RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – A series of large and powerful wildfires have impacted Northeastern Wyoming in the past few weeks. In the effort to fight them, leaders addressed a crowd of hundreds in Gillette Tuesday.

More than 200,000 acres have been scorched by wildfires in Northeastern Wyoming, prompting evacuations and a massive, coordinated firefighting effort.

Firefighters, incident commanders, and meteorologists provided information and updates to a large crowd in Gillette’s CAM-PLEX Energy Hall Tuesday night, including affected homeowners, first responders on the front lines, and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.

Crews from around the country came to Northeastern Wyoming to aid firefighting efforts, including Ansgar Mitchell’s crew from Arizona.

“It’s been a great partnership working with the local resources where they’ve tried to give us as much information of how their communities receive information and, you know, one of them being tonight at this community meeting,” Ansgar Mitchell, Southwest Area Incident Management Team said.

Several fires have erupted in recent weeks, including the House Draw Fire, the Flat Rock Fire, and the Constitution Fire.

Though Monday’s storms brought some rain to the region, experts predict dry conditions favorable for wildfires to return soon.

”So, we’re definitely pretty much done, unfortunately, with precipitation chances for the next seven days or so,” Bruno Rodriguez, Incident Meteorologist, NWS Boulder said, “We have some very slim chances here and there. But it does look like a warm, dry pattern is gonna be interspersed with some breezy conditions, some dry conditions.”

Though the challenge of stopping the fires is far from over, meeting attendees left with new knowledge on how to stay safe through the fiery Wyoming summer.

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Mark your calendars and watch the 2025 San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade live on ABC7, Saturday, February 15, 2025!

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Mark your calendars, the largest Lunar New Year Celebration outside of Asia is coming to ABC7 this February. ABC7 is now the official broadcast partner of the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade.

Read the full press release here.

ABC7 is home to the largest parades in the Bay Area and is proud to now be the exclusive media partner of the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade.

“ABC7 Presents: The San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade” will be available to all audiences live, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025 wherever you stream ABC7.

Lunar New Year begins January 29, 2025.

Watch it live this February everywhere you watch ABC7.

Colorado wildlife officials are relocating two reintroduced wolves and their pups after a series of livestock depredations — a setback for the historic and controversial reintroduction program launched late last year.

The pack of wolves, called the Copper Creek pack, will be captured from the wild in Grand County, Colorado Parks and Wildlife announced Tuesday night. The agency did not disclose where the pack will be moved to, citing the need to protect the wolves and CPW staff.

“The decision to capture and relocate the Copper Creek pack was made with the careful consideration of multiple factors and feedback from many different stakeholders,” CPW Director Jeff Davis said in a statement. ”Our options in this unique case were very limited, and this action is by no means a precedent for how CPW will resolve wolf-livestock conflict moving forward.

“The ultimate goal of the operation is to relocate the pack to another location while we assess our best options for them to continue to contribute to the successful restoration of wolves in Colorado.”

The relocation announcement comes less than 10 days after the wildlife agency announced proof of at least three pups born this spring and shared a video showing the pups playing in a puddle. The pups are the first born to wolves released in December as part of a voter-mandated reintroduction of the predator species extirpated from Colorado nearly a century ago.

Agency leaders will provide more information about the relocation after the targeted wolves are captured, according to the statement.

The agency’s statement about the relocation raises more questions than it answers, said Michael Saul, director of the Rockies and Plains Program at Defenders of Wildlife, which advocated for the reintroduction. Saul wanted to know whether CPW will keep the pack together during the capture and relocation effort, where they will be taken and where they will be released back into the wild — if at all.

“This reintroduction is in its tenuous, early stages and I just don’t understand how it makes sense to give up on the one reproducing pack we have,” he said.

The Copper Creek pack’s wolves, including the known pups, are among at least a dozen of the animals now roaming Colorado’s mountains. Eight other adults were released in December after their capture and relocation from Oregon, and a pair of Wyoming-based wolves naturally migrated into the state earlier. One of the relocated wolves was found dead in the spring.

Colorado voters in 2020 narrowly voted in favor of the reintroduction program, fueled primarily by voters along the urban Front Range. Many ranchers have opposed the effort and have said the return of wolves threatens their livelihoods and ways of life.

Colorado is the first state to reintroduce the apex predator.

Since the reintroduction, wolves have killed or injured at least nine sheep and 15 head of cattle, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s list of confirmed depredations. Most of those depredations were caused by the paired wolves in Middle Park, which formed the Copper Creek pack, said Reid DeWalt, CPW’s assistant director for the agency’s Aquatic, Terrestrial and Natural Resources branch, on Friday during a Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting.

“We have had a few other depredations from the other wolves, but nothing to the level we’ve seen in Middle Park,” he said.

Ranchers in Middle Park repeatedly have asked the agency to take action to stop the wolf depredations, but the agency until now has declined to intervene beyond providing more nonlethal deterrent resources. The Middle Park Stockgrowers in the spring requested a permit that would allow ranchers to kill depredating wolves, but the permit was denied.

DeWalt offered an update on the wolf reintroduction effort during the commission meeting but did not mention the possibility of relocating the wolves. Davis, CPW’s director, also did not mention the relocation during his update to the commission.

The agency still plans to release more wolves this winter, DeWalt said Friday. CPW has not yet found a state or government willing to supply wolves after a Washington tribe reversed its agreement to provide the canines.

But DeWalt said staff members were confident they’d be able to find another source. The agency plans to release the next batch of wolves in the same northern zone they used late last year so that they’ll increase the wolf population in the area, DeWalt said.

The agency has hired five predator damage conflict specialists. Their job is to focus primarily on wolf issues, but they will also work on predations with bears and mountain lions, DeWalt said.

The five specialists and other CPW staff attended a two-week training in Oregon and Idaho to learn about wolf management and how to deter depredations, he said.

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Originally Published: August 27, 2024 at 8:11 p.m.