It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming! I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom, for Tuesday, May 21st.

Wyoming’s first verified bear attack of the season, involving two grizzlies in Grand Teton National Park on Sunday, has left a Massachusetts man hospitalized.

The man had a “surprise encounter” with two grizzlies in the Signal Mountain Area of the park Sunday afternoon and suffered serious injuries when one of the bears attacked him, according to outdoors reporter Mark Heinz.

“We don’t know the type or extent of his injuries. The good news is, he’s been listed as being in stable condition at the hospital in Jackson and is expected to fully recover, and the investigation into the attack continues.” 

The Signal Mountain Summit Road and Signal Mountain Trail remained closed to the public Monday as the investigation continued.

The billboards first started showing up in Cheyenne around last fall, put up by a group called Honor Wyoming. The signs chide some legislators as rodeo “clowns” and praise others as “top hands” based on their voting records.

The group’s website proclaims that Wyoming has a “political integrity problem.” But politics reporter Leo Wolfson says there’s some question as to who is actually behind the organization itself.

“A man named John Guido was named as the official officer or director of his organization on its tax form. This is interesting because Guido has led extremely similar efforts in the state of Idaho, also targeting legislators there and also using kind of a western theme and some of the almost exact same advertising and marketing kind of scripts and stuff like that… It’s kind of this new evolution that we’ve seen over the last couple of years of shadowy, often anonymous political ranking groups that pop up with little to no information about who’s behind them.”

The group ranked all 93 members of the state Legislature on a scale having low, questionable or high integrity based on their adherence to the U.S. and Wyoming constitutions and their adherence to party platforms.

The Saudi government-backed Aramco Ventures is making itself a player in central Wyoming’s push for clean air.

The venture capital investing arm of oil giant Aramco has made an undisclosed equity investment in Spiritus Technologies, a clean technology company that wants to build a big field of silos to draw hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide out of the air and store the gas in underground caverns in central Wyoming. Energy reporter Pat Maio says the investment could mean an economic boost for the Cowboy State.

“They’re going to develop a pilot demonstration project in Saudi Arabia, and they’re going to develop a supply chain for many of the components, I guess, that go into the project, in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Well, this is a big connection of Wyoming because they want to build a massive field of the silos for direct air capture, and then pull the carbon dioxide gas out of the air and store it underground in caverns in Central Wyoming.” 

When completed, the Spiritus project will be capable of capturing and sequestering in underground geologic caverns up to 2 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.

A mature male wolf from one of Grand Teton National Park’s well-known packs was struck and killed by a vehicle Friday.

Cowboy State Daily’s Mark Heinz reports that the wolf was from the Lower Gros Ventre pack, but little else has been released about the incident.

“Unfortunately, in Wyoming, vehicle collisions are a leading cause of death for all species of wildlife. And we recently talked to a wild wolf biologist… and she did say that getting struck by vehicles is one of the more common causes of … death among wild wolves. And that’s one of the reasons they typically live only three or four years in the wild.”

No further details were available about the incident.

Attentive employees at a Sheridan Verizon store caught a pair of New York men allegedly winding through the region stealing identities and buying iPhones with people’s phone account information.

Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland reports that the two had already purchased phones in Powell and at another store in Sheridan before authorities caught up with them late last month.

“It started as a series of red flags where this guy was in the Verizon store in Sheridan, and he was just, you know, Apple iPhones and here’s my account information. But then when they asked him for his address, allegedly, he had to look it up on his own ID information, and didn’t seem concerned at all about the class even for multiple phones. And so they were seeing enough of these that they called police … and the guy came outside and briefly spoke to the officer and then took off and met up with a getaway car in the Albertsons parking lot.”

Wyoming Highway Patrol and sheriff’s deputies conducted a high-risk traffic stop to arrest both men. 

The Hitching Post Inn was an iconic hotel and restaurant that served as the unofficial “second capitol building” for decades. Since it was torn down, many have wondered what might be put up in its place. Stephanie Wyatt, the niece of Hitching Post proprietor Paul Smith, still owns a portion of the land where the famous Cheyenne hotel was located. 

Wyatt told Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean that she hopes to attract an affordable housing project on part of it.

“We had previously reported that all the Hitching Post land had been sold off to developers. But Stephanie Wyatt, who is Paul Smith’s niece, still owns about half of that land, and about which is about 20 acres… she’s been approached by the city and some other groups saying that this location would be good for affordable housing, if she can figure out how to thread that needle to get the financing to build that road.”  

Smith told Cowboy State Daily that she could have sold it and walked away – but said, quote, “that’s not really the Smith way.”

And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming’s only statewide newspaper by hitting the subscribe button on cowboystatedaily.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel! I’m Wendy Corr, for Cowboy State Daily.