Wyoming
What Is That Weird Boulder Dug Up On Historic Wyoming Ranch?
In a trench meant for a sewer line, a Wyoming ranch family found a massive, nearly spherical boulder that was so out of place, it left them bursting with questions.
Scott Coale and his son William, 18, were digging a trench recently on the Hogg Ranch near Meeteetse, a historic homestead that had been in Scott’s family for over 100 years.
A stubborn and unexpected obstacle blocked the ditch they were digging, interrupting their work.
They found they’d struck a huge boulder that by all appearances, shouldn’t have been there.
“We’d been in putting in a sewer line to a cabin,” Scott said. “There’s no rocks here at all. We were having smooth sailing, and then, all of a sudden, the backhoe struggles.”
William got out of the skid steer he was using to backfill and was surprised by what he found.
The Discovery
“I asked him how big it was because it was in the middle of our ditch to run the sewer line,” Scott said. “He tells me that it is as big as the side-by-side. At first, we’re just kind of joking, but then I realize I don’t know if I can get it out.”
Scott called a friend with a backhoe and they tackled the boulder.
“I had some daylight left and got on the side of it and started digging,” he said. “Next thing I know, I got it out the hole with the backhoe. It was this big old round rock. It just amazed us that it was so perfectly round.”
They set the rock to the side and resumed their chores, although distracted as they tried to figure out what they had found. The boulder is about 4 feet tall and 4 feet wide.
“It’s just weird,” Scott said. “The geology of Wyoming is a great thing. You never know what you’re going to find.”
The family was especially surprised to find the giant boulder because the area it was unearthed in is devoid of rocks.
“I’ve never personally seen anything like that,” William said. “We were just digging and then bam, there is this big old boulder in the ground that’s not normally shaped.”
What On Earth Had They Found?
Unsure of what they had unearthed, Scott’s wife Diane posted the find on the Facebook page Wyoming Rockhounder. She asked if they should try to open it and see what was inside.
There was much debate, but the consensus from other rock enthusiasts was that it’s a sandstone concretion.
“I thought it was interesting that people commented about maybe it was a geode or what might be in it,” Diane said. “So, we did a little bit of research and the geodes are found in limestone rather than sandstone.
“The likelihood of us cutting it up and finding a geode is probably pretty minimal, so we kind of want to leave it the way it is.”
That is a good idea, said geologist and owner of Ava’s Silver and Rock Shop in Thermopolis.
Ava Cole has more than 50 years of experience in the field and is familiar with this type of rock.
“There’s quite a few places around Wyoming that have them,” Cole said. “Sometimes there are iron stains in the middle of them, but they’re not worth cutting into — unless you want to sharpen your blade.”
Just A Rock
Concretions are commonly misunderstood geologic structures, according to the Paleontological Research Institution.
Often mistaken for fossil eggs, turtle shells or bones, they are not fossils. They’re rocks. This common geologic phenomenon occurs in almost all types of sedimentary rock, including sandstones, shales, siltstones and limestones.
There may be fossils surrounding the concretions if it’s in shale but not inside the rock itself.
“The concretions that you find in the shale may have fossils in the shale or crystals,” Cole said. “The concretions themselves are just sandstone. There are no fossils in them. The fossils are not in the sandstone layers, they’re in the shale layers.”
These concretions form inside sediments before they harden into rocks in continuous layers around a nucleus such as a shell or pebble.
Rates of this formation vary, but can sometimes be relatively rapid over as short a period as months to years, the Paleontological Research Institution reports.
“There’s a void in the ground,” Cole said. “It’s like a magnetism to them that attracts different minerals until the sand forms tightly around them. There’s some kind of quartz in it, too. It’s microscopic, but they’re not hollow or anything like that. Not like a geode.”
What Do You Do With It?
“I’ve collected them before and sold them, but don’t get much money out of them,” Cole said. “Even if the family wanted to, they probably couldn’t get anybody to cut it because it is a pretty good-sized rock and you’d have to have a big diamond saw to cut it.
“Anything that big [when] you cut it open, it would be futile because what’s on the outside is mostly on the inside.”
Her suggestion is to let it just sit around in the yard – since it’s always nice to have a round circle rock hanging around.
That is exactly what the Coales plan to do.
“It’s going to be a yard ornament,” Scott said. “I want to be able to showcase it in our front yard. I think it’s cool.”
Collecting Your Own Yard Ornament
These concretions are found throughout the Cowboy State and can be collected even on BLM land.
“A lot of people pick them up,” Cole said. “Between Worland and Ten Sleep, on Rattlesnake Ridge, there’s a whole bunch of them, all different sizes and shapes since they’re not always round. They can be like a peanut or anything like that.”
The Coale family are already avid rockhounds. They have interesting formations on their property that they explore and one area on the historic ranch is dubbed Death Valley because, according to William, it looks like the badlands.
That was why they were even more surprised to find this rock in an area where they normally would not be looking.
“I’m the rock person in the family,” Diane said. “We’d always go find petrified wood and stuff ever since I was a kid but I’m pretty excited about this rock.”
This plain, nearly perfectly round boulder has been added to their family collection as the centerpiece.
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
Wyoming
Casper veteran David Giralt joins race for Wyoming U.S. House seat
Wyoming
Rivalries and Playoff Positioning Highlight Week 11 Wyoming Girls Basketball Slate
It’s Week 11 in the 2026 Wyoming prep girls’ basketball season. That means it’s the end of the regular season. 3A and 4A schools have their final game or games to determine seeding before the regional tournament, or if a team is locked into a position, one last chance to fine-tune before the postseason. Games are spread across four days.
WYOPREPS WEEK 11 GIRLS BASKETBALL SCHEDULE 2026
Every game on the slate is a conference matchup. Several rivalry contests are part of this week’s schedule, such as East against Central, Cody at Powell, Lyman hosting Mountain View, and Rock Springs at Green River, just to name a few. Here is the Week 11 schedule of varsity games WyoPreps has. All schedules are subject to change. If you see a game missing, please email david@wyopreps.com.
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Laramie 68 Cheyenne South 27 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: Lyman 40 Mountain View 26 (conference game)
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Evanston 41 Riverton 39 (conference game)
Final Score: Natrona County 42 Kelly Walsh 38 (conference game) – Peach Basket Classic
Final Score: #4 Thunder Basin 64 Campbell County 32 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: #1 Cody 77 Worland 33 (conference game) – 5 different Fillies with a 3, and Hays led the way with 34 points.
Final Score: #2 Lander 49 Lyman 34 (conference game)
Final Score: #4 Wheatland 51 Douglas 40 (conference game)
Final Score: #5 Powell 48 Lovell 42 (conference game)
Final Score: Burns 56 Torrington 43 (conference game)
Final Score: Glenrock 78 Newcastle 30 (conference game)
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CLASS 4A
Rock Springs at #2 Green River, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#4 Thunder Basin at #5 Sheridan, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cheyenne East at #3 Cheyenne Central, 6 p.m. (conference game)
Jackson at Star Valley, 6 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
#3 Pinedale at Mountain View, 4 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cody at #5 Powell, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
Buffalo at Glenrock, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Newcastle at Buffalo, 12:30 p.m. (conference game)
Glenrock at Rawlins, 3 p.m. (conference game)
Torrington at #4 Wheatland, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
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Gallery Credit: David Settle, WyoPreps.com
Wyoming
Political storm in Wyoming as far-right activist caught handing checks to lawmakers
Controversy has engulfed Wyoming’s state legislature after a conservative activist was photographed handing checks to Republican lawmakers on the state house floor, in an incident that has highlighted intra-conservative divisions and the role of money in the Cowboy state’s politics.
The political storm started on 9 February, when Karlee Provenza, a Democratic lawmaker, took a photo showing Rebecca Bextel, a conservative activist and committeewoman for the Teton county Republican party, handing a check to Darin McCann, a Republican representative, on the legislative floor. Marlene Brady, another Republican representative, stands in the photo’s background, a similar piece of paper pinched between her fingers.
“You have a person from the richest county in the country coming down to Cheyenne to hand out checks on the house floor,” Provenza said. “I have never seen something so egregious.”
Questions around the checks were soon swirling, and answers weren’t forthcoming. When asked what Bextel gave to her, Brady told a reporter for local outlet WyoFile: “I can’t remember.”
Then Bextel herself addressed the incident. “I raised $400,000 in the last election cycle for conservative candidates, and I will be doubling that amount this year,” Bextel wrote on Facebook on 11 February. “There’s nothing wrong with delivering lawful campaign checks from Teton county donors when I am in Cheyenne.”
Since then, it has emerged that the checks came from Don Grasso, a wealthy Teton county donor, who told the Jackson Hole News and Guide that he wrote the checks for Bextel to deliver to 10 Freedom caucus-aligned politicians. Grasso said the checks were intended as campaign contributions, and were not tied to specific legislation. It is unclear how many checks were ultimately delivered, but two of four confirmed recipients include the speaker of the house, Chip Neiman, and John Bear, the former head of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus.
The Wyoming house has formed a legislative investigative committee, and the Laramie county sheriff’s office said they’d open a criminal investigation.
Bextel declined to answer questions from the Guardian. Brady, McCann and Bear did not respond to requests for comment.
Neiman said he considered the criticism a “wraparound smear campaign”. He said: “It never once crossed my mind that this was bribery.
“These legislators, myself included, are now guilty until we can prove that we’re innocent. How is that right in this country? Isn’t that a little bit backwards?”
The scandal has highlighted long-standing divisions in Wyoming’s Republican party, which in recent years has seen a growing divide between old school, more moderate conservatives and a harder-right Freedom Caucus.
Several former Republican lawmakers forcefully condemned their colleagues for accepting the checks, and a local Republican party branch called for the lawmakers’ resignations.
Ogden Driskill, a Wyoming Republican senator, told the Guardian he does not consider Bextel’s actions to be illegal, but that “just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should”.
Bextel has spent years pushing against housing mitigation fees in Wyoming, and Driskill noted that she distributed the house floor checks just days before a bill she had publicly supported was set to be heard. Bextel was registered as a member of the press, not as a lobbyist when she delivered the checks.
“Ethically and morally, it’s bankrupt to a massive degree,” Driskill said.
Neiman said that he and other legislators who received checks have supported similar bills in the past: “Bribery is paying somebody to do something they would not otherwise do.”
Nationally, the 2024 election cycle saw record-spending from the mega-wealthy, as well as dark money groups. Wyoming followed the trend, in a tense red-on-red primary season.
For those gearing up to campaign this year, Teton county, the richest in the US, and Bextel’s picturesque home turf, is an essential stop. Its extreme wealth gives it a foothold on the national level as well. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp and Donald Trump attended an annual Republican leadership fundraiser at Jackson Hole in 2024, and JD Vance attended the same one in 2025.
Bextel pulls dollars from Teton county into the Freedom Caucus side of Wyoming’s conservative split. She hosted no-press-allowed meet and greets earlier this year benefitting leading candidates for Wyoming’s governor and open US House seat.
In an interview with the Open Range Record, a media network she co-founded, Bextel said controversy around the checks was solely because she was making “even playing field” in Wyoming against the state’s more moderate Republicans, who she calls “George Soros” candidates. She said that she will be sure to keep raising money – just away from the legislative floor.
“I guess I’m gonna ask all the gentlemen and gentleladies to step outside the Capitol while I hand them a check,” Bextel said. “Let me be clear: I’m doubling down.”
But it’s not just wealthy local donors putting their weight behind the factions. Last election cycle, out of state groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on anonymous and often inaccurate mailers.
“These actors, especially from the far right, they like to push the bounds of the norms,” said Rosa Reyna Pugh, an organizing and advocacy consultant at Western States Center, an Oregon-based non-profit focused on democracy in the western United States. “They like to see what policies they can kind of push, and see where they can play a piece,” Reyna Pugh said.
While Neiman and Driskill fight politically, they do agree on one thing: summer will bring an expensive and brutal campaign season.
“You’re going to see more dark money than you’ve ever seen. We’ve done absolutely nothing to enforce it. Our secretary of state has not even made a slight attempt to deal with it,” Driskill said. “You’re going to see lots and lots of outside money and I think you’re seeing it on both sides.”
As national questions swirl around pay-to-play politics and profiteering in the Trump administration, Provenza wants better for the Cowboy State.
“We should not be aligning ourselves with how the federal government is conducting itself or how federal elections conduct themselves,” Provenza said. “We owe something far better and more honest to the people of Wyoming than that.”
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