Wyoming
Angling in hot water: how higher temperatures are impacting river ecosystems and fishing outfitters
Earlier this month, a heat wave broke records across the country and also hit Wyoming hard. Most counties in the eastern part of the state were under heat advisories for multiple days. But the heat didn’t just impact air temperatures, it also took a toll on water ecosystems. The increased heat is impacting rivers, fish and the guides that rely on them.
Inside the Westbank Anglers fly-fishing shop in Wilson, long sleek rods line the walls. There’s boxes on boxes of brightly-colored flies, some with hair, fur and feathers.
In the office at the back of the shop, owner Mike Dawes said company guides are seeing water temperatures on the nearby Snake River already creep close to 68° in the middle of July. That’s a number that basically means it’s time to stop fishing for cold water species like trout.
“The water temperature is getting 66°, 67° on the Snake. And that’s just…I’ve never heard that before at this time of year,” he said.
Hannah Habermann
/
Wyoming Public Media
Dawes said that’s more normal for the middle of August. Westbank Anglers has been trying to get clients out on the water earlier, and Dawes himself was doing the same during the unseasonably warm heat spell a couple days ago.
“We were putting the boat on, floating at six in the morning, which is pretty magical, but also kind of a necessity,” he said.
The state of Wyoming doesn’t implement mandatory fishing closures, like Montana does. But Dawes thinks it should, and thinks the collective community of fishing outfitters could do more.
“In general, in terms of the outfitting business, we’re just behind a little bit. We need to catch up,” he said.
Catching up, in Dawes’ opinion, could look like having fishing representation on the state’s outfitting board, which he said is very hunting-focused. It could also mean getting all the management agencies across the state to collaborate on when it’s time to shut down fishing.
As far as how those kinds of closures might impact his business?
“I think I’ve been doing it long enough that if I was worried about it, I’m worrying about the wrong things,” he said.
Dawes said if it’s this hot on the high-elevation, glacier-fed Snake, there’s no doubt the rest of Wyoming’s waters are also feeling the heat.
“We typically have colder water temperatures than the rest of the state. So if we’re hot, then we know they’re hot,” he said.
Wyoming Game & Fish Casper Regional Fisheries Supervisor Matt Hahn said there’s two main things going on for fish when water heats up.
“One is just the physics of oxygen and water, so the warmer water is, the less dissolved oxygen that it can carry,” he said.
The second, Hahn explained, is physiological.
“They end up putting a lot more energy into respiration, just trying to pull as much oxygen from the water as possible. If the water temperature continues to go up, the physiological response becomes more and more dire,” he said.
Getting caught on a fishing line and being out of the water only adds to the stress for the cold-blooded critters.
“The fish obviously is trying to escape and so that increases energy demand on the fish at a time when it doesn’t have a lot of excess energy to expend on such things,” he said.
Hahn said different types of fish are adapted for different temperature ranges. There’s cold water fish like trout and salmon, cooler water fish like walleye and perch, and warm water fish like bass and catfish.
When it comes to trout fishing, getting above 68° means you’re starting to get into what Hahn called “the lower end of the stressful range,” with 75° being the mark where long-term exposure can result in mortality and 80° being lethal in minutes for most trout.
Warm water also means the quality of fishing goes downhill quickly.
“The fish are stressed. They’re putting all their energy into respiration. They don’t really have energy to spend on feeding because there’s an energetic cost to feeding,” he said.
Hahn said that Wyoming Game and Fish has really stepped up their education around best-practices for fishing, advising people to use barbless hooks or shift their fishing to earlier in the day.
“68° degrees is just a good benchmark to remind people, ‘Maybe I should start thinking a little closer about what I’m doing at a point, maybe just a little bit ahead of when it becomes critical’,” he said.
Three rivers in the northwest corner of Yellowstone National Park got to that point. On July 15, the agency announced that it was closing fishing on the Madison, Firehole, and Gibbon Rivers, and most of their tributaries. The agency pointed to warm water temperatures and low river flows.
John Schilling is the manager of Madison River Outfitters in West Yellowstone. He said local outfitters stopped fishing those rivers weeks before the closure and thinks the park could be way more proactive.
“We usually, on our own, stop fishing them by July 1st every year because they’re just too hot. And actually, the federal government, in our opinion, should automatically close them no matter what,” he said.
Madison River Outfitters Facebook
Schilling said that’s also the norm for most guiding companies in West Yellowstone.
“The Firehole [River] has been over 80° since the third week in June, so we refuse to take clients there,” he said, pointing to the fact that it’s a geothermal river.
He said Madison River Outfitters normally start fishing again on the Firehole in September. He thinks Yellowstone should follow suit.
“There’s still fish in there that you can catch, but it’s just not good for them. Too stressful. We’ve still got lots of water,” he said.
Schilling’s been in the area for forty years and said this is only the second time he can remember Yellowstone having fishing closures. The first was in 2021 and applied to the same rivers on the west side of the park.
Madison River Outfitters is still guiding on the Upper Madison River in Montana and on rivers in the northeast part of the park. Schilling said if those rivers in Yellowstone close, it might be a different story.
“If they close the northeast corner, then we’d see some impact,” he said. “Then we’d have nowhere else to go in the park.”
Boots Allen is the advocacy and outreach coordinator for the Snake River Fund, a Jackson-based nonprofit that promotes stewardship and access. He said dealing with hot water temperatures is a relatively new topic in the industry.
“It wasn’t until like the late 90s, early 2000s that this became an issue in the fishing world,” he said.
Allen is also a senior fishing guide at Snake River Angler. He started gathering his own data on the river in 2003. At first, he was only using a personal stream thermometer, then started consulting the first water temperature gauge at Moose just outside of Jackson when it was installed in 2007.
He said in the last few years, water temperatures have been breaking the 68° threshold. In 2022, the max temp was 71°.
“It was pretty shocking to see that we’re starting to break that 70° mark,” he said.
Although Wyoming Game and Fish and Grand Teton National Park haven’t issued closures like Yellowstone National Park has, Allen said the agencies do sometimes issue recommendations.
“Once you cross the 68° mark, the general recommendation is to finish your fishing at about 3 p.m.,” he said.
Allen said water temperatures, just like air temperatures, tend to peak between 4 and 7 p.m. each day. He added that there are other precautions anglers should take, regardless of water temperature.
“When you hook your fish, try and get that fish in as quickly as possible. Expose it to air above the surface of the water as little as possible and really try not to do it at all,” he said.
He said people should also wet their hands to keep the fish’ protective “slime” layer intact and to help keep the fish cool.
Allen said some guides he knows are taking all of August off because of the high temps. He’s cutting down his own days for that month too and is seeing the shoulder seasons get a lot busier.
Hannah Habermann
/
Wyoming Public Media
But, the downstream waters of the fishing industry look a bit murky. Allen said guides will have to keep adapting, even if that means hanging up the rod.
“If it gets to a point where they have to shut down fishing in the future – might not be in my lifetime, might be in my kid’s lifetime – that’s something we’ll just deal with,” he said.
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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