Wyoming
Wandering hunters stumble on plane crash, save pilot from inferno in Wyoming woods
A pair of hunters went from wandering in the wrong direction through the Wyoming wilderness to pulling an injured pilot out of a raging inferno after his tiny plane crashed Sunday morning.
The two men, who were coincidentally expertly trained to rescue the wounded pilot, had suffered a series of setbacks during their hunting trip — including heading the wrong way while avoiding grizzly bears — that put them in the right place to see and respond to the fiery crash, according to a report.
Steve Atencio, a Black Hawk pilot for the Wyoming Army Guard and former firefighter, and JR Larsen, an ex-athletic trainer, heard a loud bang at around 10:45 a.m. and rushed into action in the town of Meeteetse.
After searching around the area, they told Cowboy State Daily they spotted thick smoke rising from the trees and called for help.
Atencio quickly deployed a Garmin inReach device to send out an SOS as neither man had cell service. While attempting to get in touch with emergency agencies, the pair trekked toward the crash site carrying around 40 pounds of equipment each in case they needed it.
“We were both blasting through the trees as fast as we could,” Atencio told the newspaper.
As Atencio was working with first responders who finally received his dire message, Larsen ran slightly ahead down a muddy hill, tripping a few times, as he tried to reach the source of the smoke as quickly as possible.
When the pair reached the downed plane, Larsen reportedly shouted, “Is anybody there?”
The pilot responded and called out for help as he was lying face down near the fire with his hands under his head. He told the hunters he believed his back was broken, though his arms and legs were still moving.
The pilot also told Larsen he believed his passenger, later identified as 78-year-old Mary Lou Sanderson, was dead.
“That’s when it started to hit home how serious this was,” Larsen told Cowboy State Daily.
As the fire edged toward the pilot and burning branches began to fall around them, both Larsen and Atencio went to great length to tug the pilot to safety.
They said they first placed a tarp under his body, but it ripped. They then turned Atencio’s pack frame into a makeshift harness and strapped it onto the pilot to carry him away, the outlet reported.
As they pulled the man through thick greenery, the pair also had to be careful with the severe burns the pilot suffered.
At one point, the pilot reportedly told them, “Leave me here,” but the rescuers were able to get him to a safe spot.
Eventually, a rescue helicopter landed about 75 yards from the crash site with Atencio’s guidance and transported the pilot to a hospital in Montana where he is currently receiving treatment, according to the news outlet.
His passenger was confirmed dead.
For the hunters, it almost felt like fate that they were in the right place at the right time to rescue the pilot, they told the local paper.
“Nothing about where we were headed was part of the plane,” Larsen told Cowboy State Daily. “For whatever reason, that’s where we were put.”
Wyoming
Wyoming authorities call on Rocky Mountain Power to explain role in massive November power outage
by Dustin Bleizeffer, WyoFile
The massive, multiple-utility power outage last fall that left some 250,000 customers across parts of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana without electricity was the result of miscommunication and inadequate procedures during planned maintenance that required de-energizing a power line in southcentral Wyoming, according to a report.
The Nov. 13 incident left thousands of homes and businesses without power for 9.5 hours — longer, in some cases — and knocked out a coal-powered generator outside Glenrock. The unit at the Dave Johnston Power Plant remains offline, leaving Rocky Mountain Power to backfill some 300 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 225,000 homes.
Without expressly assigning blame to any one party, the report — conducted by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — indicates a series of communication breakdowns between PacifiCorp (parent company of Rocky Mountain Power), the Western Area Power Administration and, to some degree, electrical grid coordinating teams.
While it’s unclear whether authorities such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation might pinpoint fault and assess penalties, the Wyoming Public Service Commission has called on Rocky Mountain Power to appear at a hearing scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. The commission wants to hear from the utility about “the specifics and details of the event and report,” a public notice announced, and it “may consider and take any action that is in the public interest.”
The hearing at the Public Service Commission’s office located at 2515 Warren Avenue, Suite 300, in Cheyenne, will also be livestreamed at this link.
What happened
According to the 49-page report published in June, PacifiCorp and the Western Area Power Administration were coordinating maintenance on their respective systems that, together, required temporarily de-energizing PacifiCorp’s Aeolus–Clover 500 kilovolt line, which runs east-west and is anchored, in part, by a substation near Medicine Bow.
The effort also required curtailing some local wind energy from feeding the grid, according to the report. But on the day of the planned maintenance, Nov. 13, there was confusion about whether the Western Area Power Administration would scrap its work, so wind energy wasn’t curtailed as originally planned.
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Wind turbines near Cheyenne poke into a colorful sunrise in January 2025. (Tennessee Watson/WyoFile)
The report indicates that modeling tools might have failed to accurately measure local grid conditions, so when the power line was de-energized, “power flow rapidly redistributed throughout the northeast portion” of the local grid. “Within six seconds,” according to the report, “an electrical island formed and collapsed, causing widespread effects across that portion of the interconnection.
“The disturbance,” the report continues, “culminated in the loss of more than 4,800 [megawatts] of generation from coal, natural gas, photovoltaic and wind resources.”
The cascading power failure began at about 12:45 p.m. on a Thursday, dragging down portions of service territories operated by Rocky Mountain Power, Black Hills Energy, Montana-Dakota Utilities and some rural electric co-ops.
The report points to failures in communication, process deficiencies and inadequate modeling tools. Wind energy was not “identified as a contributing factor,” according to the report. It credits both battery storage and wind energy throughout the impacted area for supporting “a faster frequency recovery across the interconnection” and for providing “readily available capacity during system restoration.”
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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