Wyoming

Food Bank of Wyoming spending over $121K per month to source food, triple pre-pandemic costs

Published

1 year ago

November 16, 2022

Food Bank of Wyoming spending over $121K per month to source food, triple pre-pandemic costs

CASPER, Wyo. — The Meals Financial institution of Wyoming mentioned in a press launch Wednesday that it has just lately been spending over $121,000 per thirty days to supply meals to assist folks within the state dealing with meals insecurity, “triple the quantity the group was spending pre-COVID.”

“Hovering inflation is driving up the price of fundamental requirements and forcing extra folks to hunt meals help,” Rachel Bailey, director of Meals Financial institution of Wyoming, mentioned. “Inflation can also be hitting Meals Financial institution of Wyoming, with some staples costing as a lot as 70% extra yr over yr. Certainly, for the primary time in current reminiscence, $1 now solely permits us to distribute sufficient meals for 3 meals, not 4 — an infinite shift.”

The group distributes meals throughout Wyoming by way of a distribution heart in Natrona County. After meals arrives on the distribution heart, it’s shared with over 150 companions in all 23 counties of Wyoming. Companions embrace meals pantries, soup kitchens, facilities for older folks and after-school applications. Meals Financial institution of Wyoming mentioned it additionally helps direct applications like Totes of Hope for teenagers, deliveries to homebound folks, emergency reduction and cellular pantry applications that ship meals to rural communities.

Meals Financial institution of Wyoming’s annual influence report launched in October confirmed it had distributed over 9.27 million kilos of meals throughout Wyoming in 2022, equal to over 7.49 million meals. Over 2.23 million of these meals had been distributed in Natrona County.

The group sources meals from quite a lot of locations, together with grocery shops and donations.

“Grocery rescue retains good meals out of landfills and offers folks with produce and nutritious meals to gasoline their our bodies,” the discharge mentioned. “Partnerships, resembling with the College Wyoming Extension’s Cent$ible Diet program, additionally add to the stock of meals distributed.”

An instance of the partnership with UW is an effort to reap potatoes, which yielded over 10,000 kilos this fall for supply throughout Wyoming.

Meals Financial institution of Wyoming mentioned 96 cents of each greenback goes instantly towards meals distribution.

The group depends on over 4,000 volunteers throughout Wyoming. Individuals excited by donating can go to wyomingfoodbank.org/donate.

The Meals Financial institution of Wyoming’s annual influence report is accessible beneath:

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Wyoming

Cold, Wet, Windy And Snow — Welcome To Springtime In Wyoming

Published

18 mins ago

May 6, 2024

Press Room

Cold, Wet, Windy And Snow — Welcome To Springtime In Wyoming

The first full week of May will be a mix of cold, wet, wind and even some snow around Wyoming.

Wyomingites woke up to cold temperatures and precipitation Monday morning, with snow reported in several areas. According to Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day, it’s a perfect storm of spring weather that’s pretty typical for springtime here.

“It’s a classic Wyoming spring,” he said. “Rain, snow, wind, thunder, lightning — all those things are happening right now.”

The first full week of May will be cold, wet and windy in the Cowboy State, but the devil is in the details, and those details will likely bring good news to dry areas still recovering from drought, Day said.

Watches, Warnings And Outlooks

As of Monday morning, the National Weather Service had issued a watch, warning or outlook for almost every region of Wyoming.

Winter Weather Advisories were in effect in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, the Bighorn Mountains and the Wind River and Wyoming ranges. Old Faithful in Yellowstone could receive as much as 6 inches of snow through Wednesday.

A High Wind Warning is in effect for nearly all of southern Wyoming until at least Tuesday evening. Cheyenne, Laramie and Rock Springs could experience winds as high as 65 mph.

Meanwhile, the NWS issued a Hazardous Weather Outlook for most of central Wyoming and the Bighorn Basin, anticipating wind gusts up to 80 mph in those “wind-prone areas.”

Day said Wyomingites can expect Monday’s conditions to persist through the workweek.

“The area of the state that will have the highest impact will be the northern counties, especially the northeast along the Interstate 90 corridor,” he said. “Gillette, Buffalo and communities in the northeast corner are likely to get 1 to 2 inches of rain and wet snow combined. If you add the wet snow to the rain that’s going to fall, we’ll easily see a foot or more in the Bighorns and heavy snowfall in the Black Hills.”

The Bighorn Basin received plenty of rain over the weekend, and more is likely throughout the week. Day said it’ll get drier the farther south one goes, but there could be more wind to contend with.

“As you go farther south, the precipitation is lighter, but the wind is going to be more of a factor,” he said. “The heavier moisture gets down to Casper, Douglas, Lander and Riverton. The I-80 corridor will get wet, but not as much.”

Persistent Fun Through Friday

Wyoming’s smorgasbord of spring weather will undoubtedly create hazardous conditions for drivers on the state’s highways. Day said Wyoming could and should expect to encounter anything and everything on the roads.

“If you’re traveling over the next four to five days, you could experience just about everything from rain to snow to fog to very strong winds,” he said. “The mountain passes are going to be pretty rough with the snow up in the mountains.”

Day’s analysis of current weather patterns suggests there won’t be much relief throughout the week. Wyoming will most likely stay wet and windy through Friday.

“The worst of the weather will continue through Friday,” he said. “Then we’ll start to see moderating temperatures this weekend.”

The Colder, The Better?

Many Wyomingites might find cold precipitation raining on their springtime parades. But Day said even a warm spring shower is historically too much to hope for in the Cowboy State.

“You don’t get warm rain in Wyoming in May,” he said. “It just doesn’t happen.”

If there’s a silver lining in this week’s weather, it’s that it will bring much-needed moisture to the northeast corner of Wyoming. Even with numerous spring snowstorms and rain showers, northeast Wyoming stayed mostly dry, while its winter snowpack was depleted to a fraction of its 30-year average.

Day explained that getting enough moisture is only part of the solution to an arid problem. That’s why the chilly temperatures blanketing northeast Wyoming should be welcomed.

“What’s good about this weather pattern is it’s not coming all at once,” he said. “It’s going to get spread out in waves. And when it’s cool like this, you don’t lose much moisture to evaporation. The ground soaks it in well. So yeah, this will be really good for those northeast counties.”

Gloomy Until Mother’s Day

While it isn’t an official meteorological phenomenon, Day’s oft-stated mantra for Wyoming’s spring weather is that winter doesn’t historically go away until after Mother’s Day. But with Mother’s Day less than a week away, he isn’t quite ready to put out a forecast for this year’s celebration of mom on Sunday.

“I don’t want to overpromise a nice weekend at this point,” he said. “We’ll have to see how things play out before we can get a precise weekend forecast.”

May is historically one of the wettest months of the year for Wyoming. Day said the latter half of May is when temperatures start to trend warmer and the days stay sunny.

Wyomingites will have to endure another week of windy, wintry weather before summer-like conditions set in. Day said that’s just the cold, harsh reality of spring in the Cowboy State.

“May is normally one of the wettest months of the year, and I think it’s going to be tracking very close to the averages,” he said. “Everyone’s ready for the warmer weather, and we will get some warm days soon. But we must suffer through this first.”

Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.

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Wyoming

As US spotlights those missing or dead in Native communities, prosecutors work to solve their cases

Published

7 hours ago

May 6, 2024

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As US spotlights those missing or dead in Native communities, prosecutors work to solve their cases

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Wyoming

Cowboy State Daily Video News: Monday, May 6, 2024

Published

14 hours ago

May 5, 2024

Press Room

Cowboy State Daily Video News: Monday, May 6, 2024

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 Monday, May 6th.

Upon hearing the phrase “air-dropping grizzlies,” a layperson’s mind might go wild with images of huge, roaring bears parachuting from the sky.

The reality isn’t quite that crazy, but outdoors reporter Mark Heinz says if all goes as planned, perhaps some Wyoming grizzlies could find themselves slung under helicopters, in a drug-induced stupor, on the last leg of their journey to a new home in Washington state.

“If anybody ever saw the movie Operation Dumbo drop, where they dropped an elephant with a parachute, it’s not going to be that fun. It’s pretty mundane, basically it just means they’re going – just as they would move grizzlies into some areas with trucks, it’s the same thing, except they use an aircraft. So the grizzly is put inside a cage or container – they’re tranquilized, of course, and then put inside a cage or container of some sort. And then they’re taken by aircraft to the location, and then allowed to wake up and get their bearings a little bit and then released. So sorry, folks, if you thought I was gonna have a story about Grizzlies dropping from the sky in parachutes.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal agencies have said that air-dropping bears will likely be the preferred method of getting new grizzlies to remote locations in Washington’s North Cascades Ecosystem.

Hot Springs State Park is the most visited state park in Wyoming. The state of Wyoming recently asked potential investors to dream big about the park’s future,

and Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that the state is willing to put a large chunk of money behind any improvements.

“The state is proposing to spend about $25 million there on upgrades, but that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what its selected partner, Wyoming LLC, would be putting into the park. Their punch list includes really big projects – reconstructing the Hot Springs Hotel so that it has a convention center, positioning that so that the rooms, the motel rooms face the river instead of the parking lot. They’d reconstruct the teepee pools and turn that into kind of an adult oriented Wellness Center. The Star Plunge would keep its mid century historic theme, but it would get a poolside diner, kid friendly water features like slides and swimming pools. And then some of the other things they talked about possibly doing – adding a drive in theater, a brew pub, you know, the specific details of that are going to be worked out in upcoming negotiations. They’ll have to sign a long term lease with the state in order to do the project.”

The park has long laid claim to being the world’s largest mineral hot springs, and draws upward of 1.2 million to 1.9 million visitors a year.

The Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site, located near Hyattville in the Bighorn Basin, just completed the installation of a first-of-its-kind educational experience. And Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi says it’s a mind-blowing integration of technology and culture that immerses visitors in thousands of years of indigenous history through seasons, sights and sound.

“At medicine Lodge, they felt they were telling the story of the archeology, the history, and the wildlife that are there now, but they didn’t really have a way to tell the cultural story. And the culture of medicine lodge goes back for 1000s upon 1000s of years. So the cultural experience is just that it’s an experience. It’s not a museum exhibit, or like anything else that a lot of people probably experienced because the best way to experience culture is to have culture experience with you with the people who created it. And that’s exactly what the cultural experience is. It’s been several years in the making. And it’s an entirely unique thing and Wyoming possibly the United States because it lets the culture tell its own story.”

The Medicine Lodge Cultural Experience will officially open to visitors later this spring.

A local effort to establish passenger trail service connecting Cheyenne to Colorado’s Front Range may seem a pipe dream to some, but an effort to make it happen has been gaining momentum, according to Cowboy State Daily’s Leo Wolfson.

“Supporters of this project have been coordinating with the Front Range passenger rail project to kind of try to kind of hop on to that effort, which is basically a rail service that would connect Fort Collins through Denver and south to Pueblo. They are hoping in Cheyenne that there could be an extension built on to this project to connect Cheyenne to Fort Collins. It’s a really interesting effort and one that is possibly gaining steam, especially considering there’s going to be a ballot initiative going before the Colorado voters this November, that would provide a significant amount of funding for the rail line through a tax if if it is passed by the voters, which would really open up a door for the Cheyenne extension on the project.”

Under the best case scenario, the project would still be three to five years off, but Wolfson says supporters are trying to explore different options for different carriers, which could include Amtrak.

Updates to the Biden administration’s Western Solar Plan would allow more streamlined development of utility scale solar farms in Wyoming, which means more money being invested in solar farms here. But critics feel the Bureau of Land Management, which would oversee the project, isn’t considering all the options, according to energy reporter Pat Maio.

“They feel that the BLM is overlooking what is called distributed generation. So what is that? That is, like solar panels on parking canopies on tops of roofs of buildings. Suggestions are being made to build solar farms on top of abandoned coal mines, things of that sort. That’s distributed generation. The BLM doesn’t seem to be considering that, though – they seem to be kind of moving in a different direction where they would just build these huge agrivoltaic farms, you know, that would involve maybe sheep grazing underneath the panels and so forth, and cattle too.”

The plan is meant to serve as a road map for solar development in areas where the BLM doesn’t think dangers will be posed to local habitats.

Stacy Boisseau and her daughters have been the first in line to enter Yellowstone National Park through the East Entrance on opening day of the summer season for six years running. She did it again Friday, and Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi was there.

“Stacey and her daughters thought, why not be the first family in the park? And it’s just a tradition that they’ve kept going. And they say, they don’t plan on doing it every year. They like doing it every year, but it’s kind of an impulsive decision. They just decide a couple days before if they want to do it, and then they pack up the car, make all their plans and head up there. They won’t give me exactly the time that they get there to make sure they are there first but they get there early. And it is a long night in the chilly region of the east entrance. But they do it, not be to be first – they do it because it’s a fun tradition that they’ve developed, where they get to spend time with and enjoy each other, as a family wants to do.”

There will be a time when Boisseau and her family won’t be at the front of the line. But for one more year, they were together with an empty road in front of them, soon filled with more laughter and memories.

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.

Radio Stations

The following radio stations are airing Cowboy State Daily Radio on weekday mornings, afternoons and evenings. More radio stations will be added soon.

KYDT 103.1 FM – Sundance

KBFS 1450 AM — Sundance

KYCN 1340 AM / 92.7 FM — Wheatland

KZEW 101.7 FM — Wheatland

KANT 104.1 FM — Guernsey

KZQL 105.5 FM — Casper

KMXW 92.5 FM — Casper

KBDY 102.1 FM — Saratoga

KTGA 99.3 FM — Saratoga

KJAX 93.5 FM — Jackson

KZWY 106.3 FM — Sheridan

KROE 930 AM / 103.9 FM — Sheridan