Protesters by the hundreds took to the streets of Wyoming towns on April 5 during “Hands Off!” protests. Among those protesting President Donald Trump’s recent actions were veterans and young mothers, adolescents and grandparents. 

And dogs. Judging by their presence, many Wyoming canines also have their hackles up over the federal tumult. 

Beamish, a 9-year-old Westie terrier, perched on a bench alongside protesters displaying a sign of his own. “Don’t DOGE on me!” it read. Meanwhile, the human protesters nearby held signs expressing dismay at everything from the treatment of Ukraine to large cuts to the federal workforce and threats to Social Security. 

Organizers estimate that nearly 500 people showed up to the Lander event, one of many such protests that took place across the state and country. There was a jubilant air to the Lander gathering, and passing vehicles showed ample support with honks — as well as occasional dissent with black exhaust burps. 

Aaron Hjelt, a Lander resident who organized the event, attributed the high turnout to the spirit of the protest, which he said strove to welcome all with concerns, regardless of their party affiliation. 

“We all have concerns about what’s happening at the federal level and with the chaos and the dismantling of our public institutions,” Hjelt said as the event wrapped up. “So I think part of it is just that general solidarity and knowing that we can accomplish things if we don’t have to live under a brand of being a Democrat or Republican or liberal or a conservative, if we can talk about the concerns that we have and how to accomplish those things as neighbors, rather than as a party or organization.”

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The first sandhill crane that Rob Koelling, a Powell birding photographer, spotted this year appeared in late February, slightly earlier than expected. 

“They typically arrive in early March and feed in the corn fields along the Shoshone River,” Koelling told WyoFile in an email. 

If the long-legged bird’s huge wingspan and red forehead set against its gray and rusty plumage don’t give it away, its loud, rattling bugle call is unmistakable. And unlike herons, who tuck their necks into an “S” shape in flight, sandhill cranes fly with their necks outstretched, as photographed by Koelling. 

The cranes can be seen this time of year in Wyoming, refueling on an 800-1,000 mile trip from their southern wintering grounds to the northernmost regions of the U.S. and Canada, where they breed in the summer months. 

Some, however, will stick around Wyoming, Koelling told WyoFile, until the autumn, when it’s time to reverse course. 

“When they gather for the night in the fall we have seen groups of upwards of a 1,000 birds,” he said. 

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For about half the travelers who stop in, Fossil Butte National Monument is merely a rest area on a lonely stretch of U.S. Highway 30 about 9 miles west of Kemmerer. Many make a beeline to the restrooms and are stunned to discover a Smithsonian-quality museum packed with thousands of stone slabs embedded with fossilized creatures from the Eocene.

More than 1 million fossils have been retrieved in the surrounding area, owing their preservation to an ancient, and very large, freshwater lake.

In fact, the national monument, dubbed “America’s Aquarium in Stone,” has so many fossil artifacts that they adorn the restroom walls. The visitor’s center aims to show as many different species as possible, according to staff members. From fish (there are 27 different species) to birds (40) to snakes, bats, plants and insects of all varieties, there are thousands of ancient specimens.

“What you’re seeing here is the diversity, not abundance,” Fossil Butte National Park Museum Curator Arvid Aase said, adding that the abundance of fossils is too overwhelming to fit into the visitor’s center.

If you’ve been to Fossil Butte before, but it’s been a while, you’ll find many new displays as well as vastly improved interpretive trails that wind through a sea of sagebrush and aspen groves.

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The first out-of-the-ordinary sighting came last October as Cat Urbigkit herded sheep.

A swift fox appeared amid the brush. The longtime Sublette County writer and rancher had seen the species once before, but this marked the first such sighting near her home in Big Sandy country south of Pinedale along the western flank of the Wind River Range. 

“Western Wyoming is a great place for stuff like that,” Urbigkit told WyoFile.
“The more you pay attention, the more you’re going to see.” 

There’s plenty of truth to the adage. But western Wyoming folks can look with intention for swift foxes and never catch a glimpse of one. The smaller cousin of the more common red fox is largely absent from the sagebrush-studded western half of the state — the fringe of the species range, according to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. 

Urbigkit’s run of unusual furred and feathered sightings kept on. 

On the phone with her husband, Jim, one day, the photographer, former newspaper reporter and statehouse candidate was alerted to an “interesting” bird in the yard around the time of the swift fox sighting. 

They were chukars, another first by their Green River basin abode. 

“By the first week of November, they started coming to hang out in the yard,” Urbigkit said. “There were about 30 of them and they were in two groups, but I’ve got these nine that come into the yard almost every day.”

The sighting, again, can be classified as odd. Chukar, a nonnative partridge species, are well distributed on the east side of the Wind River Range and even down by Flaming Gorge Reservoir, but they’re uncommon to absent along the higher, colder, less cheatgrass-infested west side of the mighty mountain range — though Urbigkit later learned of off-and-on sightings in the nearby Prospect Mountains. 

The finale of the string of uncommon critter sightings came just the other week. 

Cat and Jim Urbigkit were headed home when they spotted a herd of deer in the highway right-of-way. 

“One of those butts is not right,” Urbigkit recalled thinking. 

They turned around and snapped some pics. Sure enough, a whitetail deer, or perhaps a hybrid, was hanging tight with a herd of mule deer. 

Whitetails are found in the Green and New Fork river bottoms, but Urbigkit had never seen the species intermingle with mule deer. Tension dominated the interaction. Repeatedly, the whitetail doe was aggressively “raring up.” 

The muleys, meanwhile, wanted to “stay the hell away.” 

“They weren’t happy about it,” Urbigkit said. “She would start [raring], and they would move away. They weren’t comfortable with the way that she behaved.” 

It’s a safe bet that Urbigkit will be on the lookout for other unexpected critters. The new sightings, like the swift fox, are cause for joy. 

“I was pretty thrilled,” she said.

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Growing up in the Bighorn Basin, Ismael Dominguez described himself as feeling distinct, as a Mexican-American in a majority white state, but also connected to a heritage of immigrant laborers who flowed to northern Wyoming to work its sugar beet fields and then built community.

Dominguez, who studied metalsmithing and sculpture at the University of Wyoming and today lives in Laramie, is honoring his roots — quite literally through his creation of a several foot high replica of a sugar beet — in a new art exhibit on display in the Laramie Plains Civic Center.

Called Migración: Betabeleros, the exhibit celebrates the migrant workers whose wearying work was the backbone of the sugar beet industry in the Bighorn River Basin. His artwork incorporates historic photographs, like the one atop this week’s Photo Friday, with textile sculptures of fields and the houses workers lived in — including the house Dominguez grew up in, he told a crowd that gathered in Laramie for the exhibit’s March 8 opening. 

“This work is an homage or offering to my ancestors and living family members who carried themselves and our lineage through the fields,” Dominguez wrote in a statement introducing the work. “So I could have the privilege of never having to know that kind of manual labor.” 

Dominguez was joined at the opening of his exhibit by two University of Wyoming linguistic scholars, Chelsea Escalante and Conxita Domènech. In 1927, the Powell Tribune ran a weekly publication called La Pagina Espanol. The Spanish language paper only operated for one year, publishing 23 editions inserted in the Tribune and sponsored by the Great Western Sugar Company. 

The newspaper documents the development of a community within a community in the Bighorn Basin, the two professors said, including clear segregation. The newspaper ran notices welcoming migrant workers to the local movie theater and to a Fourth of July celebration, Escalante said. But it also directed the betabeleros and their families to separate themselves.

“We want you to go to the movie theater, but please stay only on the western side, because that is your site,” Escalante said, characterizing the newspaper’s language. “You cannot sit on the eastern side. That’s for the white people. At the Fourth of July celebration, it was ‘come to the Fourth of July celebration’… But come at 4 p.m., after the Anglo celebration.”

The exhibit runs in the Gorgon Gallery, in room 332 of the Laramie Plains Civic Center, until April 30. Dominguez plans to show it in Powell and Cheyenne, though he said Friday he had not yet pinned down the dates. The exhibit includes testimony, both written and played aloud, from his relatives, recounting their time in the fields and the betabelero community. 

Dominguez is calling for more people to share memories about Wyoming’s sugar beet industry. Stories can be submitted online at lpccwy.or/gorgongallery or in an email to awallace@lpccwy.org.

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Wild turkeys can be unruly neighbors. They poop all over the place, damage trees with their sharp claws, hold up traffic and are known to bully dogs, children and the occasional mail carrier. 

That was part of the motivation behind a recent Wyoming Game and Fish Department project that trapped 137 birds around Casper this winter and relocated them to rural sites in Natrona and Converse counties, where habitat is recovering from drought and severe winter weather. 

“Now that the habitat is coming back, these relocated birds will have a chance to re-establish and expand their population,” Joan Eisemann, National Wild Turkey Federation’s Wyoming State Chapter president, said in a press release. The federation aided the project by purchasing small specialized box traps used to capture the birds. 

Federation volunteers also helped with capture, transport and release. Wildlife management students from Casper College joined to get a hands-on learning experience, and a kindergarten class from a rural community also helped release the birds.

According to Wyoming Game and Fish Public Information Specialist Janet Milek, the project set out to trap and relocate wild turkeys in high concentrations around Casper. Relocation helps reduce conflicts with humans or pets, and bolsters rural wild turkey populations, she said. 

The work entailed setting up box traps as well as drop nets — which were used to gather large flocks of birds on bigger properties — in areas heavily used by turkeys before transporting the birds to their new homes. 

“Optimal wild turkey habitats encompass areas with suitable roost trees (e.g., cottonwood, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine) and food sources like seeds, grains, insects, and other hard and soft mast,” Milek wrote in an email. “These needs are often met in grain fields, rangelands, and ponderosa pine galleries with diverse understories. Riparian areas also provide ideal habitat conditions. With their typically mild winters, Central and Eastern Wyoming are particularly favorable for turkey populations as harsh winters limit their survival.”

Along with ending human-wildlife conflicts, the federation said, the intent is to strengthen wild turkey populations to create new and better bird hunting opportunities.

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CHEYENNE—Rep. Bill Allemand stood silently in the gallery, his gaze transfixed on Wyoming senators a floor down.

The upper chamber’s lawmakers were debating the merits of a proposal of special significance to Allemand. At issue during the deliberations was House Bill 211, “Hunting wildlife from vehicles,” a measure the Natrona County sophomore Republican legislator brought on behalf of a constituent who was fined by a warden for shooting prairie dogs from his truck. 

Allemand’s bill was “simple,” he told WyoFile, and would clarify in statute that gunning prairie dogs and some other species from trucks is legal on private land in Wyoming, a state where the grass-eating rodents are classified as “pests” and have been eradicated from most of their native range. On Monday, he left his own chamber and ventured over to the Senate gallery for HB 211’s introductory vote. 

“I was not only hoping,” Allemand told WyoFile of the moment. “That morning, I was down lobbying.” 

The bill was personally significant to Allemand partly because his first 10 attempts at sponsoring legislation didn’t pan out. Many of those failed efforts, he said, were “tough, controversial bills.” Like many in the statehouse, he knows that it can be a challenge to shepherd an idea through to becoming law. 

Bills dying, of course, isn’t unique. Every time the Wyoming Legislature convenes, many more bills get introduced than make it the distance. They die from an assortment of causes: some are exceedingly unpopular and get voted down, others miss deadlines. Sometimes political factions kill bills to show off their might. 

But Allemand’s 11th bill, brought during his third session, made the cut. There were some bumps along the way, including a committee discussion initiated by a member of the public over whether recreationally shooting prairie dogs is psychopathic. Nevertheless, HB 211 cleared that committee vote unanimously and then passed its third reading in the Senate on Wednesday. 

“I texted the gentleman who asked me to run it and let him know,” Allemand said. “That’s what I like doing. I like helping people much more than I like coming down here and sitting on my butt for 40 days. That’s what makes this thing [the legislature] worth it.” 

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CHEYENNE—Wyoming lawmakers spend the majority of their time in the state capitol during legislative sessions seated at their desks on the floor of their respective chambers. 

So it’s no wonder that, among the stacks of paperwork and coffee cups,  more personal items collect on those desks too. Bowls of candy. Framed photos of loved ones. A bust of Benjamin Franklin. A sasquatch figurine.

“I got the Franklin bust when I visited the Library of Congress for the first time, he is one of my favorite authors,” Rep. Daniel Singh, R-Cheyenne, told WyoFile.

His other statuette — Bigfoot — represents someone whom Singh said he likes to think of as a proud Wyoming resident.

“He may have even been spotted along the banks of the mighty Dry Creek, which flows through House District 61,” Singh said. 

Other representatives, Singh said, have their own desk mascots, including otters, cows and pigs. A few desks to the right of Singh’s several flower arrangements from constituents back home have accumulated on the desks of Laramie Democratic Reps. Karlee Provenza and Trey Sherwood. 

“We call it our ‘garden district’ and ‘wall’ of flowers,” Sherwood told WyoFile. 

“We feel very loved,” she said.

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A whirlwind of emotions enveloped U.S. Ski Team downhiller Breezy Johnson upon winning the world championship downhill gold medal in Austria this week, but she didn’t forget her Wyoming roots.

From the day years ago when she designed a T-shirt to raise money, to last year’s training in Switzerland which she had to again fundraise for, she had backers in Jackson Hole and beyond who believed in her grit.

“There are so many people who have helped me,” she said in an emotional television interview after her downhill victory Saturday.

In two remarkable races within 36 hours of one another at the World Championships in Saalbach, Austria, Johnson, 29, won the women’s downhill gold and then, with Mikaela Shiffrin, the team-combined gold medal as well.

“She has been knocked down a couple of times with injuries,” Steve Porino, NBC’s “voice of alpine skiing,” told WyoFile. Johnson also had to sit out for 14 months for a “whereabouts violation” — failing to keep officials apprised of her location so that she could be drug tested at a moment’s notice. (She has never used drugs, she and her mother said.)

“She didn’t have opportunities to really train,” Porino said of the suspension that ended last fall. “So it was a year of idling for her, wondering whether the world of skiing was pulling away from her.”

While there may have been doubts about Johnson in the Western Hemisphere, European coaches could feel a zephyr. When the women’s downhill course was laid out in Saalbach last year, they told Johnson’s ski technician what they envisioned.

“All of the Austrian coaches were coming up to him and [saying] ‘this is a Breezy-Johnson course,’” Porino said. “‘We have a tremendous amount of fear for when she comes back, because this is her course, and it’s quite high-speed.”

86 mph

Johnson went 86 mph down the Zwölferkogel peak and 38 yards through the air over the Panoramasprung to win the downhill Saturday by 0.15 seconds. It took her just over 1:40 to finish the race.

Porino called the course “a classic downhill, high speed, lots of terrain. There’s not these very sharp turns.

“The higher the speed is, the more aerodynamics matter,” Porino said. Johnson was able to hold her tuck longer than others. “When you’re strong like a bull, you have an advantage.”

In such a pure speed test, “a lot of bravado’s required,” he said. “That’s what she’s made of, and the whole World Cup circuit saw it.”

After the downhill victory, Johnson and Shiffrin had a chat. The two have known one another as friends, competitors and teammates for 15 years or longer.

“They set out rooming lists when we were children,” Johnson said of their early ski-camp years. “And I got roomed with this introverted blonde girl. We bonded over the fact that we both skied on Atomic.”

Shiffrin told of how they teamed up last week.

“After becoming world champ in downhill Saturday, Breezy Johnson told me ‘if you want to do the [team combined], I would be honored to pair with you,” Shiffrin wrote in a social post. “‘Not because of the medal, but because this sport is crazy fun and it would be fun to bring it full circle after all these years.’”

“What a wise woman,” Shiffrin wrote.

Shiffrin, recovering from an injury, had opted out of a giant slalom race, but saw the team combined as an opportunity. The U.S. Ski team paired the best slalom and best downhiller together, based on data, in the first-ever world championship race of its kind.

Johnson was fourth in the downhill, Shiffrin third in the slalom. Their combined time was 0.39 seconds ahead of the second-place team from Switzerland.

‘Tops the list’

With the combined win, Shiffrin tied the record for world medals at 15 and broke the modern-era record with her eighth gold.

At a reception after the race, Shiffrin reflected on a bond and two careers that began more than a decade ago.

“We talked at that time about the hopes and dreams, and I think we connected specifically about feeling like we were a little bit lost in a world where young girls were not really supposed to be as ambitious as we were,” Shiffrin said.

She spoke to Johnson.

“Everything you’ve overcome to get here this past year and a half, you’ve had to do a lot of it on your own, and that has been unbelievable to watch,” Shiffrin said. “I’m so grateful to be your teammate today. Thank you for a memory that tops the list of any medal I’ve ever won.”

For Shiffrin, “everything else has been a solo act,” Porino said, “and this is the first time, I think she’s experienced this real sense of team, relying on a teammate coming through.

“No one has had more experiences with winning than Mikaela,” Porino said, yet “that one [medal] stands alone.

“The fact that they were the greatest 15 years later is a pretty neat story.”

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Mushers and their persistent pups faced challenging weather in western Wyoming during the 30th Pedigree Stage Stop Sled Dog Race. From trail-obscuring blizzards to trail-softening temperatures, these dogged dogs pushed, or perhaps better said, pulled through mixed conditions this week. 

Following opening ceremonies Jan. 31 in Jackson Hole, the 215-mile seven-stage competition made stops in Pinedale, Big Piney, Marbleton, Kemmerer and Lander. The race ends Saturday in Dubois. Fierce weather canceled the second stage in Pinedale.

Two of the 17 teams are from Germany, the rest are from the U.S. and Canada. Five-time consecutive champion Anny Malo of Saint Zenon, Quebec, who broke her winning streak in 2024, was in the lead at the race’s midpoint. 

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