Wyoming News

WyoFile Feature

The search for oil in southeast Wyoming has set off a massive seismic survey effort. Last fall, three seismic surveys alone blanketed 1,500 square miles in Laramie and Converse counties. That’s an area almost half the size of Yellowstone, or 50 percent larger than the state of Rhode Island.

These are some of the largest surveys ever seen in Wyoming, according to state officials. Initial drilling hasn’t struck upon another bonanza field like the Bakken oil field in North Dakota or the Jonah natural gas field in western Wyoming. But with a comprehensive mapping of the area’s geology, oil developers hope to improve their ratio of success.

“They are looking for another Silo Field — an area where they can drill a few dozen wells and produce oil, not drill 40 wells and only have 10 producers,” said Tom Doll, Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission supervisor.

In April 2010, EOG Resources announced its “Jake” oil well in Weld County, Colo. produced 50,000 barrels over a 90-day period. That news ignited interest in the Niobrara Formation of the Denver-Julesberg Basin, setting off a rush of oil and gas exploration that swept like wildfire across the state line into southeast Wyoming.

Last summer and fall brought a frenzy of oil drilling in Laramie, Platte, and Goshen counties in Wyoming. All told, companies drilled 57 wells in the Niobrara Formation across the three counties, according to the oil and gas commission.

Snowblog Essay

Winter in the Rockies is long. After six months of the white stuff even the most avid boarders and skiers are ready for a change of season by the time the month of May rolls around.  Idaho Falls resident Matt Stanger has spent the past twelve years making sure Old Man Winter knows he’s no longer welcome by organizing a rite of spring event enthusiastically known as the Grand Teton No Motor.

This homage to better weather began back in 2000 when Stanger was an Ecology student working his way through school at a bicycle shop in Southeast Idaho. He used to ride with a group of hard-core cyclists that did 60-mile loops through Yellowstone Park each spring. Fun for Stanger, but his regular crowd of friends weren’t up for a marathon ride through steep mountain terrain. His crowd was more about marathon rides across town to the bar.

In the hope of getting his friends more involved with cycling, Stanger worked up a short ride into Teton National Park that would provide the most beautiful scenery the West has to offer while keeping the physical challenge at a level even a 49-year-old fat man could handle.  It should be noted Stanger wasn’t entirely selfless in creating this ride; he was also trying to entice his girlfriend to get out with him. It worked; he’s now married to said girlfriend.

Who knew bicycling could be used to pitch woo?

New West Book Review

Jackson Hole residents share this trait with comic-book superheroes: their origin stories tend to be more interesting than their immediate circumstances. That may be why the bulk of Tim Sandlin’s new book, Lydia (Sourcebooks Landmark, 432 pages, $24.99), rests on a centenarian’s life-tale, while the arc compelling the novel rides on a Gotham City street-level villain with the determination of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men. The title character connects these storylines in the narrator’s quest to understand human behavior.

“Why do we treat those we love so much worse than those we don’t like?” the narrator, Sam, writes. “Lydia would starve before not tipping a waitress. She’d go back home if the alternative was parking in a handicapped slot, yet she lied to and browbeat the family she loved.”

Tim Sandlin will visit several regional bookstores, including Valley Bookstore in Jackson (April 23, 7 p.m.), Boulder Book Store (April 25, 7:30 p.m.) Barnes & Noble stores in Fort Collins (April 26, 7 p.m.) and Colorado Springs (April 27, 7 p.m.), Denver’s Tattered Cover (Colfax, April 28, 7:30 p.m.), and Cheyenne’s Barnes & Noble (April 29, 7 p.m.).

New West Essay

It’s 6:30 in the morning and the mixer is already going in my kitchen.

Somewhere over the course of the last year, my husband, Cole, has developed a fanatical obsession to make the best pizza… ever. His words, not mine. Pretty soon he was that dude sniffing pizza crusts in the corner of restaurants, the guy Googling ways to jerry-rig the oven so he could get it up to 800 degrees.

Flour flies all over the counter as he prepares the next batch of dough.

On any given day, we have multiple cultures of yeast growing in a Styrofoam cooler rigged with heat lamp and meat thermometer – his homemade thermo-regulated container. At some point sweet basil will be clipped from the pots that sit at our living room window. Sauce will be made, and crust will brown on a searing hot pizza stone.

Never being one to turn down a meal, I have done nothing but encourage this behavior, joining the conversations on the attributes of various kinds of cheese. This is the kind of talk that makes more intelligent people glaze over with boredom. 

Western Book Roundup

Boise’s Anthony Doerr continued his winning streak last weekend, collecting the The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for his story “The Deep,” which came with a £30,000 prize. (Last month he won the $20,000 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall). Doerr spoke with the Boise Weekly just before the win, and noted that the award ceremony was to be held in the Great Hall of Christ Church College at Oxford University, “where they film the great hall of Hogwarts.” It’s like I’ve been telling you these past months--literary Boise is en fuego.

• Craig Johnson reported in his newsletter that filming will begin this month on a television pilot based on his Walt Longmire mysteries. Johnson notes that the crew is filming in the “Las Vegas/Taos/Santa Fe area of New Mexico, since it was deemed that Wyoming’s weather was too unstable for shooting a series and had too much snow to appear to be spring.” The show, for Warner Horizon and A&E, will be called “Longmire.” Johnson explains if the pilot gets picked up, they will film a dozen episodes for the first season, “borrowing chunks of the novels, but following their own tales because of the amount of stories they need to tell and the time constraints in which to tell them.” (Via Wyoming Arts Blog.)

Also in the Roundup: Chris Abani speaks in Utah, Western readers snap up eBooks, and Philip Connors visits the Boulder Book Store.

WyoFile Feature

In April 2001, Absaroka Bicycles owner Rick Roach submitted a proposal to the U.S. Forest Service to provide guided mountain bike trips into the Shoshone National Forest.

Two weeks ago, almost 10 years later, Roach finally got the answer he has been waiting to hear — his Cody bike shop will be awarded a temporary special-use permit for this summer to take customers into America’s oldest national forest.

“I had almost given up hope,” Roach said. “After a certain number of years, you keep hitting stone walls, so it’s tough to look forward any longer to that permit. This obviously gives us a little bit more light at the end of the tunnel.”

Every year for the past decade, Roach and other entrepreneurs in Park County have asked forest managers to issue new permits for activities like mountain biking or ice climbing that have never been commercially guided on the North Zone of the forest, as well as additional permits for activities like fishing, for which demand has grown and changed over the years.

Snowboarding and Skateboarding

In Laramie, you only have one option for a ski area to ride: Snowy Range.

The same can be said for skate parks. Summit County has Silverthorne and another in Breckenridge, just a 15-minute drive apart.

Denver and its suburbs offer even more possibilities. 

If this same person were to stay in Laramie, they would only be able to skate at the town’s sole park. If they want to skate another park, they have to drive east to the nearest park in Cheyenne, which is 45 miles away.

But, it’s not just the fact that there are more ski resorts and skate parks in Colorado than Wyoming that draws some Laramie skaters and boarders south. They’re also lured by how much more terrain there is available at Colorado resorts and skate parks.

Whether you look at the amount of terrain available at the individual resorts of Keystone, Breckenridge or Copper Mountain, they all stand as colossal giants in comparison to the dwarf that is Snowy Range.

WyoFile Column

I come from Gillette, Wyoming, so I’m familiar with the time-honored tradition among many in the coal mining industry to declare during presidential campaigns that the Democratic candidate (fill in blank) will shut down the coal industry if elected. Some have gone so far as to hand out stickers to miners on election day stating “VOTE RIGHT” and suggesting their jobs may depend on it.

The notion is that all Democrats just think coal is icky and, heck, why not switch off — over night — the fuel that powers nearly half of the nation’s electricity? This notion about Democrats and coal is entirely outlandish (see: Democrat Dave Freudenthal, former Wyoming governor, joins board of Arch Coal Inc.), but it’s part of America’s political discourse.

So it wasn’t unexpected when Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming), who also hails from Gillette, told me in January, “This (Obama) administration is flat-out against coal and they’re not going to let another permit go through. In 10 years, the coal industry will be done.”

New West Fiction

Never acknowledge the fact that you’re a girl, and take pride when your guy friends say, “You’re one of the guys.” Tell yourself, “I am one of the guys,” even though, in the back of your mind, a little voice says, “But you’ve got girl parts.”

You are born on a ranch in central Colorado or southern Wyoming or northern Montana and grow up surrounded by cowboys.  Or maybe not a ranch; maybe a farm, and you have five older brothers.  Your first memory is of sitting on the back of Big Cheese, an old sorrel gelding with a sway back and—you find out later when you regularly ride bareback—a backbone like a ridge line.  Later, you won’t know whether this first memory is real or comes from one of the only photos of you as a baby.  You study that photo a lot.  It must be spring or late fall because you’re wearing a quilted yellow jacket with a blue-lined hood and your brother’s hands reach from the side of the frame and support you in the saddle. You look half asleep with your head tilted to the side against your shoulder, a little sack of potatoes.

WyoFile Feature

Over the past several years, coal-bed methane gas operators in the Powder River Basin have idled thousands of wells due to low natural gas pricing, and a handful of operators struggle on the verge of bankruptcy.

Black Diamond Energy Inc. and Loral Operating, for example, each have failed to put up the full amount of state-mandated “idle well” bonding. Each has also failed to perform required “mechanical integrity testing” to ensure their idle wells do not create environmental or human health hazards.

In all, the fate of some 11,800 idle coal-bed methane wells in the basin remains uncertain, creating a potential liability that could cost millions of dollars to address.

However, industry and state officials say the situation isn’t as grim as it may appear.

Most of the idle wells are owned by big players such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Williams Production Co. — companies with the financial wherewithal to perform mandated maintenance on the wells, and to properly plug and abandon wells that have reached the natural end of their productive life. Industry leaders expect many of the idle wells will be brought back into production when the price of natural gas rebounds.

Just how many of those wells will eventually go back into production is anybody’s guess.