Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming for Monday, September 21st. I'm Mac Watson.

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Gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Bextel has been accused of trespassing, barred from building on her land, and locked in a legal war with Wyoming Game And Fish. Cowboy State Daily's Clair McFarland reports that Bextel says she's a political target, while her neighbors say she violated a hunting easement.

"The trespassing was called in before her run for office, and it was charged before her run for office. But how it looks from her end, she wasn't summoned to court on the trespassing allegation until the CheckGate controversy had reached a fever pitch, so it was charged before CheckGate. But on her end, what she's seeing is she's summoned to court right after CheckGates, and then in the civil case, the state started filing some pretty strongly worded arguments. Quote, Since Eric Barlow won the primary, I am now no longer allowed to build on my own property. End quote."

Bextel told Cowboy State Daily in a text-message interview that she bought the land to build a fish camp for her family, including a "little Florida room" to keep mosquitos away from her daughter, who has a genetic disorder.

Read the full story HERE.

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The crowd at the Boulder Bar on a Sunday in September offers an eclectic sample of rural Sublette County: rancher, fishing guide, washed-up rodeo rider and retired rig mechanic. Cowboy State Daily's Zak Sonntag reports that Donna Steele doesn't like people who show up late.

"When I first get greeted. She says to me, 'You're the son of a bitch from the newspaper, aren't you?' I said, 'Yeah, that's me.' And she told me, 'Well, you're the son of a bitch we've been waiting for for four days,' and it felt like such a perfectly Wyoming greeting. But coming from Donna Steele, it felt more like a warm welcome than a reprimand, and that gives you a sense of just what this community is like because that's really kind of how it feels. They're blunt, they're terse. They'll tell you how they feel."

For more than half a century, the Steeles had been taking the measure of men passing through the Boulder Bar and serving drinks since they took over this family business in 1972. Donna tells Cowboy State Daily that this is the kind of place where you might see a deer nose through the bar and come up to the pool table, but it's also one of those places that was a second home for many of the hard drinking rig hands that would come in there, and start notorious bar brawls.

Read the full story HERE.

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Jackson Hole has never lacked for luxury, but its newest $400 million private enclave takes stealth wealth to a whole new level at Teton Village. Cowboy State Daily's Renee Jean scored a rare tour inside the Hoback Club's 25 newly opened private club condos.

"Memberships there start at 150,000 a year. So they are definitely catering to the upscale luxury crowd there in Jackson Hole. It's marketed as a money-making opportunity for these billionaires, because the way they've designed these residences, you can walk off a two- or three-bedroom suite and rent that out at the you know nine to $20,000 a night for month night minimum stay. So you know every time you do that, that's 36,000 bucks."

The Hoback Club is described in the Wyoming Engineering & Surveying Society's annual Project of the Year awards as a 250,000-square-foot private, ski-in/ski-out residence club that cost more than $400 million to build. That makes it "one of the larg