My 2025 reporting kicked off in Cheyenne, where lawmakers brought a slate of contentious proposals that kept me on my toes.
I’ve covered the Wyoming Legislature for 13 years, and more closely since joining WyoFile several years ago, but I’d never seen such a concentration of bills that truly provoked people. There were controversies about letting landowners cash in on special hunting tags (a fight that’s ongoing), stripping a protective state status for otters, overriding Wyoming Game and Fish’s authority to manage mountain lions, hunting grizzly bears despite the Endangered Species Act and a quarrel over a proposed ban on the Wyoming tradition of killing wildlife with snowmobiles.
And that’s a partial list. Notably, the most divisive measures almost all died midstream in the lawmaking process. The fizzling of wildlife-related legislation freed me to cover the steady stream of headlines during the early days of the second Trump administration.
Former Wyoming Game and Fish Department Director Brian Nesvik was appointed to direct the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, overseeing wildlife issues nationally. (In a total coincidence, I happened to be in Washington, D.C. during one of his confirmation hearings, and we brought you that news from the Capitol.) Around then, the federal government made more headlines with new logging policy, grizzly bear management and more.
Otherwise, most Trump administration-spurred WyoFile headlines related to the doings of the now-defunct “Department of Government Efficiency,” then-led by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. There were scores of Wyoming federal workers abruptly let go from their jobs at a wide array of agencies with a big presence in a state that’s half federal land. Federal offices were scheduled to close, and at other facilities, small workforces were gutted, resulting in chaos.
This was tricky reporting! The federal agency sources we’ve cultivated over the years were mostly barred from communicating with the media — the policy, in most cases, amounted to secrecy. To report the facts about the layoffs and cuts, we had to get creative, and at times, offer sources anonymity. Memorably, another outlet, the Columbia Journalism Review, even interviewed my colleague Angus Thuermer and me about what it was like having to report on the DOGE cuts.
An icon of the American West — elk — also kept me occupied in the early months of 2025. Although it’s no longer the case, for the vast majority of my time in Wyoming, I’ve hung my hat in Teton and Sublette counties, where elk herds are congregated by the thousands on feedgrounds in the winter. But now those elk populations and, by extension, elk hunting, face an unprecedented threat, wildlife disease ecologists believe. Always-lethal chronic wasting disease started appearing last winter, and by the end of the season, there had been four feedgrounds where it was verified, including one spot where CWD is gaining steam. We’ve reported recently that winter 2025-’26 will be an “important” harbinger of what’s to come.
Broadly speaking, the tension between conservation and development is another wildlife issue that’s emerged repeatedly on my beat. There’s been controversy over the Wyoming State Shooting Complex’s location in the wild Absaroka Range foothills. And there have been many twists and turns in the long-term effort to protect Wyoming’s first pronghorn migration corridor. I’ve also kept a close eye on the back and forth on the federal level over allowing oil and gas leasing and drilling within two regions the migratory Sublette Pronghorn Herd depends on: the Red Desert and the Golden Triangle.
While these topics are destined to receive more ink in 2026, I had many one-of-a-kind stories in 2025: I photographed a goshawk, and reported on others seeing cool critters like the southernmost great gray owl in North America, out-of-place mammals like a swift fox and “accidental” bird species showing up in Wyoming.
Last, I’d like to highlight some of the cool project stories that I’m proud to have been a part of publishing in 2025.
In January, I teamed with Amanda Eggert at the Montana Free Press for an oral history-style feature story, marking the 30th anniversary of wolf reintroduction into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. In October, WyoFile partnered with Western Confluence, a publication of the University of Wyoming’s Ruckelshaus Institute, to produce another history-heavy feature story, this one about the stalemate over wild horse management in Wyoming’s checkerboard region.
Then, in November, WyoFile and the Mountain Journal hit publish on an investigative story co-written with Montana journalist Nick Mott. We explored what happens when wolves naive to hunting leave the protective confines of Yellowstone National Park. For me, that story was years in the making. A tip about the fate of an individual wolf in May 2022 first got me thinking about how to constructively write about this loaded topic.
The final feature story I want to mention was also a long time in the making, though this one was a WyoFile production alone. I examined Wyoming’s fight against nonnative cheatgrass, which one scientist I interviewed called the “most existential, sweeping threat” to western ecosystems. After learning a bunch, I tend to agree. So look for more reporting on efforts to prevent noxious annual grasses from overtaking Wyoming landscapes in 2026.
I’m always hunting for stories, and please reach out any time: mike@wyofile.com.
