Wyoming
University of Wyoming trustees punt on concealed-carry vote as debate over guns on campus continues – WyoFile
The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees deferred a decision Thursday on whether to adopt a concealed-carry policy for UW’s campus after hearing from students and staff who overwhelmingly oppose the change.
“I think it’s prudent for the committee to step back, get together, maybe sometime this afternoon briefly to compare notes and make sure we have not missed an issue that was brought up today in public comments that should be considered in the rule,” Trustee John McKinley said at the meeting.
With few exceptions, opposition to concealed carry on campus defined Thursday’s public comment period, with UW students, staff and faculty citing concerns over safety and gun violence.
The policy has formally been in the works since August, when the state’s sole public four-year university sought input on possible changes to its firearms regulations following a request from Gov. Mark Gordon.
In March, the governor rejected legislation that would have done away with most gun-free zones in Wyoming and would have allowed people with concealed carry permits to bring firearms into most public spaces overseen by the state.
“This is not a veto of the notion of repealing gun free zones, it is a request to approach this topic more transparently,” Gordon wrote in his veto letter. “With the authority already in place to address this issue at a local level, I call on school districts, community colleges, and the University to take up these difficult conversations again and establish policies and provisions for their districts.”
University administration has “worked very hard to comply and to draft a rule,” UW President Ed Seidel said at the Thursday meeting.
Meantime, UW Trustee Chairman Kermit Brown made plain that the board is also keeping another branch of Wyoming’s government in mind.
“This topic is going to come up in the Legislature again [next session],” Brown said. “I will guarantee you there’s going to be a bill, and that bill is going to be an overarching reach that would go over the top of all the rules the university makes, all the rules that anybody makes, and mandate statewide what the rule in this state is going to be about carrying concealed weapons and open carry for that matter.”
Indeed, Wyoming Freedom Caucus Chairman Emeritus Rep. John Bear (R-Gillette) told WyoFile in August that eliminating gun-free zones across the state would be a priority of the group of hard-line Republicans in 2025.
Since then, the Freedom Caucus won control of the state House of Representatives in the general election and is expected to secure leadership positions when Republican lawmakers caucus this weekend.
Brown, who previously served as Wyoming’s Speaker of the House, called on those who were “impassioned” and “dedicated today to the position you took with this board,” to not limit their advocacy to Thursday’s meeting.
“You have to go to Cheyenne when they have those hearings and those meetings,” Brown said. “You have to talk to your individual legislators, and you have to go to Cheyenne and make your wishes known.
“Because this board is going to do whatever it’s going to do. We’re trying to find a position that maybe will be acceptable to the Legislature, but we don’t know whether the Legislature will accept it, or whether they’ll cast all this aside and do their own thing,” Brown said.
The discussion comes amid increasing political pressure on UW’s decisions ranging from the now-shuttered Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, to athletics and longtime services for marginalized students.
The trustees’ vote on the policy is now set for 10:15 a.m. Friday.
Amendments and public comment
Like Thursday, the public comment at a Monday town hall on campus was overwhelmingly characterized by opposition.
Many of those who spoke Monday raised specific concerns about UW’s residence halls as well as its Early Care and Education Center (ECEC), which operates as a preschool and daycare, among other things.
In response, the trustees added residence halls and the ECEC and its grounds to the areas on campus exempt from the proposed concealed-carry rules ahead of Thursday’s meeting.
Several ECEC staff and parents thanked the board for doing so at Thursday’s meeting.
The board also added Half Acre Recreation and Wellness Center — the gym on campus — as well as “fitness facilities and indoor practice areas” to the exemptions.
Caroline McCracken-Flesher, a faculty member, pointed to the areas and instances that remain.
“UW is a place of education. Among the exemptions listed in this document, places of education are conspicuous by their absence,” McCracken-Flesher said. “By this document, protected spaces are the Legislature, its meetings, its committees, any meeting of a governmental entity, perhaps including this board, [and] Faculty Senate meetings. In other words, places frequented by those who vote on this document.”
University classrooms and faculty offices, which are not exempt from the policy, are “places of ideas,” McCracken-Flesher said.
“That means they are necessarily places of contention. They’re places of great anxiety, they’re places of academic rivalry. They are not places for weaponry.”
Liz Pearson, a student, said the university’s focus should be elsewhere.
“We have a huge mental health crisis on the UW campus,” Pearson told the board. “Why aren’t we talking about that? Why aren’t we talking about the issues that have arisen due to DEI being defunded? Why aren’t we talking about students that currently feel unsafe on campus due to campus life and culture?”
Pearson also pointed to the results of UW’s survey, which showed that 64.4% of respondents wanted the university’s no-guns policy to remain the same.
The one person to speak in favor of the policy Thursday was Brandon Calloway, a third-year law student.
“Under the current policy, uncertainty prevails,” Calloway said, pointing to the fact that concealed carry is already allowed on certain university grounds, such as the central green space on campus known as Prexy’s Pasture.
“If someone carries a concealed weapon and uses it to protect themselves or others from an active assailant, they would violate university policy and break the law, even if saving lives,” Calloway said. “The proposal eliminates this contradiction.”
The most recent version of the draft policy can be found here. The proposed changes are in red.
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Wyoming
Wyoming power plant booming with suspected UFO, drone sightings — but still no answers after over a year
Fleets of drones and suspected UFOs have been spotted hovering over a Wyoming power plant for more than a year, while a local sheriff’s department is still searching for clues.
Officials with the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office recorded scores of beaming, drone-like objects circling around the Red Desert and Jim Bridger Power Plant in Rock Springs over the last 13 months — though they didn’t specify how many, the Cowboy State Daily reported.
Sheriff John Grossnickle was one of the first to witness the spectacles, and last saw the mind-boggling formation on Dec. 12, his spokesperson Jason Mower told the outlet.
The fleets periodically congregate over the power plant in coordinated formations, Mower claimed.
The sheriff’s office hasn’t been able to recover any of the suspected UFOs, telling the outlet they’re too high to shoot down.
The law enforcement outpost’s exhaustive efforts to get to the truth haven’t yielded any results, even after Grossnickle enlisted help from Wyoming US Rep. Harriet Hageman — who Mower claimed saw the formation during a trip to the power plant.
Hageman could not be reached for comment.
“We’ve worked with everybody. We’ve done everything we can to figure out what they are, and nobody wants to give us any answers,” Mower said, according to the outlet.
At first, spooked locals bombarded the sheriff’s office with calls about the confounding aerial formations. Now, though, Mower said that people seem to have accepted it as “the new normal.”
Mower noted that the objects, which he interchangeably referred to as “drones” and “unidentified flying objects,” have yet to pose a danger to the public or cause any damage to the power plant itself.
“It’s like this phenomenon that continues to happen, but it’s not causing any, you know, issues that we have to deal with — other than the presence of them,” he told the outlet.
The spokesperson promised the sheriff’s office would “certainly act accordingly” if the drones pose an imminent harm.
Meanwhile, Niobrara County Sheriff Randy Starkey told the Cowboy State Daily that residents of his community also reported mystery drone sightings over Lance Creek — more than 300 miles from the Jim Bridger Power Plant — starting in late October 2024 and ending in early March.
Starkey said he’s “just glad they’re gone,” according to the outlet.
Drone sightings captured the nation’s attention last year when they were causing hysteria in sightings over New Jersey.
Just days into his second term, President Trump had to clarify that the drones were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to quell worries that they posed a national security threat.
Still, the public wasn’t convinced, but the mystery slowly faded as the sightings plummeted.
In October, though, an anonymous source with an unnamed military contractor told The Post that their company was responsible for the hysteria.
Much of Wyoming outside of Yellowstone and Grand Teton also struggles with emergency response time.
By Katie Klingsporn, WyoFile
Wyoming’s U.S. Sen. John Barrasso is pushing legislation to upgrade emergency communications in national parks — a step he says would improve responses in far-flung areas of parks like Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks.
“This bill improves the speed and accuracy of emergency responders in locating and assisting callers in need of emergency assistance,” Barrasso told members of the National Parks Subcommittee last week during a hearing on the bill. “These moments make a difference between visitors being able to receive quick care and continue their trip or facing more serious medical complications.”
The legislation directs the U.S. Department of the Interior to develop a plan to upgrade National Park Service 911 call centers with next-generation 911 technology.
Among other things, these upgrades would enable them to receive text messages, images and videos in addition to phone calls, enhancing their ability to respond to emergencies or rescues in the parks.
Each year, rangers and emergency services respond to a wide range of calls — from lost hikers to car accidents and grizzly maulings — in the Wyoming parks’ combined 2.5 million acres.
Outside park boundaries, the state’s emergency service providers also face steep challenges, namely achieving financial viability. Many patients, meantime, encounter a lack of uniformity and longer 911 response times in the state’s so-called frontier areas.
Improving the availability of ground ambulance services to respond to 911 calls is a major priority in Wyoming’s recent application for federal Rural Health Transformation Project funds.
Barrasso’s office did not respond to a WyoFile request for comment on the state’s broader EMS challenges by publication time.
The bill from the prominent Wyoming Republican, who serves as Senate Majority Whip, joined a slate of federal proposals the subcommittee considered last week. With other bills related to the official name of North America’s highest mountain, an extra park fee charged to international visitors, the health of a wild horse herd and the use of off-highway vehicles in Capitol Reef National Park, Barrasso’s “Making Parks Safer Act” was among the least controversial.
What’s in it
Barrasso brought the bipartisan act along with Sens. Angus King (I-Maine), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.).
The bill would equip national park 911 call centers with technological upgrades that would improve and streamline responses, Barrasso said. He noted that hundreds of millions of visitors stream into America’s national parks annually. That includes more than 8 million recreation visits to Wyoming’s national parks in 2024.
“Folks travel from across the world to enjoy the great American outdoors, and for many families, these memories last a lifetime,” he testified. “This is a bipartisan bill that ensures visitors who may need assistance can be reached in an accurate and timely manner.”
The Park Service supports Barrasso’s bill, Mike Caldwell, the agency’s associate director of park planning, facilities and lands, said during the hearing. It’s among several proposals that are “consistent with executive order 14314, ‘Making America Beautiful Again by Improving our National Parks,’” Caldwell said.
“These improvements are largely invisible to visitors, so they strengthen the emergency response without deterring the park’s natural beauty or history,” he said.
Other park issues
National parks have been a topic of contention since President Donald Trump included them in his DOGE efforts in early 2025. Since then, efforts to sell off federal land and strip park materials of historical information that casts a negative light on the country, along with a 43-day government shutdown, have continued to fuel debate over the proper management of America’s parks.
Several of these changes and issues came up during the recent National Parks Subcommittee hearing.
Among them was the recent announcement that resident fee-free dates will change in 2026. Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth will no longer be included in those days, but visitors won’t have to pay fees on new dates: Flag Day on June 14, which is Trump’s birthday and Oct. 27, Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday.
Conservation organizations and others decried those changes as regressive.
At the hearing, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), assured the room that “when this president is in the past, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth will not only have fee-free national park admission, they will occupy, again, incredible places of pride in our nation’s history.”
Improvements such as the new fee structure “put American families first,” according to the Department of the Interior. “These policies ensure that U.S. taxpayers, who already support the National Park System, continue to enjoy affordable access, while international visitors contribute their fair share to maintaining and improving our parks for future generations,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in an announcement.
WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
Wyoming
Evacuations spread from fires in South Dakota, Wyoming due to strong winds from coast-to-coast storm
CLIMATE TECH: As wildfires grow stronger, faster, and more expensive, a California-based startup is taking a high-tech approach to fight these fires using autonomous drones designed to extinguish flames before they turn deadly. Founder & CEO Stuart Landesberg joins FOX Weather to discuss Seneca’s firefighting drones.
Large, fast-moving fires are causing evacuations in South Dakota and Wyoming due to the impacts of a coast-to-coast storm.
The FOX Forecast Center said winds have been gusting up to 70 mph in the Pennington County, South Dakota area, which has caused the wildfire to spread rapidly.
COAST-TO-COAST STORM CAUSES TRAVEL ISSUES DUE TO HURRICANE-FORCE WINDS, HEAVY RAIN ACROSS NORTHWEST
The blaze, known as the Greyhound Fire, is approximately 200 acres in size. The fire is burning two to three miles south of Keystone and is moving east, according to the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office.
The Greyhound Fire in South Dakota spans 200 acres.
(FOX Weather / FOX Weather)
Highway 40 and Playhouse Road are closed as crews work to contain the fire.
People living along the highway between Playhouse Road and Rushmore Ranch Road have been evacuated, officials said.
TWO KIDS WAITING FOR THE BUS CRITICALLY INJURED DUE TO STRONG WINDS IN IDAHO
Crews are asking anyone in an evacuation zone to leave the area. Officials are advising people in the area to check the Pennington County Public Safety Hub.
A grass fire has caused evacuations in the Winchester Hills section of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
(FOX Weather / FOX Weather)
People in the Winchester Hills area of Cheyenne, Wyoming, have also been evacuated due to a grass fire.
The FOX Forecast Center said winds are gusting up to 75 mph in the area.
The National Weather Service has issued a Fire Warning and says there is a shelter at South High School for evacuated residents.
Check for updates on this developing story.
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