Congress largely rejected those cuts the last time around, but the administration is trying again, hoping to bully Congress into further weakening the management and protection of our public land.

A major part of Burgum’s strategy has been to continue the administration’s policy of driving out the people who do the work. Over the past year, Elon Musk’s DOGE-driven firings and buyouts gutted the Interior Department’s workforce. About a quarter of National Park Service employees have left since January 2025, including rangers, biologists, historians and maintenance workers, all pushed out through waves of terminations and early retirement offers. There’s also been the slow demoralization of being told your life’s work doesn’t matter.

This month, Interior announced yet another round of buyouts, the latest effort to thin the ranks of the people who keep trails open and fight wildfires.

What’s almost hard to believe is the policy of erasing history itself. Under orders from Secretary Burgum and President Trump, the National Park Service has removed or flagged for removal hundreds of interpretive signs and exhibits across the country.

At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia—the birthplace of the 250-year-old democracy that we’re about to celebrate—an exhibit about enslaved people at the President’s House has been removed. At the Grand Canyon, signs acknowledging that white settlers displaced Native American Tribes were taken down. At the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, some 80 items have been flagged for removal. At Stonewall National Monument, the Pride flag came down.

Climate science has been banished from Glacier National Park, and Grand Teton removed a sign about an army officer who bragged about the massacre of more than 170 Piegan Blackfeet people. The stories of Japanese American internment in the western states, of women’s suffrage, of labor rights—all deemed unpatriotic by an administration that believes you can only honor America’s 250th birthday by pretending half of its history never happened.

At the end of March, Burgum also convened the “God Squad,” officially known as the Endangered Species Committee, for the first time in more than three decades. Its meeting lasted less than 30 minutes, yet the committee voted unanimously to exempt all oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from the Endangered Species Act. The decision will almost certainly doom the Rice’s whale, a species found nowhere else on Earth, of which roughly 50 remain. It was the first time national security has been invoked to override the Endangered Species Act, and conservationists warn that it will not be the last.

As for the U.S. Forest Service, draconian cuts in its staff are planned along with wholesale closings of regional offices and dozens of research stations. The agency’s reorganization also includes moving its main headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah.

This administration has made its intent clear: Cut budgets, drive out the workforce, erase history, greenlight extinction. Energy extraction is paramount, while conservation, research, and preservation are all values that can be discarded.

These are not disconnected policy decisions. They are part of the coherent vision of a cabinet secretary who sees public lands as surplus inventory and history as a branding problem.

But this is what Doug Burgum will learn: Americans are not going along with it. Polling shows that nearly 80 percent of the public opposes removing factual history from national parks. More than 99 percent of public comments opposed rolling back roadless protections for national forests. Congress rejected the worst of last year’s budget cuts, and it will be pressed to do so again. When the administration, aided by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, tried to sell off public lands through the reconciliation bill, bipartisan outrage killed it.

Doug Burgum can propose all the budget cuts he wants, but he will face determined opposition from all of us who treasure our public lands.

Aaron Weiss, director of the Center for Western Priorities, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues.

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In this period between buckskin and billionaires, novelist Tim Sandlin, who died March 29, spun decades of living into 11 novels. Born in Oklahoma in 1950, Sandlin moved to Jackson Hole to build a life, and once there, he established a writers’ coalition and conference, raised a family and wrote regularly at the back table of Pearl Street Bagels on Pearl Avenue.

He plucked his characters’ eccentricities from the skiers, carpenters, cowboys, waitresses, motel maids and climbing and river guides he lived among. He worked more than 40 entry-level and service jobs, including elk skinner, dishwasher, cook at the Lame Duck restaurant, and copy editor and columnist at the Jackson Hole News.

The New York Times called his last novel, Lit, “slightly unhinged.” It’s about book burning, a coffee shop and a dead preacher. Readers shouldn’t be too bent on solving a murder, author Sarah Weinman wrote. “Spending time with the quirky, unforgettable characters is a lot more important.”

Sandlin fashioned many of his dramatis personae from real souls of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s West. He lived in the Glenwood Arms, an ageing warren of nine apartments originally built for nurses at St. John’s Hospital. Over time, the Arms morphed into a compound contained by the back wall of the Jackson Hole Guide and encompassing Teton Cyclery, plus the headquarters of Jackson Hole Mountain Guides.

Sandlin adopted the slopeside patoisof linguistic shortcuts and nicknames that became kind of a local code. “Every idea Sandlin had, he saw from his window at the Glenwood Arms,” said K.B., former co-owner of the Cyclery. The Arms’ residents included a master glassblower, a virtuoso luthier, artists, musicians, resort workers, and the astrologer and gemologist Janet Planet, whose window flower box fed the neighborhood moose.

From his perch at the Arms, Sandlin could witness the annual departure of the editor of the Jackson Hole Guide, which had a sack-happy publisher. He might also have seen two police actions at the compound, one with guns trained on a knife-wielding resident, who was perhaps the third part of a love triangle. The other raid responded to reports of illicit smoke.

Cyclery mechanic Marty lived nearby in a single-wide with walls covered by sarcastic artwork. Three bike riders—known locally as Hajji, the Emir and Peter—left through one door of the Cyclery in 1980, then came back through the other door six and a half years later. They’d ridden around the world.

Jim Stiles, then editor and publisher of Moab’s Canyon Country Zephyr, spent several desert summer interregnums at The Arms. Moseying to the Town Square one day, he caught sight of “the ugliest man I’d ever seen.” It was the villain of the nightly shootout melodrama, one-eyed Clover the Killer, who never wore an eye patch.

Other compound characters left their mark. Dr. Liu built the first machine to mass-produce Croakies, the neoprene strap that saves your spiffy sunglasses when rolling a kayak. Cyclery co-owner Wendell’s special quesadilla is still on the Merry Piglets menu. Flat Ed got his name after his ’69 VW bus slipped off its jack while he worked underneath.

Today, “The Glenwood” stands at the site of the razed Glenwood Arms. It offers three-bedroom townhomes for $6.5 million. Just across the street there’s the Browse ’n Buy thrift store. Second-hand Ralph Lauren button-downs are now up to $8.

Sandlin’s career tells of a just-gone era, reminding me that imagination and literature enrich us as we learn about the humanity just outside our windows. There’s more about him in the Jackson Hole News&Guide, where they drop the paywall for obituaries to allow the living to keep up with the dead. You can find a collection of his newspaper columns that reflect the valley’s weekly dramas in his book The Pyms.

Angus M. Thuermer Jr. is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a reporter at the nonprofit WyoFile and former editor of the Jackson Hole News. A decades-long Jackson Hole resident, he is also a graduate of Sandlin’s Write Your Novel class.Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues.

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On March 4, in senseless acts of violence, Linda, my neighbor, and her niece Natalie Graves were murdered at the base of that mountain.

The murderer, on a road trip from Iowa, had been stranded in Wayne County after hitting an elk and totaling his truck. Broke and in need of a car, he first killed 86-year-old Margaret Oldroyd in nearby Lyman. The much-loved elder had the fatal luck to live at the edge of town, in the first house the murderer came to.

After killing Mrs. Oldroyd, he decided her Buick Regal was unsatisfactory. When he encountered Linda and Natalie setting out on a hike, he murdered them both, took their Subaru, and went on his way, leaving behind nothing but grief.

Using an app connected to the Subaru’s key fob, authorities tracked him for 400 miles to Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and arrested him the next day. His killings were brutal and senseless—and utterly random. Any of us could have been pulling into that trailhead.

Linda and her husband Alan retired here five years ago, to revel in this wild country surrounding Capitol Reef National Park. Natalie, 34, was visiting from Massachusetts.

The Deweys were the exceptional retirees who quickly became embedded in the community. Alan volunteered for Capitol Reef’s biologists, scouting for bighorn sheep and cougar. Linda, a spirited connector, ran yoga classes and helped found a public service group, Rural Voices of Utah.

Margaret Oldroyd was a connector, too. Hundreds attended her LDS funeral, both newcomers and the extended Mormon families who had known her throughout their lives, all honoring this kind “guardian at the edge of the town’s heart,” as her memorial card put it.

Neither Torrey nor Lyman numbers more than 300 people. I-70 is 35 miles away—with no services for 110 miles. The county has no stoplights. In 1940, 2,500 people lived in Wayne County’s 2,500 square miles. We’ve since added just 100 people.

Relationships among these scattered communities are tight but complicated. Legacy Mormon families dominate. Torrey is the anomaly, full of newcomers. The murderer struck all three county demographics: proud settlers, thrilled move-ins, and one joyful and awestruck visitor.

These violent acts by a stranger who knew nothing about these people or this place disrupted our sense of safety. As I grapple with raw sorrow, I try to imagine the flood of grief following a mass shooting or a community devastated by war. Unimaginable, we say. Now, I understand viscerally.

Even as we all were texting updates and talking in the aisles of the county’s sole grocery store, our community felt quiet, pulled inward.

Utah’s canyon country has always been a source of rejuvenation and connection for me—the kaleidoscope of rocks, raucous pinyon jays, the legacy of millennia of inhabitants. I picture these connections as a web of humming cables, vibrating through time in unique chords, leading outward to every being, every person, every influence. This vast bundle of life and existence whirrs continually, creating the comforting harmonic tone that defines this place.

There’s tension, sure, between the conservative politicians who rule the county and the conservation-oriented move-ins. But the violence that came unbidden eclipses our differences. We are leaning on each other in our loss. Maybe some of that solidarity will last.

Pink ribbons now encircle every post and sign as a gesture to our loss. As Tonya Moosman, who works at the grocery store, told a reporter: “When somebody asks where you’re from, you don’t say Bicknell or Loa. You say Wayne County. We are one community.”

In Navajo culture, such fracturing violence requires a ceremony to restore balance, to heal. For those of us who are not Native, we’ll need the powers of both land and community to get back to the reassurance and resonance of this place. 

The women we lost knew something of that power. The solidarity of the community after their deaths amplifies that power. We’ll be looking for ways to reconnect with everything that makes this place special, as this place—our place—helps us to heal what a heedless man has broken.

Utah writer and photographer Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent non-profit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. His book, The Capitol Reef Reader, is a tribute to his home landscape.

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Across the country, we have watched as ICE officers roam the streets like rogue paramilitaries, covering their faces as they arrest suspected “illegal” immigrants, sometimes at gunpoint. The Department of Homeland Security claims that agents must conceal their identities from the public due to the inherent risks of their jobs.

But just how dangerous is ICE’s work?

According to government data, not very. Between 1915 and 2025, 76 immigration enforcement agents died on the job. The last officer to die from a gunshot wound, James Holdman Jr. in 2021, had accidentally discharged his own weapon. Jaime Jorge Zapata died in the line of duty in 2011, but he was gunned down in Mexico while assisting narcotics investigators.

A handful of other officers have died since 2011, but from medical complications unrelated to their work as federal officers. According to the Cato Institute, the likelihood of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being killed at work is “5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered.” In fact, ICE agents are more likely to die from COVID-19 or cancer than from a violent attack at work.

The risks of ICE’s work seem pedestrian when compared to those of other professions—including education. As a professor at Fort Lewis College, I walk into the classroom every day acutely aware of the threats facing me and my colleagues. Sadly, we know that shootings remain a clear risk to all educators, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, violence against teachers is higher than for any other non-policing occupation.

Despite this, teachers across the nation don’t step into classrooms wearing masks, though some politicians have urged them to arm themselves to “level the playing field.” Educators understand that success in the classroom depends on building relationships, fostering trust and helping young people maintain a sense of connection with others.

Can you imagine it any other way? Envision, for example, a college professor lecturing on chemical reactions or best business practices in a ski mask with a loaded 9mm strapped to their hip.

Democracy lives and dies on the hill of transparency. I think we all realize that any public entity that attempts to operate anonymously undermines the community’s trust.

Our system of governance relies on checks and balances that melt away when public servants hide their identities.  Masks make it more difficult to hold individuals accountable for their actions, which increases the likelihood of misconduct. This is particularly concerning in the case of law enforcement officers, as they alone are entrusted with the use of deadly force

When officers can be clearly identified, they are more likely to act with humility and responsibility, as they know that their actions are subject to public scrutiny and the law.

Educators understand the power of visibility like few others. It is not just about being seen, it is about being responsible. In the classroom, we model behavior, build rapport and create safe spaces where students feel valued and heard. This should be a universal standard for all public officials, including ICE officers.

But let’s be honest. ICE officers don’t wear masks because their job is risky. They wear masks to instill fear while shielding themselves from the public they are supposedly protecting. Masks allow agents to cross constitutional lines without their friends and neighbors knowing what they do during the day. Hidden under their masks, ICE agents routinely rough up, and even kill, migrants and protesters while violating constitutional rights such as due process and protection from unlawful searches and seizures.

It’s time to unmask ICE. If teachers across the United States can walk into classrooms unprotected, then surely federal officers—armed with bullet proof vests and deadly weapons—can perform their duties with a name, a face and a badge number.

Benjamin Waddell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes in Durango, Colorado.

Dave

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The slaughter of the buffalo was a tragedy for all Western Indian tribes—including every tribe in Montana—because the animals were everything to Native people. Bison provided food, shelter clothing and tools. They were central to spiritual practices. Their destruction was also a central part of the federal campaign to subdue and dispossess tribal nations.

But before the last smoke from the buffalo guns had cleared, Native visionaries had acted. A Salish man known as Attice trailed a few surviving bison across the Continental Divide to Montana’s Flathead Valley. That small herd would become critical seedstock for rebuilding bison herds in both the United States and Canada.

Through Attice’s efforts, state and federal agencies across the West were later able to establish small herds on refuges and wildlife management areas. Over the last 50 years, Western tribes have also led determined efforts to restore buffalo on reservation lands.

Tribes have also benefited from partnerships with conservation organizations that share a vision of big, healthy bison herds grazing across large landscapes. Chief among these partners is American Prairie, which for the past 25 years has worked to restore intact grasslands on public and private lands adjacent to Montana’s Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. As part of its work, American Prairie has also provided both technical expertise and buffalo to many tribal nations rebuilding their herds.

Yet even with these initiatives, there are only a few thousand truly wild buffalo today, and they occupy just a tiny fraction of their former range across the American and Canadian prairies. Why?

The persecution of bison continues—nowhere more so than in Montana. Governor Greg Gianforte’s administration has opposed any expansion of wild buffalo populations and has relentlessly pressured the federal Bureau of Land Management to reverse earlier, positive bison decisions.

Bowing to this pressure, the BLM has denied a request by American Prairie to convert existing federal grazing permits from cattle to bison in eastern Montana. What’s worse, the BLM has terminated other bison grazing permits the organization had lawfully held for years.

Given the stakes, the Coalition of Large Tribes—advocating for more than 50 tribal nations, including the Blackfeet Nation and the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana—has filed a formal protest of the BLM’s unprecedented and unlawful decision. Federal law is clear: statutes affecting tribes must be interpreted in their favor, and ambiguities must be resolved to protect tribal rights.

The consequences of the BLM’s illegal action are immediate and profound. Terminating these permits disrupts herd genetics, intertribal gifting traditions, treaty territories, and longstanding cooperative relationships. It also establishes a dangerous precedent for other federal agencies engaged in tribal co-stewardship and wildlife restoration, not only for Montana tribes but for tribes everywhere.  If bison being managed for conservation can be categorically excluded from federal lands, decades of collaborative progress are jeopardized.

Perhaps most alarming, this decision amounts to rulemaking by fiat. In order to reach the result demanded by the Gianforte administration, the BLM acted without meaningful consultation with either tribes or the public.

Federal law is clear. Actions and decisions affecting tribes require consultation, yet no meaningful effort has been made by either the BLM or the Gianforte administration to fulfill this binding obligation.  If this failure to consult is allowed to stand, tribes across the West will be harmed by the precedent. 

Montana and the federal government face a defining choice: They can cling to outdated policies that ignore history, science, and treaty obligations, or they can honor tribal leadership, uphold the law and help restore a species that once defined this land.

The future of Montana’s prairies depends on that choice.

The writers are Montana state legislators and contributors to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. Tyson Running Wolf is a member of the Blackfeet Nation who chairs the Montana Native American Caucus in the state legislature. Tom France represents Missoula in the Montana Legislature and works with the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council on buffalo conservation issues.

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Without an April-May miracle, human-caused climate change likely will finally catch up with the Colorado River—and the 40 million people who rely on it—in the form of a full-blown crisis later this year.

“Drought” may be too hopeful a word, since it implies an eventual end. Most climate scientists refer to the phenomenon as “long-term aridification,” caused by a lack of rain and snow and warming temperatures.

The West has just experienced its warmest winter since record-keeping began in 1895. The average October-through-December temperature in some parts of the region has been more than 8° F warmer than the 20th-century mean. This is a huge anomaly.

In Gunnison County, Colorado, one of the colder places in the nation, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 19° F. That doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that back in 1990, another dry, warm winter, the corresponding measure was 13.6° F. For the Upper Colorado River Basin, the average minimum temperature for that four-month stretch was about 26° F, the warmest on record.

The warmer temperatures tinker with the health of the watershed.

This water year, which began Oct. 1, started out with record-high precipitation in some areas, most of which fell as rain. That helped fend off severe drought conditions. But what really counts is the mountain snowpack, which serves as a giant natural reservoir that supplies at least 70% of the Colorado River’s water each year. Warm temperatures have left some areas snow-free even in parts of Wyoming, where the white stuff normally would be piled high in March.

The diminishing snow has, in turn, shrunk the Colorado River. The “natural” flow—or an estimate of how much water the river would carry without upstream diversions or human consumption—has been below 15 million acre-feet (MAF) at Lees Ferry during 20 of the last 26 years, with an average flow of 12.25 MAF during that time.

This matters, because when the Colorado River Compact of 1922 parceled out the river’s waters, the river was assumed to carry an average annual flow of at least 16.5 MAF. Demand has significantly exceeded supply for the last 26 years, forcing the drawdown of the watershed’s big savings accounts, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, to about one-third of their capacity.

Meanwhile, to comply with the Colorado River Compact of 1922—the document that serves as the Ten Commandments for the management of the river’s waters—the Upper Basin States must release, on average, at least 7.5 MAF from Glen Canyon Dam each year.

Given that the Upper Basin states need a bunch of water to keep their cities and farms from drying up, and that an additional 800,000 acre-feet evaporates or seeps into the underlying rocks at Lake Powell each year, you can see how the warming climate wreaks havoc on the math of the Colorado River.

The entire river system now teeters on the brink, and this year’s snow drought may be what pushes it over the edge.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast says Lake Powell’s surface level is likely to drop below the minimum level needed for power production later this year. This so-called “deadpool” would not only mean the end of hydropower production, it would also force all of the dam’s releases to go through the river’s 8-foot-wide, steel outlet tubes, which were not made for sustained use. This could compromise the tubes and the dam itself.

It’s possible that the dam would even be shifted to a run-of-the-river operation, in which releases equal the amount of water flowing into the reservoir, minus evaporation and seepage. That would almost certainly result in water shortages downstream, at the very least for the Central Arizona Project, which serves the Phoenix metro area.

This quandary didn’t sneak up on us.

The seven Colorado River states and the federal water managers can’t agree on who should make what cuts in consumption. The feds, meanwhile, haven’t gotten around to re-engineering Glen Canyon Dam or creating a bypass around it that would enable the water to keep flowing. It’s almost as if they’ve been paralyzed by the belief that dry winters were just a minor glitch.

Now, as the spring runoff gets underway, it has become clear that nature won’t save us: We have no choice but to live within increasingly meager limits.

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and author about the West.

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The BLM is America’s biggest landlord, responsible for over 245 million acres of our public lands. That’s more than 10% of the total land in the United States, which means that the management policies of BLM have enormous impacts, especially in the West where it is by far the largest landowner.

The agency’s website proclaims: “The Bureau of Land Management’s mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.” BLM’s record at living up to that mission is at best debatable, given the agency’s long accommodation of ranching, timber and fossil fuel interests. What’s not debatable is that under this administration the BLM intends to go hog-wild on resource extraction.

There is no more extreme example of this than BLM’s proposal to revise the Resource Management Plans for Western Oregon BLM Lands. 

These plans cover management of some of the most diverse and ecologically significant conifer forests in the world, vital for providing clean water, carbon sequestration, and essential habitat for endangered species including northern spotted owls, marbled murrelets, and coho salmon.  Their irreplaceable importance was acknowledged in 1995’s Northwest Forest Plan, which covered both BLM and Forest Service lands in the range of the northern spotted owl. 

That Forest Plan established a network of Late Successional Reserves protected from logging, included an Aquatic Conservation Strategy to protect key watersheds, and mandated a Survey and Manage program to provide the data needed for stewardship of at-risk species.

BLM never fully committed to these strong conservation protections, and the agency effectively withdrew its lands from the Forest Plan in its 2016 Western Oregon Plan Revision. Since then, it has repeatedly failed to live up to its own weakened standards. Now, it has decided that even those are too restrictive.

On February 19, the agency released its proposed new Resource Management Plan. It would open nearly 2 million acres to clear-cutting with no protections for remaining old growth. It would completely eliminate Late Successional Reserves and would further reduce 2016’s weakened riparian protections. It would open all currently designated Areas of Critical Environmental Concern for re-evaluation, potentially eliminating the designations and opening them up for logging.

And the bottom-line goal? To quadruple the logging volume on Western Oregon BLM forests, returning these public lands to the “robust” levels of the 1960s and 1970s. Those days of rampant and unsustainable clear-cutting led directly to the public outcry against the destruction of the Pacific Northwest’s ancient forests, and to the necessity for the Northwest Forest Plan. Now BLM wants to turn back the clock as if that destruction never happened.

If the landlords of a big apartment building were proposing something radical—say, the demolition of the top 10 floors—they would certainly call a public meeting, right? They’d provide ample time for tenants to make their voices heard, right? Not if the landlord is the Bureau of Land Management.

The Federal Register notice specifies a mere 30 days for public comments on this radical proposal: All must be received by March 23 and can only be provided digitally or by mail. There will be no public meetings.

We, the people, to whom these forests belong, will be given no opportunity to look officials in the eye and demand that they provide scientific or legal justification for this wholesale abandonment of responsible forest management.

These magnificent forests are not fiber farms. They do not belong to the Bureau of Land Management or to the logging companies waiting to move in and reap quick profits. They are held in trust for the American people. BLM’s proposed new plan would destroy these forests, and that trust.

Still, we can act. The following are the only available ways to comment on the proposed Resource Management Plan:

 Through BLM’s website: https://eplanning.blm.gov, Project Number DOI-BLM-ORWA-0000-2026-0001-RMP-EIS.

 Via Email: BLM_OR_Revision_Scoping@blm.gov.

 By snail mail: Attention BLM OR930: 1220 SW 3rd Ave, Portland, OR 97204.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and ecologist in Oregon.

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In 2024, Cody Roberts of Daniel, Wyoming mowed down a wolf with a snowmobile, dragged her into a bar, tormented her in front of patrons while she was still alive, and later killed her. The public reaction to this brutality—across the United States and abroad—was overwhelming shock, especially after learning that the wolf’s torment carried only a small fine.

But the state Legislature declined to act to make wolf-killing-by-snowmobile illegal. In Wyoming, one can still run over some animals so long as the stunned animal is “quickly” killed.

Sublette County Attorney Clayton Melinkovich, however, convened a grand jury in August 2025 to take up the case. Though this was an unusual move in the Cowboy State, he secured an indictment against Roberts for felony animal cruelty, which included a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

By accepting a plea deal in February, Roberts avoided a trial, and last week, on March 5, he appeared before Sweetwater County Judge Richard Lavery in Sublette County District Court to change his plea to “guilty.” Judge Lavery did not immediately sentence Roberts; instead, he is waiting for a pre-sentence investigation report from a probation and parole officer, who must first conduct a substance abuse assessment of Roberts.

If the plea deal is accepted by the court, the prison sentence is suspended and fine reduced to $1,000. Roberts would also be prohibited from hunting, fishing, consuming alcohol, or entering bars or liquor establishments, and would need to complete a substance-abuse treatment plan.

Animal cruelty does not occur in a vacuum. Decades of research show strong correlations between the abuse of animals and various forms of interpersonal violence. By insisting on a felony charge, mandated treatment and strict conditions, the County Attorney has affirmed that cruelty to wildlife is wrong on its own terms and has implications to the health and safety of the human community as well.

This was a disturbing case, and the victim was a wild wolf—an animal deemed a “predator” under state law, and one frequently vilified by Wyoming lawmakers. Yet despite the heated rhetoric surrounding wolves, several polls show that Wyomingites did not approve of Roberts’ actions. We also know from newer surveys that hunters, ranchers, rural Wyoming residents and people calling themselves conservatives all hold a broad reverence for both wolves and grizzly bears.

The attitudes of Wyoming’s wildlife authorities appear to be shifting as well. In another, more recent case, three Wyoming men were charged with tormenting a moose by trying to ride it.

These and other developments make this a moment of reckoning for lawmakers and wildlife officials who have repeatedly resisted outlawing vehicular killing of wildlife, or who have shied away from strengthening anti-cruelty laws.

For too long, Wyoming has been an outlier in tolerating extreme cruelty toward its wild carnivores. But the disposition of the Roberts case shows that the state does have tools and even the willpower to protect animals. This case began with the malicious use of a snowmobile to run down an animal. Now, several polls show that Wyomingites oppose killing wildlife with vehicles, which gives public officials in the next Legislative session an opening to prohibit this debased practice.

When Cody Roberts proudly showed off his maimed wolf on social media, he made more news than he anticipated, spotlighting Wyoming’s heartless “predator-zone” policies, where wolves and other animals can be killed cruelly by almost any means.

It’s up to state legislators now to strengthen existing legal frameworks, close exemptions for animals labeled as “predators,” and do away with the “predator zone” encompassing over 80% of the state.

The plea deal does not undo the suffering inflicted on the wolf, but it does create legal precedent and moral momentum. Prosecutor Melinkovich has shown what principled enforcement of animal cruelty law can look like. Lawmakers can do their part by prohibiting intentional vehicular killing of wildlife, which would go a long way toward creating a legacy of just and compassionate wildlife stewardship.

Wendy Keefover is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She works as a wild carnivore advocate for Humane World for Animals.

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You might call this unusual because Durango has access to a backup supply. In 2011, voters approved spending $6 million to buy 3,800 acre‑feet of water storage in a reservoir called Lake Nighthorse. The rationale was simple: The town could build a pipeline and ship that water into its system whenever dry times occurred.

But since then, not much has happened.

Former city manager Ron LeBlanc tried to move the project forward before retiring in 2019. An engineering study in 2023 concluded that the town should connect Lake Nighthorse to its system using one of three possible pipeline routes. Still, no construction began.

Durango’s mayor, Gilda Yazzie, says the city paid for its share of a pipe at the base of the dam, along with what’s called a manifold—a device that would split water among the four users of Lake Nighthorse. But nothing has been built to connect that manifold to Durango’s water system.

Lake Nighthorse itself is the scaled‑down result of the Animas–La Plata Project, authorized by Congress in 1968. That project would have covered the Animas and La Plata river valleys with canals, pumps and pipelines. Instead, the final plan built just one dam and one pumping station, leaving the Animas River free‑flowing.

That decision helped protect the area’s natural beauty while also attracting more people to Durango. Some of those new residents have since moved into fire‑prone areas. Many Western cities have learned the hard way about not securing enough water to fight wildfires. Fires racing through Los Angeles in 2025 wiped out entire neighborhoods. Water storage ran out and hydrants went dry.

Durango water engineer Steve Harris has 52 years of experience in the field and is known for promoting water conservation. He thinks Durango is making a serious mistake by not connecting a pipe to Lake Nighthorse.

“The city has a century of the Animas and Florida Rivers being so good to them with steady year-around flows that they don’t even know they need storage,” he said. “They may only find out during a water crisis.”

Right now, Durango has 10 to 30 days of water stored in its Terminal Reservoir, which holds 267 acre-feet. That’s annual water consumption for about 600 households; Durango has over 9,000 households. The city depends mainly on the Florida River, with large draws of summer water from the Animas River. When the two rivers flow normally, the taps run. If both rivers dry up or clog with debris from fires, the city could run out of water within weeks.

Climate change and a 25‑year drought highlight this risk. In the last eight years, on 34 days, the Animas River averaged less than 100 cubic feet per second, a low level reached only twice in the previous 120 years. Close calls have already happened. In 2002, the Missionary Ridge Fire filled both rivers with ash and debris and forced the city to cut back pumping. In 2015, the Gold King Mine spill sent millions of gallons of waste into the Animas River, stopping city pumping for a week.

When Harris spoke at a Durango Neighborhood Coalition meeting last year, residents expressed overwhelming support for more water storage. That message hasn’t reached city leaders. Mayor Yazzie said voters were happy to support a $61 million sales-tax–funded municipal building and popular new recreation projects. But she said raising taxes for a major water project would be difficult.

“We are looking at a potential water and sewer fee increase to keep the toilets flushing,” Mayor Yazzie said. As for building a pipeline to Lake Nighthorse and a much-needed new water treatment plant—an investment water engineer Steve Harris estimates at about $100 million—“it all depends on how much the citizens are willing to pay for water. “

Durango’s reluctance to invest in its water system stands out in the West, where water storage is usually characterized as urgent. Las Vegas, Nevada, for example, built three separate intake tunnels into Lake Mead to make sure it could keep taking water even as the reservoir dropped.

Durango’s Lake Nighthorse pipeline remains a paper concept. This winter, with snowpack in the San Juan Mountains the lowest recorded in generations, it’s time the town acts to guarantee more water. Fighting flames with empty hoses would be a sorry sight.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes in Durango, Colorado.

The 4^th paragraph has been changed to reflect Ron LeBlanc as the ex-city manager of Durango. Previously, it read Steve LeBlanc.

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The study, covering roughly 8.6 million acres in six management units, will run for at least three years with the goal of indiscriminately exterminating “as many (lions) as possible.”

Buying into this ancient predator-prey superstition are the nonprofits Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and Utah Wild Sheep Foundation. Each has contributed $150,000 to the cull.

Wildlife managers have no idea how many mountain lions roam the state because estimating populations is essentially impossible. Lions are solitary, elusive and range over vast territories they defend. Unlike ungulates that compensate for mortality with fecundity, predators don’t “overpopulate,” and they’re much slower to recover from culling or hunting.

I asked veteran mountain lion researcher Dr. Rick Hopkins, board president of the Cougar Fund, what science supports a claim that killing mountain lions generates more deer. “None,” he replied. “For years, agencies have made such claims, but when pushed to provide evidence, they can’t. Predator control has never worked anywhere.”

Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources estimates the state’s mule deer population at 295,200—73 percent of the “long-term goal.” That goal is based more on desired hunting-license sales than science. Still, considering the natural ebb and flow of deer populations, 73 percent isn’t bad.

Mountain lions have little or nothing to do with the decline of Utah’s mule deer. Predator populations are limited by available prey. What we learned in Biology 101—that predators control prey—is incorrect: Prey controls predators.Utah has experienced prolonged drought, which peaked in 2022. Reduced forage starved female deer so that fewer fawns were born, and those fawns were sickly and therefore less likely to survive winters. When record-breaking snowfall occurred during the winter of 2022-2023, there were massive mule deer die-offs.

Utah’s mountain lion cull follows hard upon a 2023 state law that opened up year-round, mountain lion killing without requiring permits. Both this law and the current cull outrage environmental and animal wellness communities. The Western Wildlife Conservancy and Mountain Lion Foundation have filed a lawsuit (ongoing), asserting that the law violates the state’s Right to Hunt and Fish Act, which requires a “reasonable regulation of hunting.”

The Mountain Lion Foundation dismisses the mountain lion cull study as a “lethal program without rigorous science,” and reports: “Decades of peer-reviewed research across the West show that intensive predator removal rarely delivers sustained or landscape-scale recovery of prey populations. Instead, it often destabilizes predator populations, leading to younger, transient animals, increased conflict and little long-term benefit for deer.”

And this from Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action: “The science shows that healthy lion populations create robust and healthier deer herds, with lions selectively removing deer afflicted with the 100-percent fatal and highly contagious brain-wasting scourge known as Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) caused by malformed, self-replicating proteins called ‘prions.’”

All threats to mule deer pale in comparison with CWD. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a hunter-support group, calls it “the number one threat to deer hunting.”

In Utah, CWD has been detected in 356 of the few mule deer checked. Symptoms include fearlessness and loss of coordination, behaviors inviting lion predation, and thereby removal of disease vectors.

What’s more, mountain lions are resistant to CWD. They deactivate prions through digestion, removing them from the environment. That further protects mule deer as well as possibly protecting people. In 2022, two hunters who ate venison from a CWD-ravaged deer herd in Texas died from prion disease. Given the rarity of human prion infections, this seems an unlikely coincidence.

The Idaho Capital Sun quoted Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease at the University of Minnesota, as follows: “We are quite unprepared. If we saw a (CWD) spillover right now, we would be in free fall. There are no contingency plans.”

Dr. Mark Elbroch of Panthera, a nonprofit dedicated to conserving wild felines, told me this: “Heaps of science show the beneficial contributions of mountain lions. Humans are healthier when we live with mountain lions.”

So are mule deer.

Ted Williams, a longtime environmental writer, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

A mountain lion drinking, photo by David Neils, Wild Nature Photography.

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