Wyoming
Skier killed, another injured after avalanche triggered in Wyoming
A skier was killed and another injured after the group they were in triggered a large avalanche while ascending a mountain in western Wyoming.
The large snowslide happened Saturday in a backcountry area about 20 miles east of Grand Teton National Park.
The Teton County Search and Rescue said it received a call to respond to a known avalanche burial on Togwotee Pass just before 12 p.m. on Saturday.
As the group of four people, according to authorities, went up a steep slope at an elevation of 10,400 feet, a large slab of snow about 5 feet thick broke away and slid, fully burying the victim. The second skier was partially buried and had an injury to his leg.
It took rescuers about four hours to reach the scene by skis after a helicopter tried to reach the site but had to turn around because of “challenging” weather conditions.
“(Teton County Search and Rescue) extends its most sincere condolences to the family and friends of the deceased skier,” it said in a Facebook post.
The Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center is investigating the avalanche.
A series of snowstorms have swept through the area in recent weeks, including one on Saturday, said National Weather Service forecaster Jason Straub.
The skier’s death marks the fifth person to be killed by an avalanche in the U.S. this winter.
What do portions of Wyoming and Maine have in common? In each state, there are several counties where the population is fewer than one person per square mile.
That may come as a surprise to some people, especially because Maine’s population is more than double that of Wyoming’s.
Here’s another bit of unexpected trivia: When considering what percentage of each state’s population lives in a rural area, Maine ranks second (behind Vermont), whereas Wyoming comes in at the No. 12 spot, behind both of the Dakotas and Montana.
“Wyoming is not as rural as people think,” said Jim Fonseca, a retired professor of geography and dean emeritus at Ohio University in Zanesville. He’s also the author of “The One Minute Geographer” on Medium, where he writes about world geography.
The reason why people might be surprised by Wyoming’s rural ranking is because the U.S. Census Bureau classifies urban areas as having at least 2,000 housing units, or a population of at least 5,000 people.
Anything else is considered rural.
Rural is less so people living alone in the woods and more so lots of small towns with only a few hundred people apiece, which is common in states like Maine and Vermont, Fonseca said.
“One thing we’re dealing with is the unexpected definition of what is rural,” he said.
Thorofare’s Remoteness
Wyoming does, indeed, rightfully live up to its widespread distinction as home to the most remote place in the continental U.S. That’s the Thorofare Ranger Station, located in the southeast corner of Yellowstone National Park.
There are so many different ways to measure remoteness that Jerome Dobson, the longtime former president of the American Geographical Society, was a bit dubious about Thorofare’s claim to fame.
But the ranger station came out on top as the most remote location in the lower 48 when Dobson considered the following factors: how long it would take to hike to the nearest trailhead, the distance to the nearest fast-food restaurant and the difficulty of the trail.
“It turned out to be a pretty good measure of remoteness,” he said.
To be fair, three locations in Alaska — within the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Reserve, Denali National Park and Preserve and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Reserve — are more remote than Thorofare.
But Dobson, who is also a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, said the ranking of remoteness still was a bit surprising.
“What really struck me was that the places that I thought might compete for most remote weren’t on the list,” he said.
Specifically, he said he was surprised that the top 25 most remote locations, by his measure, didn’t include locations somewhere in the Appalachia or near the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.
Despite its relative ruralness, Maine doesn’t have a location that ranked highly by Dobson’s measures for remoteness.
Rural Flight
But when thinking about how rural Wyoming is, Fonseca said, the state shares many commonalities with other areas of the country — including Maine.
Ruralites nationwide are grappling with finding sufficient job opportunities or easily accessing groceries and medical services. That’s why so many young people have deemed that being rural is a disadvantage, and rural populations are aging as the younger generations move elsewhere, he added.
That’s also why Wyoming is pretty typical in one regard: most of the population lives within a relatively short distance of the I-80 or I-25 corridors.
“We’ve tended to organize ourselves in these areas since the automobile was invented,” Fonseca said.
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The Thorofare Ranger Station in the southwest corner of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming has long been credited as the most remote place in the Lower 48. A geographer testing this claim found Maine is more rural than Wyoming. (Courtesy National Park Service) -
The Thorofare Ranger Station in the southwest corner of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming has long been credited as the most remote place in the Lower 48. A geographer testing this claim found Maine is more rural than Wyoming. (Courtesy National Park Service)
Wyoming
From toothpaste to beer bottles to industrial batteries, the world relies on Wyoming’s ‘white gold’
By Dustin Bleizeffer
GREEN RIVER, Wyo. — After a four-minute elevator descent into the bowels of southwest Wyoming, dropping deep enough to bury the Empire State Building, a Tata Chemicals trona miner drove two Wyoming journalists in a truck 8.5 miles through catacombs, crossing under unaware motorists on Interstate 80 above, to where a crew was using an electric boring machine to chew into a wall of trona.
The visitors — briefed on safety protocols and equipped with underground attire and emergency devices — trudged through fresh mud bubbling with methane. Sections were added to a chartreuse inflatable tube that unrolled like a party favor and blew fresh air at the miners, who had just finished patching a small water line break.
Beams of light from hard hats swiveled and sparred in the tunnel as the earth moaned and machinery hummed. Soon, the machinery funneled a stream of sandwich-sized chunks of trona onto a fast-moving conveyor that would eventually deliver it to the surface to be processed into a fine, white powder and shipped around the world.
Have you ever brushed your teeth with toothpaste? Drank beer from a bottle or stared at the road through a car windshield? The white stuff — sodium carbonate (Na₂CO₃) to be precise — calms your heartburn and washes your socks. Check under your sink. Take a look in your bathroom cabinet. Many of those taken-for-granted products you use daily require an ingredient sourced from the depths of southwest Wyoming, and the sweat of underground miners.
Tata’s mine, along with its soda ash processing facilities at the surface, is among four such operations in Wyoming — all clustered in an area near the towns of Green River and Granger. Combined, they produce about 10 million tons of soda ash annually and feed 90% of the nation’s soda ash consumption. Wyoming producers make up more than 14% of the global market, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Soda ash, in fact, accounts for more than half of Wyoming’s global commodity exports with a whopping $1.3 billion worth of shipments annually, according to industry officials and state economists.
Wyoming coal can’t say that. Not even close.
Despite the industry’s global importance and massive operations, employing some 2,500 workers in the state, it plods along without much fanfare. Unless you live in the region, you might not even know about trona or its role in everyday life.
“If you’re in Cheyenne and you say ‘trona’ or ‘soda ash,’ a lot of people will say, ‘What’s that?’” said longtime Green River resident Stan Blake who served as House District 39 representative from 2007 to 2020. The business, perhaps, is guilty of being kind of boring, or simply void of political drama, Blake suggested. “It’s just been steady for years and years, so it doesn’t get talked about much.”
It was a mystery, even to many who began their careers in coal mining and wound up at this trona mine. “I wasn’t even aware of trona until I came to Wyoming,” said Mine Electrical Planner Kale Pitt. When asked about the significance of the industry, another Tata miner said, “Other than they make glass and soap out of it, that’s about all I know. It’s a good way to make a living, I guess.”
The miner turned his headlamp and went back to the business at hand.
He was spot on, in Blake’s estimation, who was never a trona miner himself. He spent more than 30 years on the rails and in train yards rather than chipping at trona in Wyoming’s subterranean, but he knows his Green River neighbors and notices toys in driveways.
“The level of lifestyle out here is higher, probably, than a lot of other places in the state,” Blake said. “It seems like everybody’s got a boat and they go out to Flaming Gorge and fish. And everybody — all the miners — like to hunt. The [trona] mines are really, really relevant here in Sweetwater County, that’s for sure.”
Perhaps less glorious than coal, less loud than oil, there are changes afoot in the trona industry with implications, both good and potentially not so good, for Wyoming.
Optimism and expansion
Baking soda and Range Rover windshields aside, Wyoming trona mine owners have been scrambling to meet new opportunities while bracing for headwinds.
On the opportune side, there’s wildly escalating demand for batteries and solar energy panels across the globe, according to industry reports. Though the business of toothpaste and baking soda doesn’t change much, global manufacturers are keen on ramping up production of energy components vital to meeting low-carbon initiatives. They can’t do it without more trona processed into soda ash. And Wyoming has a lot of trona — the largest known deposit in the world, according to industry and federal officials. Ninety percent of the world’s mineable, or “natural,” trona ore is right here in southwest Wyoming, they say.
“The world has an insatiable appetite for soda ash,” said Wyoming Tata’s Director of Governmental Affairs Jon Conrad, also a former Wyoming legislator. By Conrad’s estimation, the industry in Wyoming aims to expand — perhaps even double production in the next eight or so years.
In addition to Tata’s plans to crank out more soda ash while trimming its cost of production, neighboring producer WE Soda — with a larger operation than Tata’s — has launched a multi-billion-dollar expansion that’s crossing permitting milestones. A big part of that effort, “Project West,” will include “solution” mining, or pumping water into the trona deposits to flush the material to the surface rather than sending legions of boat-owning miners underground, according to the company.
Federal regulators also recently advanced permitting for a potential fifth trona operation in the region — Pacific Soda’s proposed Dry Creek Trona Mine project, which would also pull trona via water injection-and-return wells. The operation would create an estimated additional 300 full-time jobs in the region, according to the company.
All of that optimism and investment, however, might stand a little broadside to some shifting market and political winds.
Shifting markets
Wyoming’s trona industry has, for decades, won an advantage for producing “natural” soda ash. It’s pretty simple: mine the rocks, crush them, dissolve and dehydrate the mineral and ship it to customers. But for the past couple of decades, China and Turkey have ramped up production of synthetic soda ash — a product derived from flushing sodium carbonate-containing material from more prevalent, less pure deposits.
Synthetic soda ash threatens to beat out natural soda ash on price, according to industry officials. Though Wyoming producers claim their product is superior for both its quality and lower-carbon footprint, natural soda ash producers must find efficiencies to lower their cost of production.
Solution mining is one major cost-efficiency strategy, according to Conrad. Another is finding alternatives to expensive electrical power and other forms of energy.
Mining trona and processing it into soda ash requires a lot of electricity — about a continuous 32 megawatts at Tata Chemicals, according to the company. One megawatt is enough electricity to power about 750 homes. Tata produces about 90% of its own electricity, via coal and natural gas burners, which also generate steam used in the refining process. But the operation relies on utility provider Rocky Mountain Power for the rest of its electricity needs, and those costs keep climbing. Tata wants to reduce or eliminate its reliance on Rocky Mountain Power by incorporating nuclear energy.
Last year, the company inked a letter of intent with BWXT Advanced Technologies to install up to eight nuclear microreactors on site, boosting Tata’s self-produced electrical power to about 40 megawatts — enough to meet expansion plans without increasing its reliance on Rocky Mountain Power. “The microreactors offer a carbon-free, reliable source of energy that can support [Tata Chemicals’] operations and contribute to the state’s energy portfolio,” the company said in a prepared statement.
But even the industry’s best-laid plans to increase its competitive edge could be derailed by politics. President Donald Trump’s tariff wars take particular aim at China, which accounts for about 10% of Wyoming soda ash sales. If the country retaliates with its own tariffs, it could be a major blow to the industry, according to University of Wyoming Associate Professor of Economics Rob Godby. It might even dampen the industry’s plans to expand operations.
“That could be a really significant impact on our [soda ash] exports,” Godby said.
Back underground, Mine Production Supervisor Eric Castillon proudly described a continual process of increasing production efficiencies in a never-ending effort to sustain the company’s competitive edge.
“This is the trona capital of the world,” Castillon said over the hum of a mobile conveyor carrying rock to the surface. “I can see this mine going for another 50 to 100 years. Trona’s not going anywhere, as long as there’s a need for it.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
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