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.”

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.

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.

Even while chastising federal government officials for delaying a decision on whether grizzlies should be delisted, Wyoming and Montana’s governors are hailing a relocation of bears as a sign that it’s time to delist.

Two grizzlies captured in a remote area of northwest Montana were released in Wyoming this week.

A subadult female grizzly was released Tuesday in the Blackrock drainage about 35 miles northwest of Dubois, according Wyoming and Montana wildlife managers. On Wednesday, Yellowstone National Park wildlife agents released a subadult male in a remote area south of Yellowstone Lake.

The relocations are part of cooperative program between Montana and Wyoming to boost genetic exchange between Montana’s Northern Continental Divide grizzlies and Wyoming’s Greater Yellowstone bears.

Genetic exchange between those populations is seen as a key component of full grizzly recovery in the Lower 48.

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte said in a joint statement Friday that moving the bears is important step toward getting grizzlies delisted.

“This week’s effort assures genetic connection can be achieved through active management to address the court’s requirement where a healthy number of grizzlies and an ever-expanding range have not been sufficiently convincing to the 9th Circuit,” Gordon said in the statement.

Govs. To Feds: Stop Dragging Your Feet

Meanwhile, Wyoming and Montana blasted the U.S. Department of the Interior and Fish and Wildlife Service over what they claim are needless delays in the feds reaching issuing a decision whether to delist grizzlies in the Lower 48.

The FWS recently petitioned a federal court to push the decision back until Jan. 31, 2025.

Wyoming and Montana say that’s unacceptable.

Montana last month sent a notice of intent to sue to U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and FWS Director Martha Williams.

Montana claims to have been waiting since 2022 for an answer from the feds regarding whether grizzlies could be delisted, according to the letter.

If FWS doesn’t render a decision by Sept. 11, Montana will file a lawsuit to force it to do so, the letter states.

Gordon said in a statement that Wyoming is willing to wait until Oct. 31.

“We will not accept a six-month delay to Wyoming’s petition, and one that costs the state $2 million annually to manage a species we have no authority over,” Gordon said. “Wyoming will accept nothing less than the service to expeditiously complete the delisting decision for the GYE bear no later than Oct. 31, 2024.”

Politics At Play?

The FWS might be trying to delay its decision out of an abundance of caution, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Interior Rob Wallace told Cowboy State Daily.

“If I read between the lines, everybody is trying to make sure they when they act, it (grizzly delisting) doesn’t just go back into the courts again,” said Wallace, who oversaw the FWS in his former administrative role.

There could be politics at play as well, retired federal ecologist Chuck Neal of Cody told Cowboy State Daily.

If the decision is delayed until Jan. 31, 2025, “that would take it past the election season and put it before a new presidential administration,” he said.

Is It Time To Delist?

Grizzlies once occupied much of the Western United States, but by the 1970s, their population had dwindled away almost entirely. They were placed under federal protection in 1975 so that they could recover.

Wallace said that’s been accomplished.

“From a recovery standpoint, the bears have met the recovery threshold that was set,” he said.

The recovery goal was about 700 grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. There’s thought to be well over 1,000 bears in the GYE and at least that many more in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem.

Most FWS biologists, as well as those with the state wildlife agencies, think that there are more than enough bears for delisting, Wallace said.

“You really want the Endangered Species Act to be decided by the biologists and not the courts,” he said.

If grizzlies are delisted, Wyoming Game and Fish has plans in place to open a hunting season for them here.

However, others argue that numbers alone aren’t enough and that the bears need more territory and greater genetic exchange between populations.

Neal said he favors that stance.

While moving two bears from Montana to Wyoming helps, it really amounts no nothing more than an “open air zoo” approach to bear management, he said.

Large-scale, natural genetic exchange needs to happen, he said.

He said he shares the sentiments of retired Missoula, Montana, biologist Chris Servheen that the states can’t be trusted to properly manage grizzlies.

Servheen was the FWS grizzly bear recovery coordinator for 35 years before retiring in 2016.

He previously told Cowboy State Daily that he initially favored delisting grizzlies, but then changed his mind when he saw how heavy-handed they’d been with wolves.

Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.

UPDATE: Fire 30% Contained, Plans In The Works To Lift Evacuation Orders

U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming, was teary-eyed and fought back her emotions talking about her family’s loss this week of her childhood home, which went up in flames when Wyoming’s largest wildfire roared through the Haystack Range.

The Hageman homestead, a rustic cabin-like structure with plastered walls and built into the side of a hill near McGinnis Pass, Wyoming, was destroyed by an uncontained wildfire in rough terrain littered with huge granite boulders and tinder fueled with juniper pinions woodland and sagebrush.

“It’s been pretty devastating,” Hageman told Cowboy State Daily.

Back in Washington, D.C., doing what she does there, Wyoming’s lone U.S. House member was preoccupied with upsetting late-night telephone conversations with her brother Hugh and older sister Julia in Torrington, who lives closest to their 100-year-old mother, Marion, in a local nursing home.

Matriarch of the family, Marion Hageman, hasn’t fully grasped the family’s devastation.

“I just saw her a couple of days ago when I was home. I’m not even sure she even knows about this fire yet,” said Hageman of her mother.

“It was a very old log house, with very thick walls because they didn’t split the wood. It was very cold in the wintertime,” she recalled. “We had one woodburning stove, and we would take Montgomery Ward catalogs when we were younger and put them on the stove and heat them through, and then wrap them in fabric and take them to bed to stay warm.”

Wind Shifts, More Evacuations

Meanwhile, by Friday evening the wind had shifted, prompting an urgent notice from Platte County officials for residents in the tiny town of Hartville and nearby Whalen Canyon to evacuate, their second in less than a week.

“Attention!!! Residents of Hartville and Whalen Canyon Evacuate Now!” reads a Platte County Sheriff’s Office Facebook post. “The winds have changed and the fire is advancing west. Pleasant Valley residents begin evacuation process.”

The evacuation notice also came with the announcement of local road closures, specifically for Highway 270, Whalen Canyon Road and Pleasant Valley Road.

As of 9:06 p.m. Friday, “Fire crews have been able to regain control of the fire at this time,” the sheriff’s office reported.

Among those who were quickly evacuated were the staff, volunteers and animals at the Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary.

“This evening we had to make the difficult decision to evacuate Kindness Ranch,” the sanctuary posted to its Facebook page. “The fire was picked up by the wind and headed our direction.”

All the people and animals were hustled out safely, and the “large animals (are) houses safely in metal buildings with lots of food, water and a dedicated small number of staff staying back and caring for them,” the ranch says. “We are all safe, the animals and humans.”

The wildfire as of late Friday was also upgraded from a little over 23,000 acres to 25,000 acres burned in a huge swath of flatland and hills leading into the Haystack Range.

The fire is stuck to the north of U.S. Highway 26 in the Haystacks with no containment, according to a statement issued Friday afternoon by Tyson Finnicum, a spokesman for the Wyoming State Forestry Division.

Family Roots

It’s an area Hageman knows well.

It’s where her roots are.

Hagemans are everywhere in this part of Wyoming.

One brother lives by the historic Fort Laramie near the North Platte River. Another brother lives out along U.S. Highway 26 about 4 miles west of Fort Laramie where the fire roared along the main thoroughfare on Wednesday.

Nephews, nieces and sons-in-law live everywhere around the Cowboy State.

Harriet Hageman played in the Haystacks and grew up there on the family homestead until she was 7 years old, after which time her family moved closer to Fort Laramie so that she and her siblings could participate in sports and other school activities.

“We grew up in an area we referred to as ‘The Hills,’” Hageman said. “We grew up in the Haystacks, and in a house that was on the Cheyenne to Deadwood stage trail. It was an old, old home, you know, 100-plus years old.”

For sure, the former stage route has a colorful past.

According to the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, the stage route was in operation from 1876 to 1887 between Cheyenne and Deadwood, South Dakota. Thousands of passengers, tons of freight and express and millions of dollars in gold passed over this trail until the railroad came.

During the years the trail was in use, it was the scene of numerous Indian and outlaw plunderings.

The home, said an emotional Hageman, was “very special to all of us.”

“That’s where we were all raised,” she added. “It burned.”

‘It’s Devastating’

Hageman grew up with five other siblings, including brother Hugh whose ranch has smoldering fields that wrap around the home where the family moved later in life after their earlier times at the homestead in McGinnis Pass.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, firefighters, planes and helicopters dropping water and slurry halted the fire’s march to Fort Laramie near the canal 2 miles on the western edge of town.

About 8,000 acres of Hugh Hageman’s 25,000-to-30,000-acre spread burned, taking away some of the pasture needed for his 1,000 head of cattle.

“It’s devastating,” said Hugh Hageman when reached by Cowboy State Daily late Friday.

“I’m out here fighting the fire right now,” he said, adding he was working with brothers and other family members, plus 15 forestry service volunteers trying to keep the fire from spreading on the southern and eastern front of the Haystacks. “I can’t tell on the west side.”

Hugh Hageman couldn’t confirm if any of the fire was contained, but he did believe it was more “controlled” as firefighters have encircled the fire with backburning to halt its spread on the eastern and southern fronts.

“We’re running a sprayer right now. We’re in the fire right now, doing some backburning,” he said. “We’ve got the fire surrounded now to keep it from coming back down from the hills.”

Hageman didn’t have a firetruck, but he did have his farm truck.

“We’ve got a little sprayer built just for this with a 500-gallon tank on the back. It’s putting out a lot of fire,” he said.

Late Friday, the congresswoman’s brother reflected on the family’s loss of their historic homestead.

“It burned to the ground. There’s nothing left,” he said. “It’s kind of sad. It was a place where we all went back to. It was in pretty bad shape before the fire. No one lived there since the early 1970s.”

Never Forget

The home may have been in bad shape, but the Hagemans have not forgotten their origins.

Harriet Hageman said that her parents had $200,000 in debt and had scraped together the money to buy the ranch land with the homestead back in 1962.

They had $35 left in their savings account.

“They just had nothing, but they built a very successful ranching operation over the years,” she said.

Her father, Jim Hageman, passed away in 2006 and is buried in a gravesite on “a little hill” probably about a half mile-away from her childhood home.

Jim Hageman was a member of the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1983 until his death in 2006.

A Wonderful Life

“We had two bedrooms and six kids,” she said. “The baby always slept in mom and dad’s room, and my three sisters and I slept in one bedroom and my brother slept in the dining room.

“It was a wonderful place to grow up. We had rattlesnakes, we had chickens, we had a garden, we had cattle, we had sheep, we had horses. It was an incredible place to grow up.”

The homestead life didn’t offer many of today’s comforts.

“We didn’t have a telephone, we didn’t have a television,” she said. “We rode ponies all the time. It was a great place to grow up.”

The simple life brought them close together.

“We were all very, very close with each other. We lived a kind of life almost straight out of the late 1800s. My parents were bound and determined to be ranchers,” she said. “You just really risk everything when you do it.”

Besides the Hageman children, her parents also helped raise more than 40 foster kids.

“They sent us all to college,” Hageman said of she and her siblings. “I think we’ve all been quite successful as a result of having that kind of an upbringing.”

Gunnysack Times

The Pleasant Valley Fire isn’t Hageman’s first rodeo with wildfire.

“I grew up fighting fire in those hills. It’s not easy fighting fire in the Haystack hills,” she said. “You take a wet gunnysack in one hand and a shovel in the other, and you just basically try to beat it out before it gets out on the prairie. It’s incredibly hard work.”

A gunnysack is a large sack made of a course fabric that can be used as a sandbag for erosion control or to hold grain, potatoes or some other agricultural product. The sacks are soaked with water to help fight grass fires in rural areas, like where the Hagemans lived.

The exact time of day that the Hageman homestead went up in flames isn’t known.

However, it is likely that it happened sometime Wednesday afternoon after the Haystack Fire and Pleasant Valley fires combined to form one big inferno now known as the Pleasant Valley Fire, which is what Hugh Hageman is fighting.

Since Wednesday, the fire has pulled back from U.S. Highway 26 and headed deep into the Haystack Range.

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.

Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.