Wyoming
Evacuation Lifted For Pleasant Valley Fire, But Ranchers Worried For…
GUERNSEY — Emergency officials in Goshen and Platte counties have lifted evacuation orders on tiny communities north of Guernsey, Wyoming, threatened by a pesky wildfire that’s proved difficult to contain in an area the size of more than 33,000 football fields.
The evacuation order is the second emergency officials have lifted since Tuesday when two separate fires in the region merged to form an inferno that’s burned a 26,000-acre area and now appears stuck in steep and treacherous terrain in the Haystack Range.
This is a good thing as long as hundreds of firefighting personnel can keep it tamed in the tinderbox that locals say is a godforsaken mountainous region.
On Saturday, Tony Krotz, the Platte County emergency management coordinator, told 200 people at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School that evacuation orders for the northern Guernsey communities had been lifted at about 4 p.m.
Those communities, which have about 150 people living there, include Hartville, located about 5 miles north of Guernsey, and the canyon communities of Sunrise (1 mile east of Hartville) as well as residents who dot Pleasant Valley and Waylen Canyon roads.
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon told the audience at the hastily pulled together meeting that he would fight for more resources on the frontline of Wyoming’s wildfires.
Emergency officials said that higher priority states like California, Oregon and the U.S. West generally are taking these resources from Wyoming, listed at the bottom of the priority list because of its rural nature and sparse population of a half million people.
“This summer has really been tough,” said Gordon in the high school’s gymnasium that felt nearly as hot as the outside temperature of 100 degrees. “We are doing the best job we can to allocate resources, but virtually all of these resources are already allocated.”
Gordon said he would fight for more firefighting resources, like planes to map the fires or drop water and slurry.
Emergency officials said at the meeting that it may be another week before they can get a special plane with infrared mapping capabilities to fly over the Haystacks and give a better assessment of the fire’s size and how much of the prairie-scape has burned.
“My main thing for being here today is to tell you that we are 100% behind you,” Gordon said. “We are fighting hard to get the assets we need but they are stretched.”
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A 26,000 acre wildfire has been challenging for firefighters, especial for tiny communities north of Guernsey, Wyoming, which itself only has a population of 1,130. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
A fire smolders on Saturday south of U.S. Highway 26 near oil storage tanks owned by Tallgrass Energy in the background. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
A fire smolders on Saturday south of U.S. Highway 26 near oil storage tanks owned by Tallgrass Energy in the background. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily)
Where Is The Fire?
Tracking the fire has been difficult because of the rocky and steep terrain of the “hills,” as locals have dubbed the Haystacks.
The fire has swirled in an area ranging from U.S. Highway 26, linking Guernsey and Fort Laramie about 12 miles to the east, to the eastern fringe hamlets north of Guernsey that were under orders of evacuation on Friday and Saturday, and to the north to the Haystacks.
“The firefighters on the scene have advised me that they feel comfortable and safe to allow the residents of these communities to return once again,” said Krotz, who received a call from Platte County Fire Warden Aaron Clark shortly before the meeting to support the decision.
Thunderous applause from the audience erupted on that announcement.
“We’ve always said that if a fire gets in that area, we’re scared,” Krotz observed.
“We know what that train looks like and you know how dry it has been. We saw the winds change in more directions that one night,” he said of the Tuesday-Wednesday battle with the fire over a do-or-die, five-hour window from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, but we got a break here for now,” he said.
As of Saturday, the fire is 30% contained, though some emergency officials say that area could be larger. Without a flyover by the plane with the infrared equipment, it’s difficult to come up with a better assessment.
The latest evacuation order came late Friday afternoon when a violent thunderstorm brought high winds to the area and caused firefighters to lose some of their hold over ditches and mounds of dirt dozed up that were built as a containment wall to keep the fire from spreading on the western front.
When the wildfire began threatening the Waylen Canyon Road area Friday, emergency officials didn’t think twice to evacuate everyone.
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More than 200 people showed up at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School to hear Goshen and Platte County emergency officials update them on the latest with the Pleasant Valley Fire, which has burned more than 26,000 acres. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
On left, Anne Lee and her husband, Tom Lee, got a firsthand look at the merging of the Haystack and Pleasant Valley fires late Tuesday when they visited a knoll near their home located at Road 3 and Tank Farm Road, south of U.S. Highway 26. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
More than 200 people showed up at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School to hear Goshen and Platte County emergency officials update them on the latest with the Pleasant Valley Fire, which has burned more than 26,000 acres. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon tells more than 200 people who showed up at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School that more resources are needed to fight wildfires in Wyoming. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
More than 200 people showed up at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School to hear Goshen and Platte County emergency officials update them on the latest with the Pleasant Valley Fire, which has burned more than 26,000 acres. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily)
Going Home
About 20 people from the Hartville area communities were evacuated to Camp Guernsey Joint Training Center just off U.S. Highway 26 to stay at one of their barracks on the military base.
The American Red Cross from Cheyenne set up a volunteer center to help coordinate the arrival of evacuees.
The latest flareup of the wildfire first reared up with flames several hundred feet high Tuesday and Wednesday.
That’s when the Pleasant Valley Fire combined with the Haystack Fire, creating the large burn area visible to the north of U.S. 26 along the arterial highway from Guernsey to Fort Laramie.
The historic community of Fort Laramie also was threatened by the fire at one point, but a canal 2 miles on the western fringe of town held the advance.
Along with thousands of acres of grass and forests, the fire also burned the family homestead of congresswoman Harriet Hageman, who grew up in the area.
Tyson Finnicum, a spokesman with the Wyoming Type 3 Team, said that a lightning strike in the Haymarket Range a week ago caused the Goshen County fire. The Pleasant Valley Fire, which is the official name of the combined fire, began Tuesday and is under investigation.
Finnicum’s Type 3 team was formed Thursday.
His team is an emergency classification level used by fire tracking agency National Interagency Fire Center and is made up of a small group of local, state and federal officials needed to help in the management of combating a wildfire.
They have set up an incident camp in Fort Laramie for firefighters to sleep and catch a breath.
Last Stand
Travis Pardue, the incident commander overseeing management of efforts to combat the fire, told Cowboy State Daily that about 120 firefighters have formed a “control line” on the northern flank of the fire near McGann Pass. That’s where they’ve been most of the day Saturday, he said.
The line has about 3 miles of water hoses strung together in the area that are helping to extinguish the fire, he said.
“We could be seeing smoke for weeks,” Pardue said.
The burn area in the Haystack range is between the McGinnis Pass and McCann Pass in Goshen County at about 5,000 feet in elevation. The range passes are located east of Whalen Canyon Road in the county and are located about 6 miles apart. The southern end of the fire is about 8 miles to the northeast of Guernsey, the area where the Pleasant Valley fire first started.
The biggest concern emerging from Saturday’s meeting seems to be future worries over the health and safety of cattle and horses.
Rancher Tom Lee and his wife Anne Lee live about 5 miles west of Fort Laramie south of U.S. Highway 26, which is an area that largely escaped the burn area to the north.
The couple visited a hill near Road 3 and Tank Farm Road where they were able to see the march of the Pleasant Valley Fire to the northern edge of U.S. Highway 26.
It’s where several oil tank farms owned by Enbridge, Tallgrass Energy, Sunoco and others are located.
“You could see the big flames from there and lots of smoke,” Tom Lee said. “We saw the two fires come together and the orange glow.”
“I thought we were in California,” Anne joked.
The Lees, who run a ranching operation of about 100 head of cattle, are worried about larger ranches that may struggle with finding pastures to feed their animals.
Some of the stacked bales of hay were burned in fields located to the north of U.S. Highway 26.
“They also need their fences repaired,” Tom Lee said. “We are just small guys. The bigger guys have problems.”
In his comments to 200 people Saturday, Gordon mentioned the possibility of helping with rebuilding fences with federal emergency money.
Cattle Surrounded By Fire
The Kasperbauer ranching family has about 220 head of cattle grazing near the Haystacks when the fire nearly locked them in.
Father Vince Kasperbauer and his son, Vince, were able to push the cattle out of the middle of the fire with a John Deere Gator utility vehicle, which kind of resembles a fancy golf cart with big gripping tires, and a frontend loader.
Side-by-side, the father and son pushed the cattle to the Cottonwood Draw into a tunnel under U.S. Highway 26, about halfway between Guernsey and Fort Laramie.
The fire torched roughly 7,600 of their family’s 8,500 acres, Vince Kasperbauer told Cowboy State Daily.
Next week, the family plans to haul the cattle to a ranch north of Wheatland to graze and eat hay there. Their plan is to move the cattle when rain is forecast in order to reduce the stress of the cattle, which already are feeling it.
“They were supposed to stay in the Haystack hills for the summer,” Kasperbauer said. But we’ve got to get them moved. “The 90-degree heat is stressing them.”
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
If the Wyoming House and Senate approve its budget changes, then the chambers’ Joint Conference Committee will have helped the University of Wyoming dodge a $40 million cut, while also limiting the Wyoming Business Council to one year’s funding instead of the standard two.
The Joint Conference Committee adopted numerous changes to the state’s two-year budget draft, but didn’t formally advance the document to the House and Senate chambers. The committee meets again Monday and may do so at that time.
Then, the House and Senate can vote on whether to adopt that draft by a simple majority.
First, UW
Starting in January, the Joint Appropriations Committee majority had sought to deny around $20 million in exception requests the University of Wyoming made, while imposing a $40 million cut to the university’s block grant.
That’s about 10% of the state’s grant to UW but a lesser proportion of the school’s overall operating budget.
The Senate sought to restore the $60 million.
The House sought to keep the denials and cuts, ultimately settling on a bargain to cut $20 million, and hinge UW’s retention of the remaining $20 million on its finding and reporting $5 million in savings.
The Joint Conference Committee the House and Senate sent into a Friday meeting to negotiate those two stances chose to fund UW “fully,” Senate Majority Floor Leader Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, told Cowboy State Daily in the state Capitol after the meeting.
But, $10 million of UW’s $40 million block grant won’t reach it until the school charts a “road map” of how it could save $5 million, and reports that to the Joint Appropriations Committee, she added.
“A healthy exercise, I think, for them to participate in, while the Legislature still allows them to receive full grant funding,” Nethercott said.
“I’m hopeful people feel confident the University is fully funded,” she continued, as it’s “on the brink of receiving a new president, having the resources he or she may need to continue to steer the leadership of the University, our state’s flagship school into the future.”
Hours earlier in a press conference, House Speaker Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, said the Legislature has been clear that UW should avoid “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI programming, and that it’s the position of the House majority that the school should tailor its programming to Wyoming’s true business needs – so UW graduates will stay in the state.
Within an earlier draft of the budget sat a footnote blocking money for Wyoming Public Media — a publicly funded media and radio entity funded through UW’s budget.
That footnote is gone from the JCC’s draft, said Nethercott.
Wyoming Business Council
The Wyoming Business Council is set to receive roughly $14 million, confined to one year, for its internal operations, said Nethercott.
“Both chambers have decided to only fund the operations,” Nethercott said, “not all the grant programs.”
She said that’s to compel the Legislature to revisit the concerns it has with the agency, then return in the 2027 legislative session with a vision for its future.
The Business Ready Communities program is “eliminated,” she said.
JCC member Rep. Ken Pendergraft, R-Sheridan, elaborated further.
Of the appropriation, $12 million is from the state’s checking account, plus the state is authorizing WBC to use $157,787 in federal funds and nearly $1 million from other sources.
“We’re going to take it up as an interim topic in appropriations (committee) and how to rebuild it and make it work the way we think it should work,” said Pendergraft. But the JCC opted to fund the Small Business Development Center for two years, along with Economic Diversification Division for Manufacturing Works, and the Wyoming Women’s Business Center, Pendergraft noted, pointing to that language on his draft budget sheet.
Pendergraft made headlines last year by saying he wanted to eliminate the Wyoming Business Council altogether.
But Nethercott told the Senate earlier this month, legislators have complained of that agency her entire nine-year tenure.
She attributed this to what she called communications shortfalls that may not be intentional. She cosponsored a now-stalled bill this year that had sought to adopt a task force to evaluate WBC.
The Wyoming Business Council’s functions range from less controversial, like helping communities build infrastructure, to more controversial, like awarding tax-funded grants to certain businesses on a competitive application process.
Wyoming Public Television
Wyoming Public Television, which is not the same as Wyoming Public Media, is slated to receive the $3 million it lost when Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Nethercott said.
It will also receive its usual $3 million from Wyoming.
The entity will not receive another $3 million it had sought to upgrade its emergency-alert towers, said Nethercott, “because we received information from them… they have another source to pay for the replacement and maintenance of the towers.”
Like the Wyoming Business Council, the Wyoming Public TV’s functions range from less controversial to more controversial.
The entity operates, maintains and staffs emergency alert towers throughout Wyoming.
Wyoming Public TV also produces entertainment and informational movies. Its state grants run through the community colleges’ budget.
State Employees
Nethercott noted that the JCC advanced to both chambers an agreement to pay $111 million from the state’s checking account to give state employees raises.
Those raises would bring them to 2024 market values for their work, she noted.
Because that money is coming from the state’s checking account, or “general fund,” and not its severance tax pool as the House had envisioned, then $111 million won’t impact the $105 million investment another still-viable bill seeking to build an “energy dominance fund” envisions.
That bill, sponsored by Senate President Bo Biteman, R-Ranchester, seeks to lend to large energy-sector projects.
Biteman told Cowboy State Daily in an interview days before the session convened that its purpose is to counteract “green” compacts investors have adopted, and which have bottlenecked energy projects.
Wyoming’s executive branch is currently suing BlackRock and other investors on that same assertion.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
It’s Week 11 in the 2026 Wyoming prep girls’ basketball season. That means it’s the end of the regular season. 3A and 4A schools have their final game or games to determine seeding before the regional tournament, or if a team is locked into a position, one last chance to fine-tune before the postseason. Games are spread across four days.
WYOPREPS WEEK 11 GIRLS BASKETBALL SCHEDULE 2026
Every game on the slate is a conference matchup. Several rivalry contests are part of this week’s schedule, such as East against Central, Cody at Powell, Lyman hosting Mountain View, and Rock Springs at Green River, just to name a few. Here is the Week 11 schedule of varsity games WyoPreps has. All schedules are subject to change. If you see a game missing, please email david@wyopreps.com.
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Laramie 68 Cheyenne South 27 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: Lyman 40 Mountain View 26 (conference game)
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Evanston 41 Riverton 39 (conference game)
Final Score: Natrona County 42 Kelly Walsh 38 (conference game) – Peach Basket Classic
Final Score: #4 Thunder Basin 64 Campbell County 32 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: #1 Cody 77 Worland 33 (conference game) – 5 different Fillies with a 3, and Hays led the way with 34 points.
Final Score: #2 Lander 49 Lyman 34 (conference game)
Final Score: #4 Wheatland 51 Douglas 40 (conference game)
Final Score: #5 Powell 48 Lovell 42 (conference game)
Final Score: Burns 56 Torrington 43 (conference game)
Final Score: Glenrock 78 Newcastle 30 (conference game)
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CLASS 4A
Rock Springs at #2 Green River, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#4 Thunder Basin at #5 Sheridan, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cheyenne East at #3 Cheyenne Central, 6 p.m. (conference game)
Jackson at Star Valley, 6 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
#3 Pinedale at Mountain View, 4 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cody at #5 Powell, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
Buffalo at Glenrock, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Newcastle at Buffalo, 12:30 p.m. (conference game)
Glenrock at Rawlins, 3 p.m. (conference game)
Torrington at #4 Wheatland, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
Wyoming Boys 4A Swimming & Diving State Championships 2026
4A Boys State Swim Meet for 2026 in Cheyenne
Gallery Credit: David Settle, WyoPreps.com
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