An elk calf made a decision that could have been fatal by ignoring a wildlife-friendly panel on a ranch fence and trying to plow through the middle of another section, only to become hopelessly entangled.

Luckily for the calf, the ranch hand and his wife were out for a walk and found the calf in time to free it. 

Apparently wiser after its near-fatal mishap, the calf scrambled toward the crossing panel and leapt over it to freedom. 

The ranch hand, Logan Wilson, told Cowboy State Daily that as far as he’s concerned, freeing the calf was just part of his job. 

“We care about all of the wildlife living out here,” he said.

‘That Sucker Was Caught’

Wilson is a former resident of Buffalo and frequently hunted mountain lions in the Big Horn Mountains. He’s since moved to the Diamond Cross Ranch near Birney in southeast Montana. 

The ranch is in prime wildlife habitat, with ample numbers of elk and deer. 

Wilson said he and his wife were “going on a daybreak walk” when they happened upon the calf. Its back legs were entangled in fence wire, and it was squealing loudly. 

“That sucker was caught. It wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. 

While his wife took video, Wilson went about freeing the calf. 

He started by placing a jacket over its eyes to calm it. 

That’s an effective tactic. Wildlife researchers frequently blindfold animals to keep them calm during field examinations or transport by helicopter. 

‘A Ramp On The Elk Side’

Willson freed the calf in short order. Once it got its feet underneath it, the calf took off running. 

This time, in the right direction, toward the panel designed to help elk cross the fence safely. 

“It’s a panel with a ramp on the elk side (outside of the field) to assist herds in crossing,” he said. 

The ranch installed the elk crossing panels to help ease some pressure on the fence and to protect elk. 

“The elk go into the fields at night and back out in the morning,” Wilson said. 

Most of the time the herd funnels toward crossing panels. But not always. 

“We had a bull caught in the fence once. A big bull, but we got him out,” Wilson said. 

It’s kind of chaos when a herd of elk get to a fence and they get all balled up,” he said. 

“They can tear up the fences and eat the hay crops,” Wilson said. “It’s a constant thing; we have to follow around and fix fences behind the elk.”

Wilson said he doesn’t resent that at all. 

He loves seeing the elk, “and they bring in a lot of revenue” from hunters and outfitters given permission to hunt on the ranch, he said. 

Wildlife-Friendly Fencing Matters

Wildlife-friendly fencing has been a boon for game herds across Wyoming and the West, biologist Kevin Monteith told Cowboy State Daily. 

Fences can be built in several ways to make them safer for wildlife. That might include smooth lower wires to allow pronghorn to crawl under. Or upper wires strung at heights that allow deer to jump over, said Monteith, a biologist with the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming.

“Anything that can enhance the freedom of movement” helps herds find the best habitat and migration routes, Monteith said. 

The calf getting stuck in the middle wires of a fence sounds typical, he said. 

“Especially when they’re young like that, they try to pass through the middle of fences,” he said. 

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

The first ghost towns I ever remember visiting were the abandoned hillside villages high above the Adriatic Sea. My grandparents had a house in a tiny town on the Dalmatian coast, halfway between Split and Dubrovnik, and every summer before the war we would climb the old sheep trails up through the dry yellow grass to the ruins. Along our stretch of coastline, almost every seaside town boasted an abandoned, hillside twin, a relic of times past, when life at higher elevations kept villagers close to the sheep they grazed, and safe from pirates and invading Venetians. Then, as borders were redrawn and enemies dwindled, earthquakes struck and maritime trade took hold, the people of those old villages followed new prospects down to the sea. In their absence, the stone houses fell silent. Hardy vines crept up the walls. Roofs caved in. By the time I was five years old, exploring them in the late 1980s, the villages were largely the province of stray cats. Once in a while, some solitary elder might nod from a porch chair at the sight of my grandfather and I passing.

Novelist Téa Obreht spent childhood summers visiting the hillside ruins of abandoned towns along the Dalmatian Coast.

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Eventually as circumstance and opportunity coaxed townspeople to larger hubs, the villages of Obreht’s past grew into the province of stray cats.

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This early fascination with abandonment and decay is why I have found myself so drawn to ghost towns of the American West. For the past few years, I have lived in Wyoming, a state built from boom-and-bust history, and therefore a place rife with ghost towns. Some of them, like Kirwin—a former gold and silver boomtown deep in the Absaroka Mountains—are impossibly isolated, accessible only by ATV. Others hardly qualify as towns at all, just a smattering of buildings on some gravel road since displaced by a bigger, faster, more serviceable highway.

The ruins of the Carissa mine in South Pass City, Wyoming, stand as a vestige of the region’s 19th-century gold rush.

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The most renowned of them, South Pass City, served as a touchstone for my latest novel, Sunrise. It sits in a high-country valley in Fremont County, which along with Miner’s Delight and the still-inhabited Atlantic City, comprises the historic Sweetwater Mining District,a gold-mining region with as Spaghetti Western-ish a moniker as one could imagine for a complex sitting at the threshold of Wyoming’s mighty Wind River range. The town is named for its proximity to South Pass, a route used by the Shoshone, Absaroka, and Cheyenne people for hundreds if not thousands of years, which, once revealed to fur trappers in 1812, accelerated the stream of American settlers on the Oregon and Mormon trails over the Continental Divide. It was always a profoundly isolated and rugged place, even after the 1867 discovery of gold transformed it into a boomtown overnight. The few people coming through South Pass City now—usually tourists heading for Yellowstone, or hikers testing their mettle on the Continental Divide Trail—would suspect that Mark Twain once stopped here on his way west and wrote effusively of being spellbound by the sight of “banks of snow in dead summer time.” Or that women’s suffrage in America was first secured here thanks to a bill introduced in 1869, back when it was called Wyoming Territory. Or that the nation’s first female justice of the peace, Esther Hobart Morris, served a term here when her predecessor resigned in protest over the passage of that very bill.

A Wyoming restaurant owner publicly shamed a family of four alleged dine-and-dashers who fled without paying their $130 bill — after reporting a past similar offense to the police went nowhere, according to reports.

Zoey Aldahash, the proprietor of Sweet Zoey Mediterranean restaurant in Casper, posted an image on Facebook that appeared to show a woman, man, and two teenagers who racked up a large tab at her restaurant in May.

“They ate everything, appetizers, drinks, sweets, mains, everything,” Aldahash told Cowboy State Daily.

“Then the four of them stood up in the same moment together, they walked to the door, and once they opened the door, they ran to the car — they were running,” Aldahash said.

The owner of the eatery known for its baklava and kebabs decided not to involve the police and post the four customers on social media after cops failed to nab a group of five dine-and-dashers at her restaurant in 2024.

“In my previous experience, calling the police didn’t work. There was no help, so I didn’t contact the police the second time,” Aldahash said.

“These people came here and they intended to steal,” she said.

Several angry locals backed the fed-up owner’s decision to broadcast the faces of the apparent family of four. Others took issue with the owner taking matters into her own hands, especially since children appeared to be involved

“How disgusting! Make sure their photos are plastered everywhere so they can be banned from everywhere. People like them should never be allowed anywhere,” one user said, per the outlet.

“If they dont come fwd I can swing in 65$ of the bill. I know it’s not all of it but it’s half,” another customer added.

Comments on the post now appear to be disabled.

Rebekah Ladd, a public information officer for the Casper Police Department, told the outlet that social media posts can lead to unfounded accusations, misidentification, or harassment.

“Posting [images] publicly is typically not the most appropriate tactic at the beginning of a dine-and-dash investigation,” Ladd said.

“Businesses should be especially cautious when juveniles may be involved … particularly when the full circumstances are not known.”

The crew of cheapskates has not yet been caught, leaving Aldahash frustrated, but grateful for her generous regulars.

“You come in and order this much, and just leave without paying?” she said. “Who are these people?”

“Sometimes it’s like you don’t know if you want to cry or smile.”