Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming, for Monday, July 29th. I'm Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by Wyoming Senior Olympics! Don't miss the action at this year's summer games from July 31st through August 4th in Cheyenne, Wyoming. For more info and a schedule of events, visit Wyoming Senior Olympics dot org.

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Three members from the gospel group The Nelons were killed in a plane crash on Friday afternoon in northeast Wyoming.

The Pilatus PC-12 had left Nebraska midday Friday and was bound for Billings, Montana. It crashed about 8 miles south of the Wyoming-Montana border, sparking a wildfire upon impact and killing Jason and Kelly Nelon Clark, Amber and Nathan Kistler, Melodi Hodges, and the pilot, Larry Haynie and his wife, Melissa.

Cowboy State Daily's Clair McFarland reports that experts believe the autopilot system malfunctioned.

"Some of the last data that the airplane sent to the ground indicates that it was pitching up and down that it was thrashing vertically at 26,000 feet traveling about 300 miles an hour shortly before the crash. And so you know, exactly what happened hasn't been confirmed yet."

The jet fuel crashing down into Wyoming's sage lands sparked a large fire that Campbell County authorities fought both via air and from the ground. Firefighters were combatting the last smolders on Saturday.

Read the full story HERE.

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Black Diamond Pool in Yellowstone National Park blew itself up in a spectacular hydrothermal explosion Tuesday, and videos of the violent eruption made headlines around the globe.

The story blew up again Wednesday thanks to the reports that a perfectly preserved baby mammoth was exposed after the explosion - a "mammoth discovery" that never was, according to Cowboy State Daily's Andrew Rossi.

"The Casper planet is a satirical Facebook page. All the articles on there are written to be fun and satirical just on current events… Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has a million followers, and he didn't share the Casper Planet's posts, he actually copied and pasted the text in the image and shared it on his own page, which is why it got so widely distributed… There was no factual basis behind it. A baby mammoth was not uncovered in the explosion of Black Diamond pool earlier this week."

Mammoths roamed Yellowstone 30,000 years ago and could return in the future, but there are no traces of them in the park today. And that's unlikely to change, no matter how many hydrothermal explosions occur.

Read the full story HERE.

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Airloom Energy, a Laramie-based wind energy startup, is raising $12.7 million dollars to promote its novel design of wind energy loops that operate horizontally and low to the ground instead of the giant turbines that dot the Cowboy State's landscape.

The innovative design could eventually produce hundreds of megawatts of power at a fraction of the cost and footprint of traditional horizontal axis wind turbines with three blades, according to energy reporter Pat Maio.

"It's not like building the big wind turbine towers, like you see out in the landscape across Wyoming that are the size of half the size of the Eiffel Tower, roughly, is what I've calculated… this one's gonna be working on like an oval track… they go forward and backward, depending on the