Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming for Friday, September 18th. I'm Mac Watson.

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A Rawlins couple racing to the hospital to have their baby made it only to a parking lot in a Wamsutter truck stop. Cowboy State Daily's Kolby Fedore reports that dad said seven minutes after calling 911, the baby was delivered.

"Catherine and Kyle Blake were rushing to get to the Rock Springs Hospital when her water broke outside of Wamsutter. Catherine at one point looked at Kyle and said, "We're not going to make it. You need to pull over right here. So he got into a Loves parking lot. The baby was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, but Kyle was able to talk with dispatch and quickly address the situation and get the the umbilical cord off and rub the baby until it started breathing. As soon as their son started crying, the couple felt relieved."

Max Hemi Blake came into the world in a Ram 2500 with a Hemi engine, so really, what else were his parents supposed to name him? The 6-pound, 11-ounce Wyoming boy was born Aug. 8th in the parking lot of the Love's Travel Stop in Wamsutter after his parents realized they weren't going to make it to the hospital in Rock Springs.

Read the full story HERE.

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Torrington residents are getting sticker shock from their electricity bills, which have jumped nearly 190% seemingly overnight after a change in the town's power provider. Cowboy State Daily's Emma Jane Jackson reports that after the region's provider switched from the Western Area Power Administration to the Southwest Power Pool, one woman saw her bill shoot up more than $100 dollars in one month.

"I talked to one, a mother of five, who said that she almost cried when she opened up her electricity bill and saw that it was $100 more than usual. The city said that because they switched providers, it resulted in a 189% increase, or $800,000 overall, and they're trying to get to the bottom of why this happened. We reached out to both providers, and they did not respond to a request for comment."

The City of Torrington released a statement saying, "Torrington and its wholesale power provider Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska are working diligently together to discern the cause of the sharp increase."

Read the full story HERE.

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A bull elk in Estes Park, Colorado, has been strutting around town with an antler stuck in its neck after a fight during rutting season. Outdoors Reporter Mark Heinz reports that elk sometimes get their antler racks entangled in a fight, but one ecologist said he's "never seen anything like that."

"Two bulls got into a mating season fight there. And one of them, then right about here in the neck of the elk, an antler tine, jabbed in and snapped off, and so now there's this bull elk running around Estes Park Park with this gory antler point dangling from its neck. Well, not really gory because there's no blood spurting out of it. I talked to a photographer that kind of knows that elk and took some video of him and said he appears to be doing fine. And one of the biologists I talked to said 'yeah, because they've got a lot of you know hide and fur and muscle in there he said as long as that antler point went into just muscle tissue and didn't cause any nerve damage."

Elk have entered the rut, or mating season, during which bulls can get into vicious fights as they try to lay claim to harems of cows.

Read the full story

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