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WyoFile Feature

Many people speak figuratively of preparing for spring by saying they are “shoveling out” from winter. But maintenance worker Gary Maki and others in Yellowstone National Park were literally doing just that last week, as the park opened for the summer season.

Though Yellowstone’s west entrance opened last month, the road linking Canyon, Fishing Bridge and the east entrance opened May 6, offering visitors access to most of the park’s interior for the first time since fall. Many diehard visitors spent the day returning to their favorite Yellowstone haunts, marking a kind of summer “opening day” for nature lovers across the region.

But for Maki, who has worked in the park since the 1980s, the day was mainly about digging out from a winter that saw more snow than any during the past decade.

“I saw this when I first came here, but this is kind of a lot compared to what we usually get,” Maki said of piles of plowed and drifted snow that towered above his head at Lake Butte Overlook. The hillside viewing area near the park’s east entrance offers commanding views of Yellowstone Lake, and Maki was clearing a path to a vault toilet near the parking area.

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.

WyoFile Feature

In what may be a growing trend in states around the country, Wyoming will soon join Alaska, Arizona and Vermont in allowing residents to carry concealed guns without a permit.

Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead last week signed into law a so-called “constitutional carry” bill that won wide approval in the Legislature, calling it “an appropriate law for Wyoming” during a signing ceremony.

“I think this is a historic bill, and several states will follow us. As always, Wyoming is a trendsetter,” said sponsor Sen. Kit Jennings (R-Casper).

Legislatures in at least a half-dozen other states are considering similar bills. Wyoming’s new law takes effect July 1.

WyoFile Feature

Though members of Wyoming’s citizen Legislature pride themselves on being closely connected to their constituents, voters might be surprised to learn that some laws proposed and passed in Cheyenne are first shaped by state lawmakers and major corporations during privately funded junkets in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.

As the 2011 legislative session convenes this week, some watchdog groups — and at least one legislator — are calling for better disclosure from lobbyists and greater transparency from groups that seek to influence or propose specific laws.

One of those groups, the national, nonprofit American Legislative Exchange Council, drafts ready-made bills that lawmakers can propose in their home states, with a focus on reducing state regulations and limiting the influence of the federal government.

Wyoming legislators who are ALEC members say it is a useful and needed resource that helps them learn about important issues affecting the corporate sector. But others say it should be easier for voters to track the influence of ALEC and similar groups, and question whether corporate-friendly laws proposed for adoption in all 50 states necessarily make for good government in Wyoming.

WYOFILE FEATURE

Six years after developers announced their plan to build a 104-lot gated subdivision on 550 acres between Cody and Yellowstone National Park, the Copperleaf subdivision is now owned by the bank that financed it.

The subdivision was bought last week by Wells Fargo Bank in a foreclosure auction in Cody. Among the criticisms of the project has been that its homes would be spaced close together on small lots, or clustered, in a way not in keeping with the surrounding rural community.

WyoFile Feature

When former Sen. Alan Simpson first joined Erskine Bowles, former Clinton White House chief of staff, as co-chairs of a bipartisan commission created to find ways to reduce the nation’s budget deficit, he joked that it was a “suicide mission.”

“It is going to be difficult, maybe a complete zero,” Simpson said in February, when President Barack Obama announced the formation of his 18-member National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

“I have no idea whether we’ll succeed, but we need to move the ball forward,” he said then.

By most measures, including his own assessment, it appears nine months later that Simpson has not only survived the suicide mission, but achieved some of its main objectives.