Lummis said it was a blessing to work with Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and then-Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), while she was still in the House, and with Barrasso and Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) while junior senator of Wyoming since 2021.
That’s the advice of cosmetic laser technicians across Wyoming who erase bad memories of customers who impulsively got tattoos and later regretted them.
“A lot of people will come in and say they are embarrassed by their tattoo,” said Rachel Watson, a technician at Sterling Skin Care Casper. “I tell them don’t be embarrassed, because they were young and dumb, but now have grown up and are trying to get a job and can’t have tattoos.”
Watson treats as many as 25 clients a week. Some of them have been unlucky in love and want tattoos bearing the name of a former spouse or partner eliminated. Others are just dissatisfied with how the tattoo looks.
In the case of face and neck tattoos, some say those hold them back from getting jobs or socializing. Many are also impulsive.
Jackie Dorothy, 12/06/25
Joey Puettman of Sheridan turned his passion for fly-fishing into a career building premium fly fishing rods. Over the past 20 years, Puettman has also taught more than 3,000 people how to fly fish and build their own rods.It all began when Joey Puettman was 9 years old and broke his dad’s fly-fishing rod.
Desperate, Puettman tried to fix it and, when that failed, he blamed his little brother.
Puettman would eventually confess, and his parents responded by buying him a Cabela’s fly rod building kit.
It was a simple kit and Puettman had to use a heavy dictionary as a tensioner for his thread as he wrapped that first rod on his mom's kitchen table.
His performance made the highlight reel for the parade, and his grandfather could not be more proud of “Baby E,” as Brown is known as on the powwow circuit.
He danced hard on the on the asphalt for 2-and-a-half miles,” Abeyta said. “He just stopped and danced his little heart out up to 30 times along the route.”
The pair had been invited this year by Native Pride Productions to perform in New York City over the Thanksgiving holiday.
The pardon of Michelino Sunseri comes after Wyoming Republican U.S. House Rep. Harriet Hageman said she was investigating the case as a possible instance of overzealous prosecution.
"We are thrilled that Michelino's nightmare is over, but we're not done fighting against unconstitutional regulations that give low-level park officials the power to criminalize harmless conduct," said Michael Poon, an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, which defended Sunseri. "We are ready to help other Americans who face criminal prosecution for breaking park rules that were illegally created."
As the country edged closer Tuesday to a federal government shutdown, Walt Schweitzer worried about the two-party checks issued to young grain farmers, which can’t be cashed without the signature of the U.S. Farm Service Agency.
Farmers who use crop proceeds to collateralize FSA direct operating loans must split those checks for grain sold to the local elevator. Those checks will go uncashed as long as FSA signatories are furloughed, said Schweitzer, president of Montana Farmers Union. There were 1,142 Montana farmers with FSA direct operating loans last year. The money they’ve borrowed to pay for seed, fertilizer and other farm basics totaled $118.6 million.
“It’s frozen funds,” Schweitzer said. “These are people that are living on a shoestring, the young farmers.”
Wednesday marks the beginning of a new federal fiscal year, but without a federal budget passed by Congress and no agreement on a short-term funding bill, it appeared agencies would begin the new budget year without money to function.
To excel as a ballerina, Skylar Lippincott, 17, of Thermopolis, Wyoming said you must learn to ignore the pain and push yourself beyond your limits.
“It's a big misconception that ballet is easy,” Lippincott said. “It looks easy but it's so complex because you have to be paying attention to what your body is doing and counting your music at the same time.”
In the Cowboy State when most female athletes are in rodeo or pursuing volleyball and track, Lippincott said that being a ballerina requires nerves of steel and should not be discounted since it is a tough sport.
“A lot of people don't know how difficult it is on your body,” Lippincott said. “It's definitely a full-time commitment that you have to dedicate your entire life to.”
According to Annie Carlson a research coordinator at Yellowstone, the hotel was a ‘cut above the rest.’ which was located just north of Fountain Paint Pot in the Lower Geyser Basin. The three-story structure cost $100,000 to build and could accommodate 350 guests. It boasted 143 rooms, steam heat and baths that used the hot springs water.
“The hotel was fancy given its rustic surroundings, and guests would wear their finest clothes to regular evening balls,” Carlson said.
By David Madison, 09/27/25
Before Wyoming World War II hero Sgt. Thomas L. Cotner left to serve in the Pacific, his mother hosted a dinner party at Club La Vida in Evansville, a restaurant and night club known for its roulette wheel.
The event was noteworthy enough to earn coverage in the local newspaper, which reported the dinner was to honor Tom, who had just finished training at an air base in Illinois.
Tom’s brother and fraternal twin, Ted Cotner, was also in the Army Air Corps and would be stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii, where on Dec. 7, 1941, he saw his first action.
Ted Cotner’s commander praised the young airman for his heroic response to the Pearl Harbor attack.
With a key component of the 2020 Great American Outdoors Act set to expire at the end of this month, the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources is set to meet Friday in Grand Teton National Park to consider whether to continue funding infrastructure in national parks.
The committee includes Wyoming Republican Rep. Harriet Hageman. It’s scheduled to hold an oversight hearing at 10 a.m. at the Jenny Lake Visitor Center in Grand Teton National Park. Several people are scheduled to speak before the committee, including Grand Teton Superintendent Chip Jenkins and Julie Calder, chair of the Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board.
The main topic will likely be the Legacy Restoration Fund section of the Great American Outdoors Act, which was signed into law by President Trump in 2020. The Legacy Restoration Fund (LRF) authorized $1.9 billion per year for five years. That included $1.3 billion for the National Park Service, and the rest for other federal land-management agencies.
Most state and federal agencies in charge of public lands have a standing policy to go after every blaze with everything they’ve got, as soon as possible.
“The State of Wyoming, we do not have a let burn policy, we have a put-out policy, immediately,” Wyoming State Forester Kelly Norris said during a recent interview with Cowboy State Daily Show with Jake Nichols.
“The Bureau of Land Management has that same policy, obviously private lands have that same policy,” she added.
In remote areas of vast National Forest land in Wyoming, the U.S. Forest Service has a more leeway to allow natural fires to burn.
However, that can have dire consequences if a fire escapes a wilderness area, as did the massive Pack Trail Fire in northwest Wyoming in October 2024, Norris noted.
A slurry bomber airplane, under contract with the Wyoming State Forestry Division, helps fight the Muddy Fire near Casper. (Courtesy Russell Haynes, Wyoming State Forestry Division)
The last of summer isn’t for another three weeks, but it’s taking a shockingly large chunk of its daylight before it goes. Between now and the autumnal equinox on Sept. 22, Wyoming will lose more than an hour of daylight.
“We lose an average of 55 minutes a month after the equinox,” said Max Gilbraith, planetarium coordinator at the University of Wyoming. “In the next 18 days, we will lose about an hour and 10 minutes of daylight.”
The loss of daylight will go hand-in-hand with the first bites of winter. Cooler nights, lower humidity, and the first snowfall of the season are all possible before summer’s officially over.
“The first half of September is the period of the year when we lose daylight the fastest,” Gilbraith said.
After nearly four hours of educational presentation and passionate testimony, a legislative committee voted Thursday to draft legislation that could halt cloud seeding programs in Wyoming, ban geoengineering, and deliver a message to Congress.
The message the Joint Agriculture, State & Public Lands and Water Resources Committee voted in favor of drafting and potentially sending to Congress remained unclear to the public as the vote happened Thursday.
No lawmaker had read it aloud or described it ahead of the vote.
This is not just good news for them locally and also for all of Wyoming.
The term “desert” gets used out here in the frontier when we lack things that people are used to seeing in bigger cities. When medical care is limited, the situation is often cited that we live in a medical desert.
Well, this past week, we heard about eight towns (Torrington, Wheatland, Guernsey, Pinedale, Bridger Valley, Lusk, Evanston, and Kemmerer) becoming “news deserts.”
Even in a depressed condition, local newspapers provide key information. About government meetings, births and deaths, little league team victories, lots of stuff about the local school systems . . . the list is almost endless.
There is no definite formula – each town and each newspaper is a little different from each other. But for centuries, people in this country have relied on their local papers for critical news.
Darin Smith’s family announced his swearing-in as interim U.S. Attorney for Wyoming via social media Monday afternoon.
President Donald Trump on July 30 nominated Smith, a Republican, as his pick to fill the position permanently. To win that title, Smith will have to clear a U.S. Senate confirmation process.
Smith hand-delivered his resignation letter to Gov. Mark Gordon’s office early Monday, Gordon’s spokesman Michael Pearlman confirmed to Cowboy State Daily.
“And the governor notified the state party that he had submitted his resignation,” Pearlman added. In vacancies in which the incumbent state legislator resigns, the governor plays a role in the verification and replacement process – of notifying the political party to which the legislator belongs.
The Jetson Plasma Iridescent Hoverboard sells for $148 at Walmart and allows riders to zip around on two wheels.
It’s powered by a lithium-ion battery and on Feb. 1, 2022, one at the Wadsworth home in Sweetwater County allegedly experienced a “thermal runaway,” causing it to burst into flames and burn down the home, according to a lawsuit filed in Wyoming District Federal Court.
Ryan Pasborg was running late for work as he drove past the Wadsworth family home on Highway 374 in James Town in rural Sweetwater County around 4:30 a.m. and saw smoke and flames coming from a bedroom window.
Stephanie suffered “devastating burns covering 35%” of her body, according to court documents.
Weston was also severely burned, but survived, while Pasborg was honored for his heroism.
The full moon will be covered in a blood-red shadow during a total lunar eclipse directly over Wyoming just after midnight March 14.
The moon will pass between the Earth and the sun, darkening its bright surface, and Wyomingites are in a perfect position to take it all in.
The peak of the total lunar eclipse will happen at 12:58 a.m., but the eclipse itself will be an all-night event, which means there will be plenty of opportunities for getting photos — provided the weather cooperates.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were embraced under the previous administration, but the Anti-Woke Caucus is exposing how these “insidious theories have infiltrated so much of our government so that we can start pulling them out,” Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo [pictured right]., told The Daily Signal at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington, D.C., in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on Saturday.
Hageman chairs the Anti-Woke Caucus, a group she says is targeting the “social justice-type nonsense” in America’s schools, medical system, and beyond.
The school has come under fire from the Wyoming Legislature over the past year for issues like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs on campus. Now, the school is launching a “Wyoming First” agenda for teacher education and putting more effort into actively promoting its Wyoming-focused programs.
UW President Ed Seidel told Cowboy State Daily the school’s top priority is trying to figure out how it can help advance the state.
“We are really trying to make a statement to the state that we’re here for the state,” Seidel said. “It’s very important to us that people understand that we’re here for the whole state, no matter where you’re from, and that means every student, every town, every organization across the state.”
Last year, the Legislature cut funding for the school’s DEI office. In response, the UW Board of Trustees cut the office while still retaining some of its services.
