When Jaelin Kauf zipped through moguls and jumps to win two world freestyle skiing titles this winter, she was far from the cowbells, gluhwein, chocolate and other slopeside paraphernalia that speckles historic European ski venues.

She skidded to a stop March 1 at the bottom of Kazakhstan’s Shymbulak Mountain Resort, a central Asian slope on the other side of the globe from her hometown of Alta, Wyoming. With two more races still on her international schedule, Kauf had just beaten Japan’s Rino Yanagimoto in the dual moguls event and secured the season’s crystal globe trophy for that discipline.

In besting Yanagimoto, she had also accumulated the most points for the season in both mogul events — the head-to-head duals and the single-skier competitions.

Her phone started buzzing.

“I was texting my parents … checking,” she said. “They said, ‘you also just secured the overall.’”

Kauf couldn’t believe it.

“Are you sure?” she texted back. “Are you positive? I don’t want to believe it or say anything if it’s not actually true.”

It was all true, but only half the season’s story. Within a couple of weeks, Kauf went on to Livigno, Italy, to win the freestyle single’s globe and then to fabled St. Moritz, Switzerland, to win the duals medal in the world Championships.

All those points, globes and medals might be as confusing to flatlanders as a mogul field is to an intermediate skier, but they shake out to simple truths.

Wyoming’s Jaelin Kauf, 28, dominates the freestyle moguls circuit. She won an unprecedented American crystal globe hat trick on the International Ski Federation tour this winter. She won the 2025 dual mogul world championship and is headed to next season’s Olympics in Cortina, Italy, where she hopes to add gold to her 2022 Beijing silver.

360s at the ’Ghee

Born in Vail, Colorado, to parents who skied on the pro mogul circuit, Kauf and her family moved to Alta and Grand Targhee Resort when she was three. Moguls — German for “small hills” — didn’t suit her at first. But she was determined to follow her older brother Skyler through the obstacles.

Then came mother Patti.

“My mom taught us how to do 360s off a catwalk or [by] just hitting road jumps or things around the mountain,” she said.

Skiers have long tested one another by racing down smooth courses and between gates set tightly for slalom and farther apart for giant slalom and downhill. Moguls were mine fields where grooming machines and racers didn’t venture.

That’s until the 1970s when Canadian Wayne Wong donned his white-rimmed mirror shades, got in the back seat and twisted his way through bumps in a new, expressive style — hot-dogging. Wong even incorporated a flip, the Wong-banger, into a bag of tricks that catapulted him onto posters found above many ski tuning benches across North America.

Today’s freestyle competition requires racing through manufactured snow moguls and over two kickers that enable skiers to perform aerial acrobatics. Judges rank competitors on time, style and form. In duals, skiers race side by side.

Kauf’s hometown hill, Grand Targhee, is blessed with snow and even moguls, but it’s not a mecca for budding aerialists. Kauf’s best simulation was on a trampoline. By the time she entered high school, the family had moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

That town is home to storied Howelsen Hill, a rare natural ski-jumping venue. Building on that heritage, the town also created one of the few American ski water ramps where athletes can practice aerial maneuvers in summer above a safe landing.

With aerials under her belt, Kauf in 2016 earned the rookie of the year title on the World Cup tour. Since then, she’s bumped and jumped her way to glory.

She has 16 World Cup victories, 50 World Cup podiums, a World Championships gold medal, seven U.S. Championship titles, and an Olympic silver medal. Along with Breezy Johnson, this year’s world champion downhill and team combined alpine champion who calls Jackson Hole Mountain Resort home, Kauf has again elevated Wyoming to the top of the world podium.

On to Cortina

At the culmination of Kauf’s season in St. Moritz, her family — mother Patti, stepfather Squeak Melehes, father Scott and stepmother Muffy Mead-Ferro — joined a smallish band of spectators and fans. Freestyle hasn’t captured the Europeans as completely as downhill and slalom, events in which stars bask in as much limelight as NFL quarterbacks do in the U.S. Nevertheless, “the locals or people free skiing would definitely stop and check out the event and see what’s going on,” Kauf said.

Regardless of the immediate audience, Kauf has been on the largest sports platform, including competing at two Olympics. In Beijing, even though COVID clouded her experience, the Olympic aura shone through.

“I got to walk out in opening ceremonies and perform on that stage,” she said. “It was still the Olympics.”

Kauf visited China again this year when Beidahu hosted a moguls event and where she found welcoming hosts. “They are very excited to have us there,” she said. “Everyone was really friendly and nice.”

She’s now focused on Cortina, which last hosted the winter Olympics in 1956. The coming games offer a double chance — individual and the duals medals.

“It’s not just focusing on that singles run,” she said. “You have to think about duals strategy as well.”

She’s eyeing “a very clean, zipper line right down the middle … hoping to bring in a bit higher degree of difficulty into my jumps.”

Wyoming will be there with her. Kauf wears “Deliver the Love,” on the back of her helmet, “Grand Targhee” on the front. In her gear bag, she said, she’s even got “a few brown and gold things.”

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April eases Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks into the hustle of summer, coaxing cyclists to dust off their steeds for car-free exploration of otherwise heavily trafficked scenic routes.

In Wyoming’s two federal reserves, workers plow a winter’s worth of snow from highways, then open the roads exclusively for bicyclists and pedestrians. And in Yellowstone, for a bison or 10.

“It’s a rite of spring,” said Jackson resident Anna Davis, who rode 28 miles along the base of the Teton Mountains with a small band of friends Sunday. “To be able to bike in that setting, under those peaks with no cars, there’s not a lot of things like it.”

The internal-combustion-engine-free window is brief, however. Yellowstone opened the 49 miles between West Yellowstone and Mammoth to cycling last weekend and will allow motorized vehicles April 18. In Grand Teton, the Teton Park Road will not open to cars until May.

It’s not only cyclists who enjoy the open roads. On sunny weekends, thousands flock to Grand Teton’s Taggart Lake Trailhead to stroll with the family, rollerblade or skateboard. The first mile is a gallimaufry spiced with every color and brand of outdoor togs.

“I just love the sort of carnival atmosphere,” Davis said of that popular starting point. “Everyone’s so excited to be there. It’s hectic, but everybody’s being nice.”

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In a battle over taxes and access to Wyoming’s wide open spaces, U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis voted against a measure that would have blocked the government from selling public land to help fund the federal budget.

Wyoming’s two Republican senators voted Friday evening against a budget amendment brought by Colorado’s Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper that would “prevent[…] the use of proceeds from public land sales to reduce the Federal deficit.”

Democrats and conservationists have decried the GOP’s openness to sell federal land to fund the budget, saying such a divestiture of beloved public assets would be used to offset tax cuts for the wealthy.

“Republicans are saying that they need to sell off your public lands to solve the housing crisis,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat who co-sponsored the failed budget amendment. “But we already have laws that allow for targeted land transfers for things like housing,” he said in an Instagram post.

Instead, Heinrich said, selling public land under budget reconciliation “means their goal isn’t housing — it’s selling your public land to pay for a tax cut for people like Elon Musk.”

Wyoming public land users should take note of their senators’ votes, said Jordan Schreiber, an Equality State native and director of government relations with The Wilderness Society.

“I think it’s a signal to Wyoming [that Barrasso and Lummis] are OK with selling off public lands for the benefit of America’s wealthiest people,” she said.

The Wyoming Outdoor Council also criticized the Wyoming senators, saying their “disappointing” votes “leave our public lands vulnerable in this budget reconciliation process.”

Their vote “completely ignores the vast benefits that our public lands in Wyoming provide for rural communities and our quality of life,” Alec Underwood, Outdoor Council program director, said in a statement.

Neither Lummis nor Barrasso responded to a request for comment Monday.

False hype?

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah called the anti-sales budget amendment “false hype” that would only restrict use of land-sales funds. “It doesn’t stop land sales,” he said, promoting the effort.

Opposition to federal land sales “restricts our ability to do anything, everything, develop, plan, build houses, which we desperately need, even to fund our schools, our search-and-rescue, our police services,” Lee said. “This is disgraceful,” he said of the amendment just before it failed Friday.

While Republicans say sales will resolve affordable housing problems in expensive real estate markets near national parks and other desirable locations, Democrats and conservationists see the move as more insidious.

That’s because Republicans have put federal land sales on a menu of items Congress could use to pay for the budget, according to a document obtained by Politico. The menu catalogues as a “savings” any action that “increases sale of federal land.” The value of such sales to the budget is “to be determined,” the document states.

“This vote [on the amendment] is a wake-up call and part of a concerning, larger campaign being waged against public lands at every level of government,” said Wilderness Society President Tracy Stone-Manning, who served as director of the Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden. In a statement, she ticked off other anti-conservation actions by the Trump administration, “including mass firings of land managers and executive orders that demand more drilling and mining.

“It appears,” she said, “their ultimate goal is to destroy our conservation heritage, totally contrary to what Americans actually value.”

That conservation heritage underpins Wyoming’s outdoor recreation and tourism economies, both of which are centered around the Yellowstone ecosystem. Tourism is Wyoming’s second-largest industry and generated $4.8 billion in 2023, employing 33,000 people, according to a University of Wyoming study.

Wyoming residents and lawmakers have supported the industry and public lands in a number of ways. This year, the Legislature defeated a resolution calling on Congress to begin the process of turning over all federal land in the state, except Yellowstone, to Wyoming.

In 2024, Wyoming lawmakers also authorized the sale of the square-mile Kelly Parcel of state school trust land in Grand Teton National Park for conservation, not for development or affordable housing.

The state itself, through Gov. Mark Gordon and Attorney General Bridget Hill, also refused to back the grossest claims in a fast-track Utah petition to the Supreme Court that sought to give the Beehive State 18.5 million of federal land. Wyoming’s official filing tepidly supported Utah but stopped short of demanding federal property.

The Supreme Court rejected Utah’s effort, dismissing strong Utah backers like Wyoming’s lone U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman and Wyoming Freedom Caucus members. Critics of Western states’ efforts to take over ownership of federal property say the states could never afford to manage the land and would end up selling it to private interests, destroying the public access to public lands enjoyed by all Americans.

Colorado’s Sen. Hickenlooper, who sponsored the anti-sale budget amendment that died Friday, said his measure would have “prevent[ed] this reckless fire sale of our campgrounds, our forests, our national treasures.”

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The Wyoming Supreme Court has dismissed a Teton County water-protection group’s challenge of a state-issued sewage permit for a glamping hotel in a polluted watershed.

The court ruled Tuesday that the nonprofit Protect our Water Jackson Hole doesn’t have standing — sufficient stake or investment in the issue — to challenge a Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality permit issued to the glamping owners. Although Protect Our Water is not the object of the DEQ decision, it claims to be affected by the development’s impacts, thereby allowing it to sue, its lawyers maintained.

The Supreme Court said some of POWJH’s arguments were vague — and that it hadn’t met other requirements — as the justices sided with a lower court that had dismissed the complaint.

“We are unable to conclude that POWJH has shown a tangible interest in the water quality in Fish Creek that is distinguishable from any other member of the general public,” Chief Justice Kate Fox wrote for the court.

The interests of POWJH and its supporters are real, the group’s executive director Phil Powers said. “We live in a beautiful single-source aquifer on the Snake River,” he said, “it’s fragile and we need to protect it.”

Protect Our Water claimed that DEQ had turned over its responsibility to issue permits to Teton County and therefore had no authority to approve sewerage for glamping operator Basecamp. The Utah business operates the Tammah fabric-covered dome hotel on state school trust land in the Fish Creek drainage west of the Snake River near the ski resort at Teton Village.

“Somehow Tammah managed to get a permit directly from the state,” Powers said. “That just skipped over the expectations we have in the county — we think that’s inappropriate.”

DEQ lists Fish Creek as a Class I waterway, meaning it should receive the highest level of protection. In 2020, the agency concluded the creek was impaired for the purposes of recreation — people fish there and float down the creek in innertubes — due to E. coli. The harmful bacteria can cause illness and death and is associated with sewage.

Drastic development threatens the watershed with other pollutants, Teton County officials say. The water-quality group has fought pollution in the area and seeks to help Teton County abate pollution.

“You can’t just run roughshod over that shallow aquifer,” Powers said, “and expect all of us to maintain clean drinking water and great recreation water as well.” 

To demonstrate its bona fides and interests, POWJH said it has spent approximately $164,000 for water quality monitoring in Fish Creek, another $88,000 for stakeholder involvement and some $250,000 for the Teton County Water Quality Master Plan. Protect Our Water “briefly alleges that its ‘supporters’ use Fish Creek ‘for a variety of recreational, scenic, and aesthetic purposes,’” the court said in summarizing the complaint.

That’s not enough

Without challenging POWJH’s assertions regarding its expenditures and supporters’ use of Fish Creek, the court rejected the group’s challenge. It based its decision on the “standing” issue and said the organization’s arguments were vague.

POWJH alleged “its water quality initiatives were intended to ‘improve’ the water quality in Fish Creek and … the activity authorized by the permit will harm that water quality,” the court wrote. But the group “has not described any improvements that have actually resulted from its efforts.

“It is difficult to tell exactly what ‘stakeholder involvement’ might mean or how that might improve water quality,” the decision reads. “Likewise, POWJH has done nothing to elaborate on ‘the Water Quality Master Plan process’ except to say that it ‘is underway in Teton County and has important implications for the Fish Creek watershed.’

“Just what these implications are is not apparent from POWJH’s submissions,” Chief Justice Fox wrote.

“Finally, though POWJH claims that its supporters use Fish Creek for certain recreational purposes, it does not identify them, allege that those supporters are formally affiliated with POWJH, or make any attempt to claim standing through any of its members or affiliates,” the opinion reads.

The group doesn’t explain how pollution will hinder its efforts to monitor water quality, involve stakeholders and work on a water quality master plan with Teton County, the decision said. Those were key elements in POWJH’s arguments.

Protect Our Water “has not sufficiently described its three listed activities so that even a favorable reading of the complaint could support a conclusion that those particular activities would become more expensive due to a reduction in water quality,” Fox wrote.

The Basecamp/Tammah glamping hotel has drawn significant opposition in Teton County ever since 2020, when the Legislature targeted state land in wealthy and expensive Jackson-area for revenue-generating development. Opponents object to a lax oversight and permitting, changing development sideboards and other problems at the development along a scenic road.

Basecamp and Tammah have repeatedly said they have abided by all conditions required in their lease of the state property.

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The 2.2-million-acre Wind River Indian Reservation encompasses frothy rivers and wild mountains, alpine lakes, buffalo herds and rich cultural heritage. The kind of outdoor attractions, in other words, that many western communities leverage to fuel tourism. 

Just look at  Lander, Thermopolis, Jackson and Dubois, said Paul Huberty, executive director of the Wind River Development Fund. 

“Everybody around us has capitalized on the natural resources here, and of course, all of those areas used to be part of the reservation,” Huberty said. “So we know it works.”

The Wind River Development Fund and others on the reservation are planning to undertake several projects aimed at making outdoor recreation more robust and accessible — both for tribal residents and for tourists who flock to nearby destinations to experience iconic landscapes and wildlife. This year, the state is chipping in to help make that happen.

The lion’s share of 2025 Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Program grants will go to projects on the Wind River Reservation. Of 15 projects receiving a total of $17.8 million in funding, seven are on the reservation and earmarked for $4.4 million. The Wind River Development Fund and its partners were awarded six of those. 

The state grants dovetail with a major reservation redevelopment project already under way. Last August, the Development Fund was one of six awardees of the federal “Recompete” pilot grant program, which targets areas where prime-age (25-54) employment significantly trails the national average. That hefty award comes with $36 million for eight job-creating projects. 

“This is part of a bigger vision for the reservation,” Huberty said of the outdoor-recreation projects. That broader vision encompasses workforce training initiatives to a local farm project and the construction of an ecotourism complex — all aimed at nurturing economic vitality in a place where economic markers place it well behind the rest of the state. The 2022 per capita income in Fort Washakie, for example, was $17,814, according to Huberty — significantly below the statewide per capita income of $76,440 and in a different world entirely from Teton County’s $418,669.

Development Fund Chief Operating Officer Director Erika Yarber, who is Northern Arapaho, considers generations — both past and future — when thinking about the work ahead. 

“Our ancestors didn’t go through what they went through for us just to settle for mediocrity like we are,” she said. “We are meant to thrive in our environment and not just survive any longer.”

Projects 

Even though the reservation is vast, Huberty said, it’s been carved up over the years, and much of it is held in trust by the federal government. “So it’s not like you can do whatever you want with it.”

Despite those constraints, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to developing outdoor recreation, he said. The state grants awarded to the Wind River Development Fund are as follows:

• $791,000 for trailheads at Mosquito Park, Washakie Park and St. Lawrence Basin in the Wind River Range. The project will install signage and tribal permit kiosks and construct or upgrade picnic areas, parking, existing buildings and vault restrooms. Right now, a lack of signs makes it hard for users to even find these spots, Yarber said. “A lot of the trails are completely grown over,” she said. “It’s pretty rugged terrain.” 
• $1.2 million for improvements at Bull Lake, Dinwoody Lake, Moccasin Lake and Ray Lake. This project will construct or upgrade kiosks, restrooms, boat ramps, picnic areas and pavilion-type structures. 
• $508,000 for the Fort Washakie powwow grounds to enhance the powwow arbor — the circular structure used to hold cultural events. 
• $1.1 million for three Eastern Shoshone playgrounds, which are key elements of a larger outdoor sports project. The project will include an ADA playground, an elder playground with equipment meant to help older people move and a children’s playground. Restrooms and tables also are included.
• $78,000 for outdoor sports to rehabilitate a baseball field in Fort Washakie that has fallen into disrepair. 
• $333,000 for the Tribal Buffalo Initiative. This project will construct a pavilion-type outdoor education center with a concrete base, picnic tables, signage and a public restroom at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative — a tribal buffalo restoration project. The goal is to enable the initiative, which is located on Highway 26 on the way to Yellowstone, to be able to host tribal ceremonies, celebrations, visitors and school groups. 

The final state outdoor recreation grant awarded for a reservation project earmarks $410,000 for the Northern Arapaho Tribe for improvements to its Ethete powwow arbor. 

Complementary 

The state grants are meant to invest in outdoor-based tourism in a way that helps spread out visitor impacts across the state. The growing industry generated $2.2 billion and supported 15,798 jobs in Wyoming in 2023, according to federal data. 

The bulk of that tourism is in northwestern Wyoming. In 2024, Yellowstone National Park tallied its second-highest annual visitation at 4.7 million. The Wind River Indian Reservation sits just southeast of the park. Creating nicer visitor amenities could help siphon off some of those visitors and others who come through Fremont County by giving them a reason to stop. 

“We know that $167 million comes to Fremont County during tourist season,” said Yarber, who also sits on the Wind River Visitors Council. “And we sit here in our windows and just watch campers and people come and want to have an experience. And there’s just nowhere [on the reservation] for them to spend their money.”

The state grants aim to complement and support the larger work of the federal Recompete Grant. That federal package includes $9.75 million to build a 14,000-square-foot buffalo center for the Tribal Buffalo Initiative. Another component is $6.5 million to construct a wildlife museum and new ecotourism center for the Tribal Fish and Game office in Fort Washakie. A workforce development component will assist community members with attaining certifications that include trail building, while a wellness component aims to incentivize healthier communities. 

Outdoor recreation ties into all of those, Yarber and Huberty said. 

While the Development Fund was the lead applicant for the grants, Yarber and Huberty stressed that community organizations are co-applicants for individual projects. Partners include the Tribal Buffalo Initiative, Eastern Shoshone Tribe, Wind River Food Sovereignty Project and Central Wyoming College.

“This is not just us, this is the community coming together,” Huberty said. “There’s no way we could do this all on our own, and we wouldn’t want to.”

Federal uncertainties?

The vision is ambitious, and the parties have a lot of work to do. Wind River Development Fund and partners will be hiring soon for the outdoor recreation projects, though crews won’t be able to get into mountainous areas for trail work until summer. Those state grants are supposed to be finished by the end of 2026.

The reservation will never be as popular as a national park, and nobody wants that. But the initiatives can help not only create but sustain economic activity, Huberty and Yarber said. 

While there’s uncertainty with federal grants amid funding freezes and job cuts propelled by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts, Huberty said, his organization hasn’t seen any indication of funding decreases. Still, they are proceeding with caution. 

“We were just about to take off running,” Huberty said. “And instead what we’re going to do is just, walk.”

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the name of Wyoming’s 2025 outdoor recreation grant program. -Ed.

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The American climbers sent the bad news the fastest way they could. In this instance 62 years ago today, it was “carried by runner.”

From Everest’s basecamp, where the mountaineers were preparing to climb the world’s highest peak, a Nepali courier set off at a trot. He carried a message as he wended his way across the fractured detritus below the Khumbu Glacier. His calloused feet padded down the shadowed valley where gravity and time wear the mountain’s granite, gneiss and limestone.

He ran down trails worn smooth by a million soles, following the Lobuche Kosi and Imja Kosi rivers that mill boulders into flour. He jogged by mani stones, past rope bridges, loped by the storied Sherpa villages of Lobuche, Pheriche and Dingboche.

In about 15 miles, the messenger climbed out of the shadows to the hillside hamlet of Tengboche, a holy crossroads between Nepal’s capital Kathmandu and Qomolangma, Sagarmatha — Everest. As the courier arrived, Jackson Hole alpinist David Dornan was inhaling the clear Himalayan air, perhaps scented by a Sherpa’s yak-dung fire or incense drifting from the Tengboche Monastery.

Dornan was on an expedition to the Sherpa homeland, an expedition separate from the American climbers’. He was building a school and waterworks with Sir Edmund Hillary who, with Tenzing Norgay, had been the first to climb Everest 10 years earlier in 1953.

But seven of the 19 Americans who were just up-valley from Tengboche had worked professionally in Wyoming’s Teton Range. That was Jackson Hole native Dornan’s back yard, and Dornan knew and had worked with a bunch of them.

The messenger arrived apace at Tengboche, an ethereal world ornamented with Tibetan totems, a world almost touching the heavens. Here temple lions with the eyes of God guard the monastery entrance. A golden spire juts from a bedazzling white stupa. Dozens of prayer flags flutter in the breeze. Inside the lamasery, saffron-robed monks and devotees spin prayer wheels that hold scrolls of Tibetan-script mantras.

In this rare aura, Dornan scanned the top of the world.

“It was a clear, beautiful day, and I was just totally absorbed looking at the mountains and being where I was,” Dornan said. Then came the runner’s dispatch.

“An American had been killed.”

Which American?

But which American?

There were 19. Seven of them had climbed professionally in the Tetons, as had Dornan, a mountain guide with the Exum guide service.

Was it a Teton veteran? Was it Barry Corbet, the handsome Dartmouth dropout and skier; Willi Unsoeld, the gregarious Peace Corps volunteer who would sprout a national forest of a beard, or Jake Breitenbach, the tow-headed mountaineer who wore his alpine beanie at a rakish angle?

Could it be Dick Pownall, or David Dingman, two more of Dornan’s fellow Exum guides from the Tetons? It could be Richard Emerson, Grand Teton National Park’s chief climbing ranger. Or possibly Tom Hornbein, a Colorado climber, ranger and anesthesiologist who worked with search-and-rescue teams at Grand Teton one summer and had designed the expedition’s oxygen masks.

“I had a rare intuition,” Dornan said. “Jake did have some history of bad luck; he was never able to summit Mount Owen, for example. Once guiding the Grand Teton, he was hit by lightning, “actually knocked out,” Dornan said. “There were other stories where the mountain turned against him.”

“I instinctively knew,” Dornan said, “that it was Jake.”

John Edgar Breitenbach was only 27 when a tower of ice collapsed and entombed his body among the crevasses of the Khumbu Glacier on the first climbing day of the American’s 1963 expedition to Everest. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1935, he graduated from Oregon State College, as it was then known, majoring in mathematics.

Heaven in Jackson Hole

He moved to the climbing crucible of Jackson Hole in the mid 1950s and guided clients up the 13,775-foot high Grand Teton in the summer. There, he met and married Mary Louise McGraw, a transplant from the East Coast. She was Lou to those who knew her, Mary Louise McGraw Breitenbach, M.Ed., of Harvard, to the rest of the world.

“He was blonde and beautiful and adventuresome, and so [Lou] loved all those things about him,” said Joseph Piccoli, Lou Breitenbach’s second husband.

In the Jackson Hole winter, Breitenbach was one of a corps of young skiers and alpinists establishing a ski hub at the base of Snow King Mountain that they hoped would sustain a year-round life in the mountains. Corbet had built the A-frame Alphorn Lodge at the base of the “Town Hill” and ran it with his wife Muffy Moore. Lou Breitenbach ran a restaurant, the White Cupboard, next door. Jake Breitenbach bought and operated a ski shop nearby. “We were all pretty young and trying to find our way,” Moore said.

In a cowboy town, the alpinists with their sun glasses and ski sweaters stood out. “I was impressed with these guys,” said Rod Newcomb, who arrived in Jackson Hole around that time and eventually became a guide and co-owner of the Exum guide service. One of Breitenbach’s gang would walk around town in an overstuffed expedition jacket from a groundbreaking climb of Denali, Newcomb said, “and everybody knew who he was.”

Breitenbach himself “was humorous and inventive and had a gaiety of spirit,” said Corbet’s wife Moore. “He was just a delightful person to be around,” even as he fended off depression, something he did best by climbing a mountain.

The Jackson Hole cadre skied where nobody had skied, camped in the snow on extended alpine traverses and probed the corners of the Teton range in summer. “What a gift that was,” Moore said, “having your own personal paradise to spend the winter months in. “Jackson in those years really was just heaven. Young as we were, we even recognized that at the time.

“And then Everest came along,” she said, “and kind of ended it all.”

What Jake wanted

The American mountaineers regrouped on the Khumbu Glacier after Breitenbach died on March 23, 1963.

“These things happen instantaneously,” Corbet said in a taped message he made at the 18,000-foot base camp 10 days after Breitenbach’s death. “And while we were all stunned for a couple of days, we’ve all come back, and we’re doing battle with the mountain again.”

The team would forge on, “just as Jake would have wanted us to,” Corbet said.

Forge on they did, as plotted by expedition leader Norman Dyhrenfurth, a Swiss-American mountaineer who had assembled the team and its bankroll. Dyhrenfurth secured key National Geographic backing only after traveling to Jackson Hole to hand pick team members from the Tetons. At the time, the range was one of a handful of American climbing centers, a town with a mountaineering colony.

“There was a harmonic convergence between a Swiss-American climber [Dyhrenfurth], this sweet spot of climbing here [in the Tetons] and the possibility that America could actually head off to Everest,” said Brot Coburn, a Wilson resident, Nepal historian and author of “The Vast Unknown: America’s First Ascent of Everest.”

The peak had only been climbed once, perhaps twice before (a Chinese ascent was contested). Dyhrenfurth was bent on putting an American on top, whatever logistics it took.

“So Norman came to the Tetons and he saw the right stuff — Willi Unsoeld, Dick Pownall, Barry Corbet and Jake Breitenbach,” Coburn said, ticking off some of the Teton climbers who would join the team.

“These were scrappy, energetic, innovative climbers. They were more than ready and willing to take on challenges.”

Dyhrenfurth, however, knew where the butter was on his sliced American bread. Above all, he needed a photograph of an American on the top of the world, perhaps hoisting an ice axe with a flag, maybe even a National Geographic banner. That image was best secured by following Hillary and Tenzing’s 1953 line up Everest’s South Col route.

Although that route has little rock climbing, there’s a corniced ridge near the top and a stinger in the tail — the near vertical Hillary Step a snowball’s throw below the summit. Plus, it’s bitterly cold, there’s scant air to breathe and what oxygen is available rips past in the jet stream.

Towering Jim Whittaker, a Seattle volcano climber, was among the Dyhrenfurth contingent and with Sherpa Nawang Gombu became the leader’s choice for the first summit team. Despite the distinction an Everest ascent held, Teton climbers were decidedly unexcited about following Hillary and Norgay’s 10-year-old footsteps.

Beatnicks on belay

Here’s maybe why.

“The young Teton climbers were, perhaps as a function of their youth, their adventuresomeness and their audacity, also intrigued by some of the cultural changes that were just beginning to happen at that time,” Coburn said. “During that period, beatnik sensibilities and creativity was leading into anti-establishment types of thinking, and definitely, these Teton climbers had that.

“They knew that they were different from the rest of straight 1950s American culture,” Coburn said. “They knew they were outliers, almost outlaws in a way, and so they differed from the approach of the National Geographic and the volcanos climbers, rather fundamentally.”

The Teton group also had “mixed mountaineering” skills, Coburn said. They took on, professionally, steep rock bands and serrated ridges, snow gullies walled by granite faces, glaciers and their deadly crevasses. They handled rucksacks of gear — ropes, ice axes, carabiners, pitons, crampons.

Importantly, they hauled those loads to untrammeled places. “They were knocking off new routes like crazy,” Coburn said. They yearned to explore.

On the weeks-long hike into Everest’s base camp, rebellious chatter, especially among what Unsoeld called the Teton Tribe, began. As they approached Everest, one mountain feature looked strikingly familiar. Unsoeld saw the Grand Teton, Hornbein saw Colorado’s Longs Peak, albeit on a larger scale.

This rocky spine jutted above the expedition’s planned 21,350-foot-high advanced base camp. A combination of snowfields, ramps, a huge couloir and an unavoidable Yellow Band of rock — all unexplored mountain — rose 7,678 feet to the summit.

Unsoeld and Hornbein “just had this bug,” said Renny Jackson, Teton guidebook author and former Teton Park climbing ranger, “‘Let’s go check something else out.’”

“They were out for a new experience, and that’s definitely why they were up for the West Ridge,” former Exum owner Newcomb said. “It had never been climbed. It would be a first ascent.”

“We wanted to make America proud and [show we] were as good as the Europeans,” Dornan said of the expedition. “For the first time, they had to start respecting American climbers.”

The West Ridge was a plumb, albeit high on the tree. Nevermind that the climb would require trespassing into China during the heat of the Cold War. The Teton climbers were social bandits in any case. And who would be watching?

Wyoming’s outsized role

On May 1, the mismatched “big Jim and little Gombu,” made good on their Mutt-and-Jeff diversities and climbed Hillary and Tenzing’s South Col route to the 29,028-foot summit [Everest’s elevation is refined somewhat regularly]. Now the West Ridgers were able to claw supplies to their side of the mountain to support their audacious plot, an effort that had caused friction.

“They were denied the resources that they needed,” Dornan said, “not only in personnel, but supplies. It was nasty.”

They spent weeks ferrying loads to a high camp where two of them would climb the last of the West Ridge, meet a second American South Col team on the top, and descend that easier side of the mountain. It would be the first traverse of the peak.

Remarkably, the first ascent of Everest’s West Ridge would be an almost exclusive endeavor of climbers who had been Teton pros. Among those, Breitenbach was gone and Teton guide Pownall, “very beat up,” from the icefall collapse.

But Teton ranger Emerson hauled loads up the route. Exum guide Dingman was there, too, with Corbet, Unsoeld and Hornbein. Fifteen Sherpas lent heavy support. At Corbet’s insistence, Unsoeld and Hornbein would be the West Ridge summit team.

Corbet, perhaps the strongest of the lot, said later his hardest day in the mountains was when he humped a load up through the huge gash, later named the Hornbein Couloir, to Unsoeld and Hornbein’s high camp 5W at an elevation of 27,250 feet. The supply team left the tented summit pair to spend a night sleeping with oxygen.

On May 22, Unsoeld and Hornbein set off, abandoning their camp for a one-way journey. “The going was a wonderful pleasure,” Hornbein wrote in “Everest, The West Ridge,” “almost like a day in the Rockies.” They summited at 6:30 p.m. and found the footprints of Barry Bishop and Lute Jerstad who had been there hours before. Lower down the South Col route, the four bivouacked for the night in the black void.

The groundbreaking effort cost. National Geographic photographer Bishop lost toes to frostbite. It’s said that Unsoeld also lost nine, but that’s inaccurate. After they came off, he preserved them in a jar and would show them off to his students.

Om mani padme hum

“When someone you know dies young, they remain frozen in time in your memory,” a climber with the social-media handle “rgold,”  wrote about Breitenbach on a climbing thread. “He remains forever a golden-haired boy with a smile that could light up the countryside.”

To the world, Breitenbach would always be as the camera caught him, tossing what Coburn called “a mischievous shock of Dennis the Menace blond hair,” drawing elegantly on a cigarette, dashing around a mountain town in Teton toggery behind the wheel of a new Volvo.

Those images stop on March 23, 1963, when Breitenbach’s partners cut his rope where the twisted nylon disappeared under tons of ice. It was the end of a star-crossed affair with the mountains. From that time, the Khumbu Glacier ground unsentimentally on. Seven years later, in 1970, the Khumbu disgorged Breitenbach’s remains.

“There wasn’t much to speak of,” Piccoli said. “They identified him from his clothing.”

Bishop went to Nepal and buried Breitenbach above Tengboche.

Meantime, Lou Breitenbach packed a box of memorabilia including Jake’s letters, condolence notes from around Wyoming and other things and shipped them to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. More recently, the family of Breitenbach’s friend, Frank Ewing, pulled a cache of about 500 Breitenbach slides from a closet and revived tales of the golden years.

Forty years after Breitenbach’s death, Piccoli convinced Lou Breitenbach to leave Jackson Hole and visit Tengboche. It wasn’t an easy trek. Lou, 66 at the time, battled dysentery, but soldiered on. She passed paddy and pagoda, even a trailside mystic who told her she would live to 83, to arrive at the Buddhist friary.

“She made it all the way to a puja ceremony performed by the monks at the monastery,” Piccoli said. There, she heard the drone of long Tibetan horns, the auspicious ring of Tingsha cymbals, the lamas deep-throated incantations.

“They were burning incense and setting up rice cakes and all kinds of stuff and reading from the scriptures,” Piccoli said. “It was an amazing little ceremony.”

Lou Breitenbach strived to live to her 84th birthday but died in Jackson Hole in 2020, two weeks shy of it. Just as the trailside soothsayer said. But she had managed to visit Jake’s grave, just above the monastery and look down on the site where Jake penned his last letter to her.

“Thyanboche, March 14, 1963,” he scrawled.

He described the carefree path of an adventurous young man in an exotic milieu that the world would soon wash over. A few days before, down the trail at Namche Bazaar, “it turned into quite a night for three of us who ended up eating wild goat and drinking chang in some Sherpa’s house … lots and lots of very good chang.”

Breitenbach looked toward the mountain, too.

“We’ve been divided into two groups now – one for the South Col and the other for an attempt on the West Ridge,” Breitenbach wrote. “Barry [Corbet] and I are both on the West Ridge and happy about it.

“The fact that we’re going to try the West Ridge is definite, but is still not to be public knowledge,” the letter reads. “Attempting this route reduces our chance of climbing the mountain at all and makes it most unlikely that any of us going on the West Ridge will see the summit. Nevertheless, the opportunity of trying a new route cannot be passed up.”

He closed after five pages as the Himalaya became moody.

“The afternoon clouds are coming up now,” Breitenbach wrote. “I probably won’t have another chance to write until base camp. I miss you very much – Love, Jake.”

A standard 4 by 9 1/2 inch envelope, addressed to Mrs. J.E. Breitenbach and marked with red, white and blue airmail slashes around its edges carried the letter to the United States. A line drawing of Mount Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse graces the envelope’s bottom, right corner. “American Mount Everest Expedition 1963” is printed on the envelope in three places. “Hotel Royal, Kathmandu, Nepal” is the return address.

Another inscription is stamped at an angle.

“CARRIED BY RUNNER”

Sources: American Alpine Journal; Jackson Hole News&Guide; The Breitenbach Collection at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; James Ramsey Ullman’s, “Americans on Everest,” and other historical material.

The caption in the photograph of the Teton alpinists and skiers has been corrected to identify John Harrington, not Neal Rafferty, next to Pete Sinclair. Also, there were no photograph of Breitenbach taken after March 23, 1963, not May 23 as originally published — Ed.

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The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver has backed four hunters sued by a wealthy ranch owner for corner crossing on Carbon County’s Elk Mountain, preserving public access to millions of acres of federal property.

A three-judge panel ruled Tuesday that a Wyoming federal judge concluded correctly when he said that Fred Eshelman, the owner of the Elk Mountain Ranch, could not block four Missouri men from passing through the airspace of his property when they stepped from one piece of BLM land to another, without touching Eshelman’s land.

Corner crossing involves stepping from one piece of public land to another at the common corner with two pieces of private property — without touching the private land. While it stands to affect much of the American West, the practice has particular resonance in southern Wyoming where millions of acres are laid out in a “checkerboard” of alternating public and private mile-square sections. 

By blocking passage at such corners, whether by physical obstruction or threats or trespass citations issued by law enforcement, private landowners are able to enjoy exclusive access to public land.

Eshelman sued the hunters in 2022 after they corner crossed to hunt elk and deer on federal land enmeshed in his 22,045-acre ranch.

The law doesn’t allow private landowners to prevent others from corner crossing in the checkerboard area of Wyoming — as long as they do not touch the private property — Wyoming Chief U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl ruled in 2023. Federal appellate judges David M. Ebel, Timothy M. Tymkovich and Nancy Louise Moritz unanimously sided with Skavdahl’s ruling in the just-concluded appeal.

In reaching their decision, the judges relied on case law and the Unlawful Inclosures Act of 1885, which prohibits blocking access in such situations.

“The western checkerboard and UIA reflect a storied period of our history,” Tymkovich wrote. “Whatever the UIA’s merits today, it—and the case law interpreting it—remain good federal law.” 

“Applying that law here, [Eshelman’s landholding company] Iron Bar cannot implement a program which has the effect of ‘deny[ing] access to [federal] public lands for lawful purposes[.]’” he wrote. “So the district court was correct to hold that the Hunters could corner-cross as long as they did not physically touch Iron Bar’s land.”

The case has implications not only for the 2.4 million acres of “corner-locked” land in Wyoming, but also for 8.3 million acres across the West.

This is a breaking news story and may be updated – Ed.

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A Utah-based hydroelectric company wants to build another reservoir above Seminoe Reservoir to produce bursts of energy when demand is high, promising to bring tax revenue and jobs to a rural part of central Wyoming. Fish and wildlife groups and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, however, worry the project threatens the healthiest bighorn sheep herd in the state and the Miracle Mile, a world-class, blue-ribbon fishery. 

“I’m looking at this with a lot of caution, because waters with that quality of a fishery aren’t that common anywhere in the world,” said Matt Hahn, Game and Fish’s Casper fisheries supervisor. “Any activity that could jeopardize the quality and sustainability of the fishery, we should be pretty cognizant of and should proceed with caution on.”

The project would include a 13,400-acre-foot reservoir, a complicated tunnel system, new transmission lines, an underground powerhouse, and, at least during construction, two concrete mixing facilities. 

The company, called rPlus Energies, says the project could raise $60 million to $70 million in sales tax revenue, create up to 500 jobs during construction and provide $8 million to $9 million in annual property tax revenue and 35 full-time jobs during operation. Plans have been underway since 2019, and the latest round of public comment for the project’s permit through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ends Friday. 

Water as a battery

At its most basic, the Seminoe Pumped Storage project acts as energy storage. The company would use excess energy when production is high and demand is low to pump water uphill to fill a secondary reservoir where it would sit until energy is scarce and demand is high, at which point the water would rush down the tunnels through a power station and back into Seminoe Reservoir, generating up to 900 megawatts of power. As a comparison, the Dave Johnston Power plant east of Casper also produces 900 megawatts of power, albeit continuously. 

At its highest capacity, the system could generate power for up to 12 hours before requiring about 14 hours to refill. It could also produce less power for a longer period, said Lars Dorr, program manager for rPlus Energies. The concept is similar to lithium-ion batteries, only Matthew Shapiro, the company’s managing director of hydro strategy, says a pumped storage project can last up to 100 years and doesn’t degrade in its efficiency and capacity like batteries. 

“It provides a lot of flexibility to the grid to match what other generation sources are doing at that moment,” Shapiro said. “So that’s why it’s been a popular tool around the world for the past 100 years.”

Pumped storage projects were common across the country, used as a way to take excess coal or nuclear electricity generated, say, at night, and store it for peak daytime demand. They fell out of popularity, however, with the advent of more consistent natural gas energy. The last pumped storage project was built in 1995, and none exist in Wyoming. They’re finding favor once again as a way to take excess solar or wind energy and save it for high-demand periods and meet the growing need for power.

rPlus Hydro, the subsidiary in charge of the Seminoe project, formed in 2019 from a partnership between rPlus Energies and Gridflex Energy and has a dozen projects underway across the western U.S. and Kentucky. The Seminoe project would be one of its first, and it’s an ideal location because of its proximity to existing transmission and because there is already an existing reservoir, which means the company would not need to build two. 

Estimates show the project could run the company roughly $3 billion to build. Shapiro does not know if the energy would stay in Wyoming or leave the state as the company is still looking for potential buyers. 

Fish and wildlife concerns

Using Seminoe Reservoir as one of the two reservoirs in the system is more affordable. However, open-loop systems, as they’re called, come with the possibility for more environmental issues, according to a 2020 U.S. Department of Energy report.

Closed-loop pumped storage systems are often built away from primary waterways and run water back and forth between two reservoirs. Open-loop reservoirs, on the other hand, run water from an existing reservoir. That creates issues for what could be sucked up into the upper reservoir as well as the force of water coming back down into Seminoe itself.  

“The estimates of fish entrainment during pumping cycles, especially for walleye, could result in a loss of this wild fishery,” the Game and Fish Department wrote in formal comments about the project. 

Estimates from the company predict 5.21 walleye could be entrained in the system each hour, which Game and Fish estimates could be about 23,770 walleye per year, more than 5.7 times the annual catch rate by anglers.

The department’s biggest concern, however, is for the Miracle Mile, a stretch of water sometimes 15 miles long below Seminoe and Kortes dams that attracts thousands of anglers from around the world every year to catch trophy rainbow and brown trout. 

While only about 10,000 acre-feet would flow between the two reservoirs, and Seminoe Reservoir’s capacity is more than 1 million acre-feet, the second reservoir would remove water from, and dump water into, Seminoe Canyon. The canyon is a much narrower area, and 10,000-acre feet could be roughly the total volume of water in the canyon during dry periods, Game and Fish’s comments continued. 

In the peak of summer, lakes typically stratify, with cooler water on the bottom and warmer water on the top. Flushing water in and out of the canyon would create a “tidal-like ebb and flow of water” that would mix those water levels and “significantly increase the temperature” of water flowing out of Seminoe. 

Hahn and the Wyoming chapter of Trout Unlimited worry the project might threaten the viability of the Miracle Mile. The fishery exists because water flows from the bottom of Seminoe Reservoir at a consistent temperature throughout the year. Raise that temperature by a couple degrees, and the impact, especially in the summer on heat sensitive trout, could be dire. 

After Game and Fish submitted its comments, rPlus Hydro coordinated with Wyoming’s Department of Environmental Quality to run models showing there would be minimal impacts. 

Patrick Harrington, Wyoming Trout Unlimited’s government relations director, worries that if there are impacts such as temperature changes or water quality issues, they would be difficult, if not impossible, to mitigate. 

“How do you do adaptive management if you start to lose a fish population?” he asked. “How do you adaptively manage if something happens to the fishery and people can’t guide anymore?”

The fishing group held a recent informational session and about 90 people attended to learn what this could mean for the river.

But impacts extend beyond fishing. The site sits in the middle of the Ferris-Seminoe bighorn sheep herd’s winter range. The herd is also the only disease-free bighorn sheep population in the state, said Katie Cheesbrough, the Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation’s executive director.

The project itself will cover about 1,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Reclamation land. And while sheep can move around, Cheesbrough said five years of construction is a long time for bighorn sheep to be displaced by heavy traffic and dust. 

“There’s disturbance and then there’s chronic disturbance that displaces sheep from their habitat,” she said. “It’s not even about the food and habitat but about what a loss of food and habitat means for their susceptibility to disease.”

Harrington and Cheesbrough ask anyone with thoughts to submit their comments to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before public comment ends Friday. They hope FERC requires the company to complete a thorough environmental impact statement on the project, and Shapiro said he anticipates FERC will require one.

“The additional transparency of an EIS and additional processes with an EIS are what we’re after, so there’s an open public process to engage in the project,” said Harrington. “It keeps the conversation going.”

Shapiro and Dorr both encouraged people to reach out with questions and concerns. If approved, the company hopes to begin construction by 2027 and be operational by 2032. 

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UPDATE: Devils Tower announced in a March 14 Facebook post that the limited hours will only be in place until March 30. After that, hours will return to around the clock. -Ed.

Devils Tower National Monument will slash hours of operation from 24/7 to daytime only, the park announced Tuesday. 

Starting Thursday, the popular destination in northeast Wyoming will be open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., instead of around-the-clock. The park did not cite explanations behind the change, but social media users were quick to point to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s recent mass firings of federal workers, which has resulted in untold job losses in Wyoming. 

“We apologize for any inconvenience,” the park’s Facebook post said. Monument Superintendent Doug Crossen forwarded staff-cut-related questions from WyoFile to the National Park Service’s press team in Washington, D.C., which has been handling media inquiries since Trump took office. The office didn’t respond by publication time.

The Belle Fourche Campground at Devils Tower is currently closed for the winter. It is scheduled to open May 16 and there are currently no anticipated changes to its operating schedule, Crossen told WyoFile.

The reduction appears to be an example of the harmful impacts DOGE critics warned will follow the mass firing of workers at federal land-management agencies like the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. In Wyoming, where nearly 50% of the land is public, they say, layoffs threaten everything from outdoor recreation opportunities to wildlife programs and the fabric of local communities. 

“Wyoming’s outdoor industry is built on strong partnerships with federal agencies that provide essential infrastructure, permitting, and land management,” the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Business Alliance said in a February press release. “A diminished federal workforce compromises public safety and access, restricts amenities, and harms Wyoming’s iconic landscapes.”

Wyoming icon 

Devils Tower, which is known as Bear Lodge in Indigenous communities, rises 867 feet from the grassland and ponderosa forests and has a large summit of about 1.5 acres. It’s the world’s largest example of columnar jointing — a geologic phenomenon that creates hexagonal columns. The size and incongruity of the igneous tower make it a landmark that has long struck wonder in humans, and it’s so popular an emblem for Wyoming that it’s been featured on the state license plate. 

The park sits about 10 miles south of the small town of Hulett, and is accessible by a single road, Highway 24. It attracts climbers, as well as hikers, campers and sight-seers. 

Numbers wise, it’s not nearly as popular as Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park, but visitations have been on the rise. The park recorded 540,890 visitations in 2024, a 27% increase over 2020. 

Public lands advocates have warned that visitors to Wyoming’s forests and parks could see negative impacts from the federal cuts. The Trump administration is planning to terminate National Park Service leases and shutter 34 offices across the country that function as visitor centers, law enforcement offices, museums and hubs for critical park services, according to the National Parks Conservation Association.

This story has been updated with information on the summer campground operations. -Ed.

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Wyomingites like their public land. They hunt pronghorn in Shirley Basin’s high desert sagebrush, ogle exploding geysers in Yellowstone National Park, ride horses on trails cut through the Bighorn National Forest and hike among wind-carved spires in the Red Desert’s Adobe Town. 

And nearly 60% of Wyoming residents oppose giving the state control over federal public lands, including national forests, national wildlife refuges and national parks, according to a recent poll out of Colorado College’s State of the Rockies Project.

The poll is considered a gold standard of surveys examining the opinions of western voters, and its results ring true on the ground. Almost 90% of respondents said they visited federal public lands in the last year. One-third of Wyomingites visited public land more than 20 times in the last year, more than any other state and obvious to anyone pulling into a crowded national forest campground in the summer. 

But the results come amid renewed efforts to cull federal land. Wyoming lawmakers recently proposed and debated bills attempting to prevent the federal government from owning more land and even a resolution demanding the feds cede all public land outside Yellowstone National Park to the state. 

If a majority of Wyomingites like public lands, why do lawmakers continue to propose ways to wrest those lands from the feds? 

Likely due to a whole host of reasons, observers say, from low voter turnout to an oversimplified public lands messaging campaign. Some fear threats to public lands will only get worse as on-the-ground biologists, trail crews and other federal employees continue losing their jobs to the Trump administration’s cuts, lawmakers struggle to refill firefighting coffers and proposed land transfers keep cropping up.

“I think there’s been a bigger push for privatizing public lands,” said Buzz Hettick, co-chairman of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers’ Wyoming chapter and longtime public lands advocate. “I wouldn’t say we’re further along, but the pressure just doesn’t ever let up … And I’m going to be the guy who tells them no. I don’t want the public to take it in the teeth.”

High value lands

Cyrus Western, a former Republican lawmaker from Sheridan County, blames low voter turnout for the disconnect. 

While the State of the Rockies poll surveyed more than 400 registered voters in each western state, including a mix of Republicans and Democrats, they may not have captured those who actually voted, especially in the primaries. 

“Less than a third of people showed up to vote,” he said. “I mean, I would agree the broad public really appreciates and wants public land … but the people who show up to vote are the people who call the shots.”

Sabrina King, a lobbyist for Wyoming’s Backcountry Hunters and Anglers chapter, agrees. She also believes the public land message becomes lost in the mailers and screaming noise often from voices outside of Wyoming. 

“It keeps people away from the polls who would vote on public lands,” she said. “When they’re bombarded with PAC mailers who think everyone is terrible, folks don’t go vote.”

For Jessi Johnson, the Wyoming Wildlife Federation’s government affairs director, the disconnect might be a little bit more subtle, and the sportsmen’s community shoulders some of the blame. 

Public land advocates, and the public in general, have boiled down the conversation to be bite-sized pieces like “public lands in public hands.” While the phrase may be catchy, it becomes hard to convey the particular benefits of federal public lands. Legislators then think that as long as the public has access, they will be happy. But it’s federal public lands like those run by the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service that allow dispersed camping, hunting and fishing. It’s federal public lands that are managed for multiple use. State lands are managed to raise money for schools. 

“Could some federal lands be run more efficiently? Absolutely. But we love multiple use. We love that everybody has a say in what moves forward and not just following an industry need,” Johnson said. “We get frustrated because allowing everyone to have a voice at the table is clunky and there are knock-down drag-out fights and it’s cumbersome.

“But when we simplify things to be bite-size, we forget what makes it special and that we can work to make it better.”

Efforts to trade, transfer and sell

All out transfers of federal land to the states — and also likely to private landowners — aren’t the only worries among Wyoming’s public land users. They also fret over proposed land transfers with major consequences.

Wyoming contains about 3.05 million acres of landlocked public land. Largely due to the scattershot way the government and settlers moved across the West, there are islands of public land trapped within private land. As a result, landowners frequently propose land trades or all-out purchases with the state and feds to consolidate their properties. While the sales can sometimes result in more access for the public, they more often end up blocking the public from prime hunting, fishing or hiking grounds, said Jeff Muratore, longtime Wyoming hunter and public land advocate. 

He and Hettick worry that’s the case with current land trades proposed in central Wyoming. Ranch owners near Hanna recently held a public meeting to discuss trading some of their private land near Seminoe Reservoir with BLM land near the Freezeout Hills. The trade hasn’t formally been proposed to the BLM, but Hettick attended the meeting and says it would block 100,000 acres of elk, deer and antelope hunting. Another ranch north of Casper proposed buying state land north of Casper that would result in more than 10,000 acres of lost hunting grounds in prime elk and pronghorn habitat. 

“There are some land exchanges that have gone down that have been good,” Western said. “There have been some land exchanges that have gone down that have been horrible for the public.”

But all of them lack transparency, he added. As a lawmaker, he pushed for a bill that would require the state lands office to alert the public shortly after a landowner proposes a trade instead of years into negotiations. The bill ultimately reached Gov. Mark Gordon’s desk, but he vetoed it. 

“Quite frankly, I think the process was designed to not be transparent,” he said. “I think it was designed to keep the public out.”

If the public isn’t informed on land trades — or begins to conflate state land with federal public land — the very land they love could begin to disappear, Johnson said. 

“The silver lining is that this push for federal lands is not going away, so it means we’re going to have to keep having this conversation,” she said. “These efforts push us to have that conversation again and relook at what we love about public lands.”

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