Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming! I'm Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom, for Tuesday, May 21st.

Wyoming's first verified bear attack of the season, involving two grizzlies in Grand Teton National Park on Sunday, has left a Massachusetts man hospitalized.

The man had a "surprise encounter" with two grizzlies in the Signal Mountain Area of the park Sunday afternoon and suffered serious injuries when one of the bears attacked him, according to outdoors reporter Mark Heinz.

"We don't know the type or extent of his injuries. The good news is, he's been listed as being in stable condition at the hospital in Jackson and is expected to fully recover, and the investigation into the attack continues."

The Signal Mountain Summit Road and Signal Mountain Trail remained closed to the public Monday as the investigation continued.

The billboards first started showing up in Cheyenne around last fall, put up by a group called Honor Wyoming. The signs chide some legislators as rodeo "clowns" and praise others as "top hands" based on their voting records.

The group's website proclaims that Wyoming has a "political integrity problem." But politics reporter Leo Wolfson says there's some question as to who is actually behind the organization itself.

"A man named John Guido was named as the official officer or director of his organization on its tax form. This is interesting because Guido has led extremely similar efforts in the state of Idaho, also targeting legislators there and also using kind of a western theme and some of the almost exact same advertising and marketing kind of scripts and stuff like that… It's kind of this new evolution that we've seen over the last couple of years of shadowy, often anonymous political ranking groups that pop up with little to no information about who's behind them."

The group ranked all 93 members of the state Legislature on a scale having low, questionable or high integrity based on their adherence to the U.S. and Wyoming constitutions and their adherence to party platforms.

The Saudi government-backed Aramco Ventures is making itself a player in central Wyoming's push for clean air.

The venture capital investing arm of oil giant Aramco has made an undisclosed equity investment in Spiritus Technologies, a clean technology company that wants to build a big field of silos to draw hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide out of the air and store the gas in underground caverns in central Wyoming. Energy reporter Pat Maio says the investment could mean an economic boost for the Cowboy State.

"They're going to develop a pilot demonstration project in Saudi Arabia, and they're going to develop a supply chain for many of the components, I guess, that go into the project, in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Well, this is a big connection of Wyoming because they want to build a massive field of the silos for direct air capture, and then pull the carbon dioxide gas out of the air and store it underground in caverns in Central Wyoming."

When completed, the Spiritus project will be capable of capturing and sequestering in underground geologic caverns up to 2 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.

A mature male wolf from one of Grand Teton National Park's well-known packs was struck and killed by a vehicle Friday.

Cowboy State Daily's Mark Heinz reports that the wolf was from the Lower Gros Ventre pack, but little else has been released about the incident.

"Unfortunately, in Wyoming, vehicle collisions are a leading cause of death for all species of wildlife. And we recently talked to a