Cooper Hadaway and a couple of friends were sitting around one afternoon last week, cloistered by coronavirus, when a mountain lion stepped into view through the back door of their Henry’s Road home.
Nearly two dozen U.S. Department Of Interior employees have tested positive for COVID-19, the pandemic that’s intensifying and sweeping across the country.
Although a return to normalcy for Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks is impossible to predict, private businesses that lodge and feed millions of park visitors have penciled in reopening dates.
Ungulates roaming the National Elk Refuge are likely to find fewer alfalfa pellets to eat over the course of this week and none at all by Friday as part of a plan to scale back the historic feeding program.
Antler gatherers and the wardens who police them will no longer have to deal with the darkness as they set out on Wyoming’s shed hunting season.
With COVID-19-related restrictions closing down national parks, the Bridger-Teton National Forest is now more than ever prized by cooped-up Jackson Hole residents needing fresh air and a stretch of the legs.
For all of its history Snow King Mountain has been a small and mostly sleepy ski area, with slow lifts, relatively few people and familiar ski runs cutting through the forest rising over town.
Jack Bayles didn’t hesitate to beeline it for northern Grand Teton National Park when word had it that lumbering grizzly bear 679, a big male who goes by Bruno, was out of his den.
Lee Pico’s job has always been a bit easier because he has been surrounded by people who carry a sense of duty to protect wildlands in and around Yellowstone National Park.
When times get tough, pee in the woods.
With a good many normal activities and tourist destinations derailed by the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Department of the Interior is telling Americans to go play in the outdoors on their federal lands.
Snow King plan meeting called off
Bridger-Teton National Forest officials have extended their deadline for comments on the environmental study of the possible historical, wildlife and recreational benefits and drawbacks of a proposed overhaul of Snow King Mountain.
The Jackson Hole Airport Board has postponed considering Wind River Air’s application to operate scenic helicopter tours from the airport due to coronavirus-related health advisories discouraging public gatherings.
Going into the weekend, the Jackson Hole valley floor had been melting out for weeks, and sunny days with above-average temperatures had zapped a once 17-inch-deep March snowpack down to just 6 inches.
Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks are transitioning into the off-season and beginning to scrape a winter’s worth of snow off of interior roads.
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Turns out bears like corn, too.
The first plague-infected cat was a kitten that turned up dead in the high country between Ditch Creek and the Gros Ventre River some 14 years ago.
Meghan Warren’s “once-in-a-lifetime bird” has gone home.
Seventy-five male sage grouse putting on a show for their hen friends and strutting on local leks this spring may be enough to negate the need to import outside birds this year, biologists agreed last week.
State wildlife biologists are seeking some concessions to protect species like elk as Snow King Mountain Resort prepares to build out already leased acreage in Leeks Canyon.
Potential bird rule rollback
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is taking comments on a proposed rule that limits the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, exempting some industries that kill species protected under the act.
As soon as this April, a scenic helicopter tour business could be authorized to pick clients up at Jackson Hole Airport and overfly places like the Gros Ventre and Jedediah Smith wilderness areas.
Jackson Hole residents have another couple of weeks to weigh in on plans for the most sweeping changes to Snow King Mountain in the ski resort’s history.
One idea that emerged was to punch out Teton Park Road all the way to Jenny or String Lake so that uphill skiers could more easily play up north in exchange for more expansive bighorn sheep closures farther south.
Teton Valley game warden Rob Howe has a pretty good idea of what led to a moose calf dying slowly and painfully last weekend just south of Driggs, Idaho.
On opening weekend for the 2018 rifle season for deer, hunters gathered along the Upper Hoback River, scouting, setting up camp, tracking quarry. Amid the bustle, smoke curled from a ridge Sept. 15 in the Roosevelt Meadows area.
Jackson Hole’s largest elk herd is thriving and appears to have grown slightly over the past year after hunters had a historically tough time finding animals and filling tags.
Shoshone to take bids
The Shoshone National Forest is looking to permit new outfitting and guiding services near the communities of Cody, Dubois and Lander.
Eight trail restoration and reconstruction projects are being proposed on the Bridger-Teton National Forest’s Jackson Ranger District this summer, including in places like Munger Mountain, Upper Cache Creek and Teton Pass.
Numbers of wapiti drawn to the National Elk Refuge’s feed lines are up significantly this winter, with 8,095 animals counted during an assessment a week ago.
In an effort to “strike while the fire is hot,” climate advocates are, for the third time in recent months, organizing a presentation on how the Jackson Hole community can reduce its carbon emissions.
Ken Mills noticed something amiss with the Pinnacle Peak Pack while flying over the National Elk Refuge in mid-January during his routine wintertime wolf census.
A survey crew on skinny skis poled and glided off into the powder, hopeful of finding flocks of sage grouse that had proved sparse all morning in the birds’ usual winter haunts in southern Grand Teton National Park.
Four days after hired gunners flew what unexpectedly became a one-day mission, Grand Teton National Park released results.
Wanted: BLM land consultant
Teton County has released a call for consultant assistance in determining and pursuing alternative ownership or management options for federal property along the Snake and Gros Ventre river corridors.
The U.S. Secretary of the Interior directly intervened in an aerial goat cull underway in the Tetons last Friday, ordering Grand Teton National Park Acting Superintendent Gopaul Noojibail to “stand down.”
The Hole Scroll
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and the chief of his wildlife department reached out to Grand Teton National Park at the last minute to try to stop contracted gunners from killing the Tetons’ nonnative mountain goats.
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Initially, just one adult lioness padding apace with a single kitten stepped into the frame of Jackson Hole resident Tiffany Smith’s Nest home security camera.
A second shot at eliminating nonnative mountain goats from the Teton Range starts Friday.
Rod Newcomb gestured down to an opening in the timber on an untracked powder-covered slope a few hundred yards west of the boundary of Snow King Mountain Resort.
Wind River Air owner Tony Chambers is eager to get his scenic flight business aloft, and some impediments to his operation have been jettisoned.
Environmental attorneys have their sights set on a 3,500-well gas field that overlaps with the state of Wyoming’s only recognized sage grouse winter concentration area and a migration path that’s used by pronghorn that dwell in Jackson Hole.
Stargazing sets speakers
Wyoming Stargazing has announced its 2020 speaker series, “The World Above the Tetons.”
The Bridger-Teton National Forest is assessing whether to double the number of user days allotted to Jackson Hole Mountain Resort ski guides who lead clients out of bounds into the backcountry.
The National Park Service is taking steps to relocate a major bridge spanning the Yellowstone River at Tower about 500 feet south of its current location.
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Wind River Air LLC — the company aiming to offer scenic helicopter tours from Jackson Hole Airport — has been cleared for takeoff by federal aviation officials.
A former federal wildlife health chief says the National Elk Refuge’s plans to reduce feeding are “likely to fail” and it’s doubtful they’d slow the spread of disease.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement officers received word two years ago that several dogs had eaten poison and died just east of Dubois.
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