area, bullfrogs can be nearly impossible to eradicate. Their potential to damage ecosystems is so great, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department passed a new regulation that took effect Jan. 1 prohibiting anyone from importing or possessing live bullfrogs. 

“A lot of the landowners in the Sheridan area said they had lots and lots of leopard frogs and now they have only bullfrogs,” said Estes-Zumpf. “There are frog species that are now endangered in other states and the primary cause are bullfrogs because the natives just cannot compete.”

Eaters and carriers

Like carp, feral pigs and crayfish, bullfrogs aren’t all bad. They play important roles in the areas where they’re from. In the eastern part of the U.S., bullfrogs are critical as predators and prey and distribute nutrients from wetlands into more terrestrial areas. 

“They are just an amazing species,” said JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy. Also often called pond frogs, bullfrogs are the largest true frog species in the U.S.

They have abundant predators like smallmouth bass and snapping turtles in their native habitats, and the waterways are much more complex. Ponds back East tend to vary in depth and vegetation and streams snake between other ponds offering other frog species, tadpoles and fish plenty of places to hide. 

Bullfrogs are also hardy, big and incredibly efficient travelers, able to cover tens or even up to 100 miles over dry land to reach new water. 

“They get big and have chunky chicken thigh legs,” Estes-Zumpf said. “They are probably the number one frog-leg frog,” and they taste like chicken.

As a result, they were introduced across the world, sometimes as a food source, and other times as stowaways in fish stocking efforts. More recently, well-meaning classroom teachers have dumped easy-to-raise bullfrogs into ponds and creeks after they’ve run their course as classroom pets. 

How, exactly, they entered the Sheridan region, no one knows for sure. 

Game and Fish first received reports of bullfrog sightings in 2018. The next year, biologists surveyed the area and found bullfrogs everywhere. 

Estes-Zumpf knows a landowner outside Sheridan introduced bullfrogs and fireflies to his property to remind him of home back East, but she’s guessing as widespread as they’ve become in the region, they were likely introduced elsewhere as well. 

Bullfrogs have occupied a few streams in far eastern Wyoming for decades. They’ve been there so long, in fact, biologists don’t know the impact they’ve had because no records exist of native species prior to their arrival. 

The problem in the Sheridan area is the bullfrog’s crusade to consume nearly every northern leopard frog and tadpole in sight. Northern leopard frogs are stable in portions of their range. They exist everywhere from Maine to Washington down to eastern Arizona, but were petitioned for Endangered Species Act listing in some portions of the West where their populations are struggling. 

Leopard frogs can coexist with bullfrogs in eastern water systems because they’ve found plenty of ways to hide and survive, but they’re not so well adapted out here, said Apodaca. 

Potentially more concerning, bullfrogs carry, but are immune to, the deadly chytrid fungus that is suffocating and killing native frogs and salamanders across North America.

“When it becomes a real concern for us in the conservation community is when [bullfrogs] throw ecosystems out of alignment and actively harm and damage native species,” Apodaca said.

Keeping them out

Once established, it’s exceptionally hard to eradicate bullfrogs, Estes-Zumpf said, though Wyoming’s harsh winters could help. 

One approach includes draining ponds, trapping adults and killing any tadpoles and eggs in the process. But the collateral damage of annihilating everything in the water limits its use and is not practical once bullfrogs spread to complex water systems with streams and connecting waterways. 

Biologists with more invasive-bullfrog-management experience elsewhere have found ways to minimize their damage. 

Officials in Boulder County, Colorado, for example, have been able to control bullfrogs in priority wetlands where northern leopard frogs breed. 

Efforts include targeting adult bullfrogs, Apocada said, as well as strategically removing eggs since bullfrogs reproduce later in the summer than northern leopard frogs. 

“To get rid of bullfrogs is a continuous battle because they’re on the landscape and will come back,” he added. 

That’s why Game and Fish decided to ban them from the state. The fewer bullfrogs here, the lower potential for release. Estes-Zumpf encourages anyone with a hankering for bullfrog legs to feel free to hunt them (though not at night with lights, because that’s illegal), remembering that they can’t be kept alive as pets or released back into the water again. 

With any luck, Estes-Zumpf said, the bullfrog invasion can be contained to the Sheridan region. 

Anyone who hears the telltale croak — it may sound similar to a cow mooing — or sees or captures a bullfrog should call their local Game and Fish office. The earlier bullfrogs can be caught and contained the better for the rest of Wyoming’s species, fish, frogs and ducks included, Estes-Zumpf said.

The post Bullfrogs are invading Sheridan, threatening native species appeared first on WyoFile.

Ecologist Joel Berger wasn’t pleased when he learned his research had been cited as evidence — inaccurately, he says — that the famous Path of the Pronghorn migration route ends well short of Jonah Energy’s Normally Pressured Lance gas field. 

The contention came from state and federal attorneys during oral arguments last week in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, where environmental groups are challenging the NPL field. They argue the Bureau of Land Management didn’t properly account for impacts to migratory pronghorn and the world’s largest-known sage grouse winter concentration area. 

Defending the BLM’s decision from a Denver courtroom, Wyoming’s senior assistant attorney general, Travis Jordan, said studies from Berger and former colleague Renee Seidler “indicate that the Path of the Pronghorn terminates 30 miles north of the project area.”

Without naming the researchers, U.S. Department of Justice Attorney Sommer Engels made a similar claim during oral arguments Wednesday. 

“Ultimately, the Path of the Pronghorn, which is discussed in petitioner’s briefs, occurs well outside of the project area,” she told appellate judges Nancy Moritz, Timothy Tymkovich and Veronica Rossman.

Berger, a senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, charged the state and federal government’s counsel of “doing a deliberate mislead” because, he said, “we know that migration is continuous and the animals continue.

“There are semantics and there’s biological reality,” Berger told WyoFile. “The semantics are making an argument about where the legal end of the path is. But we know that … the animals that use the Path of the Pronghorn migrate far to the south of the NPL gas field.” 

Jordan, the state’s attorney, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Neither did the U.S. Department of Justice regarding an email request to interview Engels.

Presumably, the attorneys were referring to what could be considered the legal end of the officially designated pronghorn migration route — which is well to the north of the biological end. 

Scientists have mapped the complete route the animals travel each year, and it extends well beyond what’s formally designated. Animals in the Sublette Herd seasonally travel as far as 220 miles one way, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Yet only one agency has officially recognized the path — and it only recognizes the portion that traverses land it manages. The Bridger-Teton National Forest designated the route’s northern 43 miles via a protective forest plan amendment adopted 15 years ago. 

Considerable efforts to designate the more southerly reaches of the Path of the Pronghorn, which cuts through the Green River basin’s gasfield country, have failed or stalled. But if official designations were granted, wildlife advocates say, Wyoming could more effectively protect the critical routes. 

Years of effort

At the time of the U.S. Forest Service’s designation, “the BLM refused to participate,” Berger once told the Jackson Hole News&Guide, attributing the agency’s lack of participation to “politics.”

More recently, political pressure has stymied the state of Wyoming’s attempts to protect the migration route used by animals that summer in and around Grand Teton National Park. 

The Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migration, which includes the Path of the Pronghorn, was next in line to be designated as a Wyoming Game and Fish Department-recognized route in 2019. A coalition of industry groups, however, protested and effectively halted the process. In the aftermath, Gov. Mark Gordon created an all-new migration corridor designation process. That was more than three years ago, and the Path of the Pronghorn has remained on deck in the designation queue. 

Meanwhile, litigation over the NPL gas field, once valued at $17 billion, remains unresolved. Citing sage grouse- and pronghorn-centric concerns, the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project and Upper Green River Alliance first brought the lawsuit in 2020, but U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl ruled against the three conservation groups last year. Quoting precedent, he wrote that environmental law “merely prohibits uninformed, rather than unwise decision making.”

The environmental groups appealed the decision, which led Jordan, Engels and Jonah Energy counsel Kathleen Schroder to Denver last week to exchange oral arguments with Center for Biological Diversity senior attorney Wendy Park.

In those arguments, the Path of the Pronghorn took center stage. 

“Did [the BLM] consider the Teton pronghorn — the Path of the Pronghorn — as part of the evaluation, or did they completely disregard potential impacts on that herd?” appellate judge Timothy Tymkovich asked Jordan, with Wyoming. 

In its environmental impact statement and decision, Jordan said, the BLM “very candidly” said there would be impacts to migration, including the loss of migration. The agency’s analysis was of the larger Sublette Herd, he said. 

During her arguments, Park said the EIS devoted only three sentences to Jackson Hole’s migratory pronghorn. 

“It was just so general that there was no indication in there as to whether the Grand Teton pronghorn would survive or not,” she said, “and whether that Path of the Pronghorn would continue.” 

In 2018, BLM officials told the Jackson Hole News&Guide that impacts to pronghorn migration were scant in the planning documents because the corridor hadn’t been designated. 

“It would help us out if the [Wyoming] Game and Fish were to formally designate something in there,” former BLM Pinedale Field Office Manager Caleb Hiner said at the time. In lieu of codified protections, he said, the agency would “micro-site” during the application-to-drill process to diminish impacts.

Jonah Energy has contested designating the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migration route, which cuts through two more mature gas fields — the Anticline and Jonah fields — before spilling into the NPL field. The company’s vice president of public affairs, Paul Ulrich, did not respond to WyoFile’s request for comment.

In 2019, Ulrich expressed incredulity about the prospect of a state designation for the Path of the Pronghorn. 

“I’m questioning why we’re talking about a … migration corridor for pronghorn in two of the most intensely filled fields in the country,” Ulrich said at a Wyoming Game and Fish meeting that year.

A blow from winter

Amid the delayed designation, Wyoming Game and Fish Department officials have been trying to more thoroughly track and map the Sublette Herd’s movements. 

Scientists were tracking 93 GPS-collared pronghorn in the herd at the onset of winter, which walloped the herd. Some 75% perished, including all three Teton Park migrants, leaving the Path of the Pronghorn on shaky ground. At least a few of the farthest-traveling animals remain: Jackson Hole photographer Tim Mayo reported seeing four animals in northern Grand Teton Park on Monday morning. 

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Berger, who’s also the university chair of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University, described the winter of 2022-’23 as a “catastrophic mortality event” and a reminder of what happens when animals don’t have adequate food — in this case from an unusual inverted, persistent snowpack.

“When animals have to deal with all the pressures, all the disturbance and the loss of habitat, we know what the consequences are,” he said. “Their immune systems are compromised. And they have a higher probability of death, as we have just seen.” 

Other, longer-lasting forms of pronghorn habitat loss are on display in the Green River basin. Research published in 2019 led by Western Ecosystems Technology research biologist Hall Sawyer found that Sublette Herd antelope are avoiding and even abandoning the Anticline gas field, dispelling the notion that Antilocapra americana adapts well to industrial activity. Industry attempted to partner with biologists to conserve Anticline pronghorn, but the collaborative effort ended in ruin after gas companies tried to massage data and alter reports, according to a Journal of Environmental Management study. 

Seidler, the other scientist whose study Jordan, the state attorney, cited during oral arguments, also criticized how her research was presented as evidence that the Path of the Pronghorn ends before the NPL gas field. 

“That’s a strange argument to put out there in the public eye,” she told WyoFile. “I think it’s pretty well known that these animals at least get fully onto the gas field in the winter, if not further south.”

‘Red flags and warnings’

Now the executive director for the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, Seidler specifically examined how pronghorn used the then-proposed NPL project area during her time at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Publishing the results in the journal of Conservation Biology, she illustrated how pronghorn were using the NPL while simultaneously avoiding the drilled-out Anticline gas field and especially densely drilled Jonah field.

A map of the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migration published by the U.S. Geological Survey in May 2022 illustrates dozens of animals traveling through the landscape where the NPL field was approved. 

“Eight years ago, we were giving red flags and warnings,” Seidler said. “We said, ‘Hey, if you’re going to develop this NPL [field], you better do it in a way that works for the wildlife or you’re going to be blocking major migration routes.” 

Erik Molvar, who directs one of the plaintiffs, Western Watersheds Project, described the state and federal attorney’s remarks about the NPL field and Path of the Pronghorn being apart as a “fictional argument.” 

“Since the Wyoming Game and Fish Department is responsible for managing the pronghorn that migrate along the Path of the Pronghorn,” he said, “you would think that the state of Wyoming ought to know where that migration route lies, and shouldn’t be misrepresenting it in court.” 

Molvar had no predictions about which way the appellate court would rule, but remarked that he believes the stakes are clear. 

“I think this is the big chance for the courts to reverse what is likely to be a death blow to the Path of the Pronghorn migration,” he said. 

Berger, meanwhile, said that his frustrations fall on state of Wyoming officials. It’s their delays, he said, that have clouded the picture and created ambiguity about the landscapes the Sublette Pronghorn Herd depends on to migrate. 

“Mark Gordon and Wyoming Game and Fish’s leadership should be ashamed of themselves,” Berger said. “Not the biologists. People are being suppressed within the organization. They don’t have the freedom to speak.” 

“Mark Gordon and Wyoming Game and Fish’s leadership should be ashamed of themselves.”

Joel berger

A Gordon spokesman was unable to be reached before press time. 

The governor listened to calls to designate the Path of the Pronghorn at a Pinedale meeting about the severe winter for wildlife.

“Our pronghorn cannot wait another minute,” Upper Green River Alliance Director Linda Baker told Gordon. “Please do it now.” 

The governor offered his thoughts in response. He called for a “durable” solution that transcends political swings and changes in federal land management policy. 

“Drawing a line on a map is not going to fix that,” Gordon said. 

Instead, he said, a “committed” coalition of private landowners, local agencies and the public is needed to make the “migration corridor work.” 

“That’s what’s going to be durable for generations,” Gordon said, “and that’s what we need to have.”

In 2020 Gordon issued a gubernatorial executive order establishing the state’s approach to designating and protecting migration corridors. It’s state policy, not federal, though federal officials can heed its guidelines about what occurs in migration corridors in their land management decisions. The document states that, “Wherever possible, development, infrastructure and use should occur outside of designated corridors.” 

Under the policy, the governor of Wyoming ultimately calls the shots.

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Alisha Kaluhiokalani spent most of her first year at Hawaii’s only women’s prison alone in a 6-by-8 foot cell.

She fought, broke the rules, and lashed out at everyone around her. Because of that, she was frequently sent to “lock” – what everyone at the Women’s Community Correctional Center called solitary confinement.

On a rare afternoon in the prison yard Kaluhiokalani heard a mellow, hollow sound. “What was that?” she whispered to herself.

She looked across the yard and saw a prison staff member playing the ukulele.

“You play?” he asked.

She nodded, taking the instrument and starting to strum. She sang “I Kona,” a traditional Hawaiian song loved by her father.

“You want to continue to play that?” the man asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Stay out of lock.”

So she did.

It was the ukulele, a Hawaiian language class, and her encounter with the man in the yard more than 20 years ago that changed Kaluhiokalani’s educational trajectory.

‘Not Knowing Who You Are’

Native Hawaiians like Kaluhiokalani are disproportionately locked up in the Hawaii criminal justice system, making up only 20% of the general population but 40% of people in prison. Similar imbalances are true for Indigenous people across the country.

Among other states with significant overrepresentation of Indigenous people are Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah, according to a recent report by the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative. Native women in particular have higher incarceration rates than the general population.

Native Hawaiians are more likely to struggle with addiction, drop out of school and go to prison. Many feel alienated from Western education systems, Kaluhiokalani said, and that their cultural identity has been suppressed in the wake of historical losses of land and language.

“They call that the ‘eha … the hurt, and not knowing who you are,” she said.

That was something she has struggled with personally. She has often felt like a screw up given the life she has lived, she said. There have been times in her life when she had a hard time seeing herself as anything other than an addict or a prisoner.

Kaluhiokalani became pregnant with her first child at 17. She finished her GED before the baby was born by taking classes at night. Her boyfriend, Jacob, enlisted in the National Guard, and over the next few years they had three more children. During that time, they both struggled with addiction and cycled in and out of jail. She went to prison for the first time on drug-related charges at the age of 23.

In prison, shortly after that first year in solitary, Kaluhiokalani enrolled in her first college class, Hawaiian 101.

“That was a tipping point,” she said.

Being able to learn her language taught her about her identity, helped her see that there was a place for her in higher education. After that, she started working in the prison’s education department and created informal Hawaiian culture classes for her peers.

“I full-force dedicated myself to my culture, to helping people,” Kaluhiokalani said.

All higher education in prison has been shown to reduce recidivism, but incorporating culture into college programs can empower incarcerated Native Hawaiians in different ways, said Ardis Eschenberg, chancellor of Windward Community College.

“Pushing back on the narratives of colonization and racism through Hawaiian studies,” she said, “fights the very systems that have led to our unjust incarceration outcomes and underscores the agency and value of our students in education, community and society.”

A Lack of Programs

Despite the benefits, there are few college programs in the United States that specifically target Indigenous people in prison. Windward Community College’s Pu‘uhonua program is an exception. It’s the only higher education institution in Hawaii offering culturally focused classes in prison, and one of only two offering degree programs.

Last fall, the college started an associate’s degree in Hawaiian studies at Halawa Correctional Facility, a medium-security men’s prison. The college was selected for a federal program known as Second Chance Pell, which has provided federal financial aid to people in prison on a pilot basis since 2015.

Eschenberg said that their focus on cultural education for incarcerated Indigenous students is part of Windward’s mission as a Native Hawaiian-serving institution. Almost 43% of their students on campus are Native Hawaiian, the highest in the University of Hawaii system.

For Native Hawaiians, learning about their culture is “validating them in a society where so much of Hawaiian existence has been invalidated in history,” Eschenberg said. And cultural education, she adds, benefits everyone.

“There’s robust research that shows that even outside of Native Hawaiian studies, ethnic studies courses in general helped to build resilience and success for students.”

Windward has also offered a psycho-social developmental studies certificate with coursework in sociology, psychology, and social work at the women’s prison since 2016. They offer Hawaiian studies classes as electives, and focus on the Hawaiian context for the other coursework, Eschenberg said.

In addition, Windward faculty teach Hawaiian music-related coursework, such as ukulele and slack-key guitar, at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility. The students earn both high school and college credit.

The college’s prison education program has primarily been funded by a five-year U.S. Education Department grant for Native Hawaiian-serving institutions that runs out this year. The expansion of Pell Grant eligibility for people in prison in July will help sustain the Pu‘uhonua program going forward. Eschenberg said that Pell dollars will help pay for instructor salaries for courses taught inside, but there are still costs not covered by federal financial aid.

Eschenberg had hoped that the Hawaii Legislature would approve a bill appropriating state funding for staff positions, such as academic counselors and coordinators, to support the Pu`uhonua program because those positions aren’t covered by Pell Grants. The bill stalled in the Legislature in April. Eschenberg said she’s currently applying for two federal grants to secure the necessary funding to keep the program running.

Elsewhere, other college-in-prison programs also have started to provide more opportunities for people to focus on their own cultures. In California, San Francisco State University last year created an ethnic studies certificate in state juvenile facilities. Portland State University’s prison education program also recently received a national grant to offer humanities courses focused on identity, including Indigenous Nations Studies, at Oregon’s only women’s prison.

While more programs in the United States are offering ethnic studies classes, few of those courses focus on Native people. Full degrees like Windward’s Hawaiian studies program specifically focused on Indigenous language and culture are even rarer, said Mneesha Gellman, political scientist and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, which offers a bachelor’s degree in Massachusetts. Gellman’s research focuses on Indigenous language access and education.

Much of the cultural learning that currently occurs in prisons is informal education offered through community groups, prison arts organizations, or classes organized by incarcerated people. Those are valuable, Gellman said, but more academic programs should incorporate culturally relevant curriculum into traditional degree pathways.

Having culturally relevant content makes higher education in general more relatable to Indigenous students, she added, so they are more likely to go after a degree in the first place. And that in turn helps them get the credentials they need to get jobs when they leave prison.

A Wake-Up Call

While Kaluhiokalani’s path through education has had plenty of detours, a connection to her culture has resonated throughout. When she thinks about her elementary school years, she remembers the kupuna – Native Hawaiian elders – who would visit her school to share their cultural knowledge.

“Everything that I learned, I held on to …I loved to sing, play the ukulele, and dance hula.”

Kaluhiokalani grew up in Honolulu less than a mile from Waikiki beach, where she learned to surf.

She associates Waikiki with her father, Montgomery “Buttons” Kaluhiokalani, who was one of the top young surfers in the United States in the 1970s. As a young teenager, she would hang out with him at the beach and smoke pot. Buttons, too, struggled with addiction throughout his life.

“I was a surfer, party animal, like my dad,” she said.

Kaluhiokalani was in and out of prison for most of her 20s and early 30s. Her father’s death in 2013 was a wake-up call, she said, for her to do things differently when she got out.

In 2017, Kaluhiokalani was released for the last time. A few years later, she ran into a woman she had been incarcerated with who encouraged her to enroll in college. She immediately signed up at Windward when she found out there was free tuition for Native Hawaiians and she could pursue an associate’s degree in Hawaiian studies. She wanted to use what she learned in her classes to use Native Hawaiian practices to help others in the criminal justice system.

The Hawaiian language class, and the ukulele in the prison yard, started Kaluhiokalani on a 20-year journey. She earned an associate’s degree last year from Windward and then, this month, she crossed the stage to receive her bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of Hawaii Manoa.

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This story was co-published by Honolulu Civil Beat.