Mystery Lake Fish Stocking

Mystery Lake Fish Stocking

Fly Fishing Equipment Basics

Fish should swim thrice.

They say fish should swim thrice. . . first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.

Jonathan Dean Swift

Yellowstone. A really radical idea.

A really radical idea that won't happen, but maybe should.

There have been really horrific floods, as we all know, in Yellowstone National Park. Roads in the northern part of the park may be closed for the rest of the summer.  Here's a National Park Service item on it:

Updates

• Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance.
• Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.
• The National Park Service will make every effort to repair these roads as soon as possible; however, it is probable that road sections in northern Yellowstone will not reopen this season due to the time required for repairs.
• To prevent visitors from being stranded in the park if conditions worsen, the park in coordination with Yellowstone National Park Lodges made the decision to have all visitors move out of overnight accommodations (lodging and campgrounds) and exit the park.
• All entrances to Yellowstone National Park remain temporarily CLOSED while the park waits for flood waters to recede and can conduct evaluations on roads, bridges and wastewater treatment facilities to ensure visitor and employee safety.
• There will be no inbound visitor traffic at any of the five entrances into the park, including visitors with lodging and camping reservations, until conditions improve and park infrastructure is evaluated.
• The park’s southern loop appears to be less impacted than the northern roads and teams will assess damage to determine when opening of the southern loop is feasible. This closure will extend minimally through next weekend (June 19).
• Due to the northern loop being unavailable for visitors, the park is analyzing how many visitors can safely visit the southern loop once it’s safe to reopen. This will likely mean implementation of some type of temporary reservation system to prevent gridlock and reduce impacts on park infrastructure.
• At this time, there are no known injuries nor deaths to have occurred in the park as a result of the unprecedented flooding. 
• Effective immediately, Yellowstone’s backcountry is temporarily closed while crews assist campers (five known groups in the northern range) and assess damage to backcountry campsites, trails and bridges.
• The National Park Service, surrounding counties and states of Montana and Wyoming are working with the park’s gateway communities to evaluate flooding impacts and provide immediate support to residents and visitors.
• Water levels are expected to recede today in the afternoon; however, additional flood events are possible through this weekend.

Here's an idea.

Don't rebuild the roads.

For years, there have been complaints about how overcrowded Yellowstone National Park has become.  A combination of a tourist economy and high mobility, and frankly the American inability to grasp that the country has become overpopulated, had contributed to that.  For years there have been suggestions that something needed to be done about that.

Maybe what is needed is. .. nothing.

Well, nothing now, so to speak.

Yellowstone was the nation's first National Park.  It was created at a time when park concepts, quite frankly, were different from they are now.   Created in 1872, its establishment was in fact visionary, and it did grasp in part that the nation's frontier was closing, even though the creation of the park came a fully four years prior to the Battle of Little Big Horn.  There was, at the time of its creation, a sort of lamentation that the end of the Frontier was in sight, and the nation was going to become one of farms and cities.

Nobody saw cities like they exist now, however, and nobody grasped that the day would come when agricultural land would be the province of the rich, and that homesteading would go from a sort of desperate act to something that people would cite to, in the case of their ancestors, as some sort of basis for moral superiority.  Things are much different today than they were then.

Indeed, in some ways, the way the park is viewed is a bit bipolar.  To some, particularly those willing to really rough it, Yellowstone is a sort of giant wilderness area.  To others, it's a sort of theme park. 

The appreciation of the need to preserve wilderness existed then, but what that meant wasn't really understood.  The park was very much wilderness at first, and some things associated with wilderness went on within it, and of course still do.  Early camping parties travelled there.  People fished there, and still do.  Hunting was prohibited early on, which had more to do with the 19th Century decline in wildlife due to market hunting than it did anything else.  This has preserved a sort of bipolarism in and of itself, as fishing is fish-hunting, just as bird hunting is fowling. There's no reason in fact that Yellowstone should have not been opened back up to hunting some time during the last quarter-century, but it is not as just as the park is wilderness to young adventurers from the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, and hearty back country folks of all ages, it's also a big public zoo for people from Newark or Taipei.  

Since 1872, all sorts of additional parks have been created. Some are on the Yellowstone model, such as Yosemite.  Others are historical sites such as Gettysburg or Ft. Laramie.  All, or certainly all that I've seen, are of value.

But they don't all have the same value.

Much of Yellowstone's value is in its rugged wilderness.  Some cite to the geothermal features of the park, but that's only a small portion of it.  And for that reason, much of Yellowstone today would make more sense existing as a Wilderness Area under the Wilderness Act of 1964, the act that helps preserve the west in a very real way, and which western politicians, who often live lives much different than actual westerners, love to hate.

A chance exists here to bring back Yellowstone into that mold, which it was intended in part to be fro the very onset, and which many wish it was, or imagine it to be, today.

Don't rebuilt the roads.

That would in fact mean the northern part of the park would revert to wilderness, truly.  And it means that many fewer people would go to the park in general.  And it would hurt the tourist communities in the northern areas, and even in the southern areas, as the diminished access to the park would mean that the motorized brigade of American and International tourists wouldn't go there, as they wouldn't want to be too far from their air-conditioned vehicles.

But that's exactly what should be done.

 This major public access story hit the news here Thursday.

BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new stretch of North Platte near Casper

I'm quite familiar with this stretch of property. As a kid, before the recent owners who owned transferred it, I used to hunt part of it.  I never asked for permission, even though I'm sure I should have.  In those days, in the 70s, we asked for permission a lot less, and it was granted by fiat a lot more.

This is a real boon to sportsmen.  It'll open up miles of river to fishing, and miles and miles to hunting.  I've passed by deer and doves in this area a lot as I didn't have permission to go where they were.  Now I'll be able to, although I hope the BLM makes as much of this roadless as possible.

I hope they also lease it out for grazing.

Indeed, I have some mixed feelings about this as I really hate to see a local ranch go out of production.  The family that owned it had started off as sheepmen in Johnson County and moved down to Natrona County when their land was bought for coal production.  Now they'll just be out of agriculture entirely, and I really hate to see that, even though I'm glad to see this didn't go to out of state interest.  Indeed, what occurred is more in keeping with the purpose of the original Federal land programs, including the Homestead Act, than what often does occur with land sales now days.

I will note that, of course, in the age of the internet this of course resulted in moronic comments, including the blisteringly ignorant comment that its somehow unconstitutional for the Federal Government to own land. That comment is so dense that it should disqualify a person from going onto land in general until some education occurs.

The Gourmet Sportsman: Once in a Lifetime: First Outing of 2022

The Gourmet Sportsman: Once in a Lifetime: First Outing of 2022:  January 2, 2022 Steam rises off the bush as I pee on it.  I am cursing myself for wearing waders as I hate hiking in waders.  Although its ...

Catch and Release

Catch and release fishing is illegal in Germany and Switzerland.

Underwater Footage of Kokanee at Lake DeSmet

July 1, 1921 Field & Stream. A missed magazine cover and what it tells us about language and cluture.

This was one of the numerous saved threads I hadn't gotten back to, and then July 1 came and went, and I forgot about it.  Instead, as that day deal with the Chinese Communist Party, there was a big old hammer and sickle that appeared as the art for that day.

Wish I'd remembered this one.

This does bring up a bit of an interesting topic, or at least two such topics, one linguistic and the other cheesecake oriented.

Depictions of women fishing, and let us be more precise and say depictions of pretty young women fishing, are at least as old as print magazines in popular culture.  They're considerably more common than depictions of women hunting, even though fishing is simply fish hunting.  We sometimes forget that English has various words for various types of hunting, as fishing is the only one we commonly use to separate it out from hunting in general.  But there are others.

Fowling, for example, refers to hunting birds and was once a fairly common term. Offhand, I can't think of another sort of hunting other than fishing which is named for the prey, but there are some types that are named for the method.  For example, falconry, that type of hunting done with falcons, is named for the method.  Trapping, which is a controversial type of hunting that has been controversial my entire life, also is.

Of interest in this general topic, hunting of various types was so important in the Medieval era, when people started to first acquire family names, that various things associated with it or the practice itself gave us a series of last names that are still with us. This shows the degree to which it was significant, and even elemental.  Just as we have the last name "Farmer", for example, we have the last name "Hunter".  Noting that English is a Germanic language, and that this evolution occurred at the same time all over Northern Europe, and Europe in general, the same occupations are reflected in the common German last names of Bauer and Jaeger or Jäger.  It ought to be noted here that the last name Hunger more accurately reflects its Medieval origins, however, than "Farmer", as farmer actually meant "renter" at the time, reflecting that farmers tended to be tenants, if not actually serfs.

Jäger, interestingly, shows up as an English last name as well, in the form of Yaeger occasionally.  A name that sounds related, Jagger, isn't.  That name is a Yorkshire name meaning a horse packer.

Fisher, of course, also shows up as a last name, as does the German equivalent Fischer.

Falconer also shows up as a last name, that being for a person who kept and hunted with falcons.  Falconry was expensive back in the day and its pretty likely that anyone who was a falconer was in the permanent employment of a noble, so it's different from simply being a hunter or fisher.  The same occupation gave us the name Hawker as well.

Another name last name that may have a hunting origin is Bowman.  We tend to think of bows as military weapons, in a Medieval context, but in reality they were by far the most common hunting weapon at the time and, moreover, keeping standing armies was extremely rare.  While armies did employ bowmen in times of war, those guys were in other occupations the rest of the time, and they were likely using their bows for hunting.

Indeed, the significance of that may be demonstrated the only other weapon of the period which I can think of which reflects itself in a last name is Pike.  It would seem obvious that the name must derive from the weapon of that name, but it apparently isn't clear that this is the case.  It might be a corruption of "peak" or it might actually refer to the fish.  On that, Trout occurs as a last name, and it apparently stems from fishing for trout.  I.e., a person named Trout, back in the Middle Ages, was a trout fisherman, showing the importance of the species.  On the other hand, maybe Pike refers to the weapon, including its importance in Medieval warfare.  No other weapons directly resulted in last names, however, if that's the case, although the knife did give us the German last name of Messer.

Well so much for names.  Let's talk about clothing, or the depiction of it.

As noted above, depicting female fishermen was pretty common in the early 20th Century.  The depiction above is a little unusual in that the subject is deep sea fishing, but then deep sea fishing depictions in general were a little unusual.  Usually fishing subjects were fishing streams, or maybe rivers.

Depictions of women fishing early in the 20th Century weren't very different from those depicting men.  If you go all the way about to around 1900, they are different as women didn't usually wear trousers and therefore they're sometimes depicted wearing the bulky clothing of the day, fishing, which would have been extremely difficult, in actual practice.  By World War One, however, they were usually depicted just like men, with both tending to have the outdoor clothing, rather than the work clothing, of the day.  No doubt there were men, and women, who went out to the streams fully equipped with the period outdoor clothing, which tended to feature breeches and very high boots, but my guess is that most fishermen simply went out with the sort of clothing that they wore when mowing the lawn or working in the shop.

I note this as in the world of Reddit, Twitter, and Istagram, if you have any interest in fishing, you're going to be assaulted at some point with a photograph of a woman fishing wearing a bikini.

I don't know if any women really fish wearing bikini's. They don't fish wearing bikini's in the L.L. Bean or Orvis catalogs, that's for sure, and I've never seen a female bikini clad angler myself.  Of course, I don't have a boat, and maybe they're all on boats, rather than on your typical Wyoming stream or river where you'd be eaten alive by insects if you tried that.

Which brings me to this, wearing hardly anything outdoors is stupid in general, very stupid when you are more or less on the water where there's no shade, and who wants to smell all over like a fish?

All of which leads me to believe that such photos are in a certain category of adolescent male driving soft pornography, much like the weird Japanese cartoon depictions of World War Two ships as young women.  Maybe some young women on boats wear bikinis, but I bet they do it only once.

I was fishing the other day in a deep Wyoming canyon, the last fishing trip I'll make of the season, probably, as hunting season is now on, and even though I'm license impaired as I didn't draw anything, I'll be doing that on general tags.  On my way out, I encountered a young woman hiking in.

You could see she was a serious fisherman. She was carrying her pole in its tube and had on a large brimmed fishing cap of the type that's somewhat unique to fishermen, and wearing dark sunglasses.  Even from across the stream, and down in the canyon from where I was, you could also tell that she had on one of those bug and sun resistant pull on shirts that some fishermen now wear.  

She looked like a real fisherman of her vintage. I.e, one of the young fishermen in their 20s.

She was looking for a way down the canyon.  I pointed to a place up stream.  She nodded her head in affirmation. 

Chuck 70 vs Basic Chuck Taylors - (CUT IN HALF) - Converse Chuck Taylor ...

Proof, I guess, that things really were better back in the day.

Of course, I don't know why "Chuck 70s", which apparently are marketed as retro Chuck Taylors are a thing, because I didn't know they existed.  

Chuck Taylors were introduced in their current form (from a previous pretty close form) in 1922.

1920 advertisement for the predecessor of the Chuck Taylor, which was formally introduced in 1922.

The shoe itself was introduced as a basketball shoe, even though it'd be nearly impossible to imagine anyone playing basketball wearing them today. They grew to be the basketball standard by the 1960s and had about 80% of the basketball market at the time. They were also very popular in the mid 20th Century with young adults and teenagers, and fit in a bit with the postwar Levis and leather jacket image.  

In the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up, you felt lucky if your parents would buy you a pair, rather than the lesser "Keds", which we usually ended up with.  They were also popular with adults, to some degree, as fishing shoes, for those who waded in streams and rivers but who didn't wear waders, or were forgoing them for some reason.

That was before the running style shoe became popular in the late 70s and basically pushed them out.

They've bounced in and out of popularity since them.  

Monday, June 27, 1921. Jacksonville Florida and Crowley Louisiana photographed, Chinese Special Mission in Washington, Senator Shortridge goes fishing.

 

 

The Agrarian's Lament: A Tribune op ed and some thoughts on outfitters and locals.

 A Tribune op ed and some thoughts on outfitters and locals.

April 05, 2021

We recently ran the item below.

The Agrarian's Lament: Two Hunting Season Reflections

A column appears in the Tribune today, by an outfitter, congratulating the Legislators involved in this matter (voting the bill down) for their thoughtfulness.  Interested folks can find it here:

Outfitters: Senators deserve our thanks for taking a thoughtful approach

The argument basically is the one I noted.  The bill would have reduced, the way the op-ed termed it, "hunter tourists" by 50%.  And that's true.

That doesn't rise to the level a good argument in my view. After all, legalization of marihuana was subject to the same pocket book interest. And Colorado was, and probably still is, getting stoner tourists. But that is the way that a lot of people tend to look at any question, and this question in particular.

The bill claims the Senators were verbally attacked, which if true is inexcusable, but which probably does show the deep seated cultural feelings on this issue here in this state.  Natives, of which I am one, tend not to be too sympathetic to this argument.

Why would that be?

It's  not, by and large, that most natives and long time residents are opposed to people keeping their jobs and we generally don't want to hurt the owners of restaurants and hotels and the like.   And we're keen on sporting goods stores. So none of that is it.

What is it, is being locked out.

Hunters and fishermen have sort on odd admiration/aggravation relationship with farmers and ranchers (quite a few of which, we should note, are hunters also).  And outfitters have made this worse.  It has to do with access to land.

Now, I'm not going to wax too romantic about this and there's always been places that hunters and fishermen, and from here out we'll just refer to both as "hunters" as fishermen are simply fish hunters, could not go.  But they were much fewer before outfitting became a big business in the state.  

That wasn't until the 1980s and the impact wasn't immediately felt. But by the 90s it was.  Outfitters were part, but not all, of that.

Indeed, out of state land ownership was also a big part of that.  Rich people would buy ranches in Wyoming and lock them up, if they could, whereas the same lands before had been ones of ready access for hunters.  Outfitters, however, came in and bought the hunting access, often locking up public lands that were landlocked by private lands at the same time.

Ranchers and farmers of course participated in this for a variety of reasons, simple economics being one but also because that often meant that they didn't have to deal with the minority of hunters who were some sort of a problem to them.  The outfitters guided their clients and hence controlled them.  

The entire development has impacted the local land culture a lot.  Access to private lands is harder to come by than it once was.  Given that, local hunters are unlikely to love outfitters if they've been pushed off of their former hunting lands.

The Game & Fish, for its part, has tried to redress this and has done so fairly successfully by effectively becoming sort of an outfitter, sort of, itself, by buying access to hunting lands under various agreements with landowners. That's a great program that I highly encourage, but of course it still isn't going to engender love by the locals for outfitters.

With only so much wildlife to go around, and so many places that it can be found, reserving licenses for out of state hunters, while generally supported by the locals, loses some of its appeal when the argument fails to ignore the impact of what outfitting has helped to create in the state.  

It's a classic agrarian conflict.

Indeed, it very closely replicates the agrarian conflict that took place in the 30 years following the Civil War in the South, to some extent, a conflict that came near to violence on multiple occasions.  That won't occur here, but that local hunters will back such bills if they can, and that the outfitting industry will oppose them, should be no surprise.

All of which gets back, in some ways, to my earlier arguments about creating a subsistence hunting license in the state, but that's not seemingly too likely to happen any time soon, and if it did, chances are that those with a trophy focus, and outfitters, might oppose that.  Or might not.

The Seasons Wrapped up on February 14. . .

Valentine's Day.  And who doesn't take a break from singing the praises of their sweetie in order to go out one last time?

I can't say that this was a great hunting season.

For one thing, I can say that its gotten difficult to draw antelope and deer tags, something I used to do routinely.  I was going to start a post on this way back when, and didn't.  Commenting on it now, what I'll note is that I used to expect to draw my first choice on antelope and that I had a relatively good chance of drawing a limited area deer tag every few years.  Elk tags were the ones that were difficult to regularly get.  Not anymore.

Starting a few years ago, for some reason, it started getting hard to draw antelope tags, and not just in the area that I put in for.  Lots of locals I know have shared this same experience.  I don't know what's up with this, as there are as many antelope as ever.  I've heard it claimed that this is because tags are going to out of staters, but I don't know if that's true or simply claimed.

This year the Coronavirus Pandemic may have influenced this as we're now a year into it and its undoubtedly the case that more people are out and about than normally, and I do regard that as a good thing . . . but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The 2020 season started in spring for me with turkey, if we discount that the 2019 waterfowl season ran into 2020, just as the 2020 waterfowl season ran into 2021.  I got a general turkey license, as did my son.  He got the turkey this year rather than me, so that season was as success.  After he returned to school I went out quite a few more times, but without any luck.  That's basically what I expect with turkey, however, so no big deal.

Turkey season was followed by "fishing season", which isn't an established season of any kind, but which is that time of the year that runs between the close of turkey season and the start of bird season.  I tend to only fish in the mountains, for whatever reason, and this year the fishing was good.  I even got in some fishing in streams I'd never fished before, and saw some areas I intend to go back to.

Fishing season closes with the opening of the early grouse seasons.  I went up for blue grouse as I usually do, and ran into the same problem I've run into the base few years.

The area that I go blue grouse hunting is in an area that has been dedicated to an elk hunting hunter's management area.  I support that program.  However, what it means is that the rancher whose land is in the area doesn't feel that he can let anyone cross it now for other hunting purposes.  

I have no desire to hunt on his land, and indeed, blue grouse aren't in it.  I only require transit.

Anyhow, once access across topped I realized that it wasn't a problem, as I have a Jeep, and I know the back roads in.  The first time I did this I received a call from the game warden and he was super enthusiastic about it probably as he's a hunter himself and he was excited to find somebody willing to dedicate such an effort to this.  

That warden was transferred and the year before last I ran into a new one, who flat out refused to believe that it was possible that I hadn't crossed private land to get where I was.  I invited him to follow me out, and he did.  At one point I had to warn him that I thought he had a risk of rolling his pickup in one area, but he followed me anywhere.  He basically called me a liar just prior to that, but when he had followed me all the way out he sheepishly admitted that he'd been wrong and that he just didn't think anyone would devote so much effort to bird hunting.

This past year, yet another new warden.  This one was hyper aggressive and when he what roads I'd taken in to get where I was, he informed they weren't roads.  They were there, but they weren't "official roads".  

It's difficult to tell somebody who is a native to this place that a road isn't official when I've been driving them longer than he's been alive, but he was insistent.  Eventually he calmed down.

Next year I'm thinking of riding in with a horse or mule.  I'm just one of those people. 

This takes me, however, to my next topic.

Both of these wardens were new when I encountered them and the last one was from urban California.  Neither are native to the state.

At one time game wardens here were a lot like lawyers.  They tended to come from ranching families and there was no place for them on the ranch, or they were local outdoorsmen who wanted to work outdoors. That's really changed.

It started to change when the state brought in a test system to qualify people to be game wardens. At some point, it really tightened this up in keeping our our certification culture, which basically holds that if you have a certification, you are qualified to do a job.  Now game wardens are almost all out of state imports.

This has tended, in my view, to convert them from game wardens into cops.  The last friendly warden this area has visited with me a lot about the shotgun he used for hunting.  The one prior to that had helped me drag an antelope in over a very long distance, just as he saw me doing it.  Now, getting stopped by some of them is like being a black man getting stopped in a big city. . . you're going to get grilled.

Indeed, the last one was hostile right off the bat.  Not only that, he didn't know that shotguns have to be plugged back in the state to be legal for hunting.  I know this, as I asked him if he wanted to check mine and he told me they didn't have to be plugged.  He was a lot more interested in harassing me, which is what he was doing, and telling me what amounts to a fiction about roads, than being a game warden.

Indeed, I'll note that this cop attitude has really caused the state a problem now, and one that has spread into the neighboring state to the north as well.  Back a few years ago a game warden up north found a pile of cartridge cases on the ground and realized that some elk had been taken out of season, and that the tracks lead back to the Crow Reservation in Montana.  This was evidence of poaching, but a sensible warden, and for that matter a sensible policeman, knows that there are times you pass on following up on something, and this was one of them.  He didn't, and zealously tracked it to the end, ending up in a United States Supreme Court case the successor of which is being litigated out here now, by necessity.

Well, anyway. . . 

We did get some blue grouse.

Then came sage chicken season.  We did okay, but not great.

Following that came the license draw disappointment, or rather its impact as the failure to draw anything was known well before that.  I, of course, obtained a general deer permit, but I do feel that something needs to be done about the difficulty to draw, and what I feel that is would be to consider subsistence hunting permits for subsistence hunters, of which I'm one.

I'll get into this some other time, but there are quite a few of us around in the state who are "pot hunters" or "meat hunters".  When I was a kid, most of us from here fit that category.  Being a "head hunter" was somewhat of a slam against you.  I don't think I met a real head hunter until I was in university, actually, in the 1980s.

Anyhow, I think some consideration needs to be given to a subsistence hunter category of license.  It'd still have to be controlled in some fashion but for those of us who are dedicated hunters, but in the killetarian category, something should be considered.  Indeed, I know that head hunters fear guys like me as we'll take a buck in an area that they feel we should let go for a couple of additional years until it has a more prominent display.  So let us have a sort of reserved doe permit then.  Anyhow, as noted, more on that later.

This also gets to the fact that since the game and fish's site has become computerized and has new categories, I'm not as good at putting in for things as I used to be.  I still put in for the main things I want to hunt, but I'm a failure at building points and Super Tags and the like.  Nobody to blame for that but myself.

So, anyhow, I didn't draw an antelope tag.  

I did purchase a general deer tag and my son and I went out in the short season in an area that we go into and did get up on some nice deer, including legal bucks for the area we were in. But we only saw them the one time and we didn't do the approach correctly.  Again, nobody to blame but myself, but getting them out would have been an epic, and probably nighttime, endeavor.

I completed the season in a completely different area and I did get a small buck, by myself  I didn't think that remarkable but when I later went to the game biologist to have it checked for CWD he was stunned how far I'd gone.  Says something about me, I suppose.

By that time, waterfowl season had started, which starts the saga of the chukars.  I recently posted on that on another site, so I'll just copy and repeat my comments here, from there:

I’ve been a bird hunter since I was five years old, which now means that I’ve occupied that vocation longer than any other. Indeed, over half a century now. But in that time, I’ve taken chukars once.

That occasion was some time in the very late 1970s or the very early 1980s. It was very late in the season and I was goose hunting. I saw some chukars, knew that it was open and got one or two, I don’t quite recall. What I do recall is that I was with my father and I crossed the frozen North Platte to retrieve my birds.

That says something, whether we are to admit it or not, as there’s no way on earth I’d cross the North Platte if it had ice on it now and there’s no earthly way I’d let my kids do it. But my father did, and I didn’t worry about doing it. I knew it was frozen solid.

Last weekend I was out by the Platte and it was completely open.

Anyhow, I’ve seen chukars from time to time since then but I didn’t go out and make a dedicated effort to hunt them. . . until this season.

And that intent formed the season before last.

The season before last I was hunting deer late in the season, in a snowstorm, and ran into a big bunch of chukars in the mountains in territory much like that you have recently depicted in another post. I had a shotgun with me, but I was carrying a rifle. I didn’t see any deer, and I didn’t try for the chukars, but it stayed on my mind.

This year I ran into chukars again while deer hunting, but out in a sage brush covered area where I’ve never encountered them before in my life. And it was a lot of them. Again, as I was deer hunting, I passed on.

I didn’t get a deer, however, I went back into the aforementioned mountainous area and encountered them walking down a road. I got a deer later in the day, and looked for the chukars on the way back, but I didn’t run into them again. Opportunity lost.

About a week later I was out duck hunting and walked for a couple of miles across the plains to get to a water hole with ducks on it. Walking down a draw I ran into a big bunch of chukars. I was completely unprepared to shoot, or even encounter, chukars. On my way back out, I looked for them again to no avail.

I mentioned to a game biologist at that point that I’d run into chukars three times that year. He was checking my deer for CWD. I noted how surprised I was by the last encounter I just noted. “Big hatch this year” was his reply.

Later, hunting ducks on the river, I paused on a bluff just to observe the river. I then noticed the dog was nowhere to be found. Looking around, I saw him working the area behind me, nose to the ground. He was on to. . .chukars.

I figured they were gone but sent him down a draw to work it. He found them again, and I got a long shot. Missed.

Of course steel shot waterfowl ammo isn’t ideal for chukars either.

About a week later, I was hunting the same area and crossing from one spot to another, not seeing any ducks, and not prepared for anything else, when the dog got them up again. Another long shot and another miss.

The next week, walking to the river from a different spot, yep, once again. I wasn’t prepared to shoot at all, and when I did, I missed. I saw where they’d gone and we worked them again, and one more long shot, with the same results.

After this, it was game on. I went back three more times just looking for them. We walked for miles.

Never saw them.

All of which is probably some sort of a lesson. . . but I’m not sure what it is.

This takes us back to waterfowl.

I didn't have a great waterfowl season, success wise.  I went out a lot, but without much success.  I only took a couple of ducks the entire season and didn't get a single goose for the freezer or dinner.  Not one.  I did get some shots, but nothing really worked out well, in spite of being out a lot.

I did hike for miles and miles, mostly by myself, or rather just with the dog.  So all in all, it was good that way.  I can't complain.

My last trip out was yesterday.  It's been absolutely artic here, but it warmed up enough to go out, and I figured that the general conditions would mean that it was likely nobody else would be out, which was at least partially true. As per the general nature of the year, I got up on a lot of geese, but I didn't get any.  I didn't even get a shot.

I'll have to see if rabbit is still on. . . .

Blog: Game and Fish Commission issues statement on former Commissioner Schmid

This has been in the news:

Game and Fish Commission issues statement on former Commissioner Schmid The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission President Pete Dube has issued the following statement on former Commissioner Mike Schmid: The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission thanks former Commissioner Mike Schmid for his service on the Commission over the last four years. Mike was energetic, passionate, and worked diligently as a Commissioner. His service on the commission has led to many significant accomplishments including heightened awareness and action on wildlife road crossings and the establishment of the WYldlife Fund which will benefit wildlife for years to come. Mike’s actions on some occasions unfortunately conflicted with actions that the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission had voted on and enacted. The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission has always supported and encouraged unfettered spirited debate from the public, the Department, and Commissioners during the numerous public meetings held by the Department and during Commission meetings. The expression of many opinions and voices lead to sound Commission and Department action. Mike was an integral part of those discussions. Commissioner Schmid, on several occasions, made public statements in writing, via social media, and in person that were directly contrary to votes and actions taken from Commission as a whole. That type of behavior unfortunately undermined the actions of the Governor, the Commission, and led to confusion and problems in enacting the mandates found to be important by the Commission and the Department. Mike’s failure to support the duly enacted Commission actions has harmed the important actions taken by the Commission, the Department, and the Governor.     The Commission hopes that Mike Schmid continues to be involved in the numerous issues important to wildlife and Wyoming citizens. Mike’s voice is important, and he may be an even more effective advocate when he is free to follow whatever position he may believe in and not be bound by the decisions made collectively by the seven members of the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission. All members of the Commission and the amazing employees of the Wyoming Game and Fish possess every ounce of passion that Mike has expressed for Wyoming’s amazing wildlife and wild places. The management of those wildlife resources requires that after spirited intelligent and informed debate by the public, the Department, and the Commission, the action publicly voted on and enacted by the Commission must be followed and respected. No Commissioner or Department employee should be allowed to undermine the important actions taken by the Commission or the Governor. -WGFD-

I'm not at all certain what this is really about.  It's pretty unclear.  Schmid was a vocal opponent of the aerial hunting of mountain goats by hired USF&W agents, wanting it to be done by local hunters, which I agree with.  He also was quite vocal in support of trappers, where things seem to be evolving towards new regulations.  And, while the Governor indicated that this was not part of it, he was one of the Wyoming Republicans who traveled to Washington D. C. for protests that turned into insurrection, although there's no indication that he was part of the insurrection.

Before the Oil. And after it? The economies of Wyoming and Alaska.

This is a thread that I captioned, in a somewhat different form ("Before the Oil") and then failed to add any text to, after I'd come back from the last vacation I went on, which was to Alaska.  

Fish hook statue, Homer Alaska.

That was several years ago, 2015, which I guess says something about me, and it isn't good.

Anyhow, what I had intended to write on, and still will, was Alaska before aggressive oil exploration in the 1970s.  I never got around to it, but unlike some undeveloped posts here, and indeed unlike some developed ones, I didn't trash the draft as I still intended to come back to it, which I'm not doing. 

But now, I'm going to add in Wyoming as well.

Indeed, even since I started what was sort of a pioneering thread, at the time I resumed it several days ago, this story has continued to develop and now I can't really claim the "you heard it here first" tag that it would have deserved.  An article very similar to this one, in some ways, has already appeared in the Tribune, for instance.  And indeed, not one articles, but now two.

Wyoming stands in a completely unique position in comparison to Alaska in that oil has been a feature of our economy going all the way back to the 1880s.  This isn't the case for Alaska, although oil was discovered in Alaska as early as 1902,but because of the state's high transient population, chances are good that there are plenty of Alaskans at this point who have no memory of a pre oil economy.  Both Wyoming and Alaska can be pretty chauvinistic about out states, but truth be known the transient population is so high that there are more imports than imports in the state at any one time.*

Real commercial exploration of oil started in Alaska in 1957, not earlier, in spite of a least one paper on Alaska's oil trying to track the history of oil exploration back that far.  I reality, prior to 57, oil wasn't much of a thing in Alaska and there are Alaskans just a little older than I am that might have a memory of the pre oil days. No living Wyomingite remembers a Wyoming before oil.

We may be about to find out what that is like.

Indeed, on the day I'm finally putting this up, it's believed that President Biden will enter a second, more permanent, order.

It's a fact of human memory that its largely inaccurate on certain things, while blisteringly accurate on others.  It's odd, but true.  And as part of that, it's almost impossible for people who have become acclimated to one economy to accept its change, let alone its disappearance. There are still people sitting around in Detroit who had worked in the automobile industry in the 1970s who are waiting for it to come back irrespective of the fact that automobile manufacturing went global in general, and went south, in the United States, in particular.  I don't know why Ford, Chrysler and General Motors centered their activities in that far northern state, but they did. They're never going to do that again.

Wyoming and Colorado were the homes, in the late 19th Century and early 20th, of a collection of famous saddle makers.  You could not only order one of their fine saddles in their shops, but also by mail.  There are still saddle makers in Wyoming, and in Colorado, and some very fine ones at that, but not that do the largescale sort of business that the saddle makers of that period did.  At least one of them located in Colorado warned his fellows to get out of the business in the early 20th Century before taking his own life.  He saw the automobile induced change coming, but he couldn't adapt to it himself.

At least Wyoming has been sort of like that.  We've experienced booms and busts repeatedly. Every time we busted, we vowed to broaden our economy, but we've never done it.  In our heart of hearts, we really don't think the oil economy will ever go away.

On this blog there's a very long thread on the history of coal.  I'm not going to repeat what was written out there, as its written out there. But what you'll find is that if you really look into it, coal began to decline as "King Coal" prior to World War One.  That wasn't obvious to common people however.  Indeed, it certainly wouldn't have been obvious to Wyomingites as coal came on strong here in the 1970s, well into the decline, paradoxically making coal's golden age something that's really a feature of my adult life.

Not so much that I obtained employment in the local coal industry, however.  Coal is cyclical like other energy sources and when oil slumped in the 1980s coal followed along, but more slowly. Again the history of my personal connection with it can be read in the other thread.

Petroleum oil and natural gas, which of course are not the same thing, have a more complicated history in regard to the state and the nation.  The US is a massive petroleum producer and always has been.  There's never been a point at which, after petroleum was first produced, that the US hasn't produced a lot of it.  And not just in the West, like we sometimes like to think, but also in regions of the East, Pacific Coast, and the South.  

The perception of an oil shortage, which came on strong in the US following the 1973 Oil Embargo, wasn't due to a lack of supply, but a gigantic demand.  After World War Two, and up until then, the US was the dominant economy of the world in an unprecedented way.  The Second World War left Europe and Asia's economies completely wrecked and they really didn't recover for a couple of decades thereafter.  It wasn't until the 1960s that European economies began to resemble what they had been, and it wasn't until the 1970s that Asian economies really entered the scene.

In that gap, the US economy went wild with expansion. At the same time, we became the free world's guardian or the world's policeman, depending upon your view.  At any rate, we kept producing a lot of oil but we also were consuming huge amounts at the same time.  We crept into being an oil importer without really realizing it and without doing anything to attempt to address it.  Cars that got 12 mpg were no big deal to us as the price of gasoline were pretty consistently low.

The 73 Oil Embargo changed all of that. There was a dual front effort to address the situation.  One was to expand our production of petroleum, and another was to reduce our consumption.

In expansion, if you lived in Wyoming in the 1970s, you knew that was going on. Drilling was going on like crazy.  And that's when the  concept of a Trans Alaska Pipeline came on.

That petroleum existed under Alaska's North Slope had been proven, but there was no way to get it to market. The pipeline was pushed as a way to address that.  It was controversial even at the time, as the Environmental movement already existed, but backed by a nation suffering from high petroleum prices and rampaging inflation, and Alaska's politicians boosting it as a way to open coffers of money to the state, it was amazingly rapidly built.  Even while the controversy went on, it was heralded as a technological achievement of historical proportions. As a kid in grade school at the time I recall it being compared to the Transcontinental Railroad as an achievement.

The expectation that the pipeline would transform Alaska was completely correct.  Oil booms, like booms of any kind, transform a region wherever they occur.  For Alaska, the impact was profound.

Prudhoe Bay, 1971.

Alaska became a petroleum producing state prior to the pipeline.  The first oil discovery was in 1902, so in some ways it's economy mirrors Wyoming's in this respect, but only slightly.  There was a 55 year gap in oil discoveries in Alaska after that, and the industry really took off in 1957.  That's long ago enough, however, and prior to statehood, such that one study notes that employment in Alaska's "traditional" economy, which includes fishing and logging, as well as petroleum extraction, hasn't changed since its 1959 statehood.  

Be that as it may, Alaska's oil fields presented all sorts of challenges that Wyoming's, Colorado's, California's, North Dakota's, Texas', etc., do not, and transportation was one of them.  Oil was produced in Alaska's large North Slope fields prior to the mid 1970s, but it had to be shipped out literally by ship, with that really being a seasonal endeavor. The pipeline changed all that.

This left Wyoming and Alaska in similar positions in the 1970s.  A massive oil boom in states with vast distances (with Alaska's obviously being much more vast) and economies that were in need of cash.  Wyoming had been relying on petroleum production for a large part of its economy going back to at least the 1910s, and World War One greatly expanded that.  Alaska hadn't really relied upon it until the 1960s, but it rapidly acclimated to it.  By the late 1970s both states had economies that depended enormously on petroleum production.  Wyoming had augmented its original prime industry, agriculture, with petroleum, and then coal, up to the point where they largely supplanted agriculture as economic drivers.  Alaska had started off with fishing and logging, which remain, like Wyoming's agriculture, but with petroleum being the main economic driver.

So where are we now?

Now we can hardly imagine a world that works differently.  Do we have to start to?

That's difficult to tell, in terms of the complete story, but at least Wyoming's example would suggest the answer is yes.  Wyoming, unlike Alaska, never relied completely on petroleum, although it relied heavily on it.  It had coal too.  Now that's rapidly passing away and the state is in deep economic trouble.  New petroleum booms have come on since 1990, fueled in part by massive technological advances in petroleum extraction, but they've tended to be natural gas centered, something that has oddly not been noticed outside of the industry. This is actually a good thing for the industry in Wyoming, however, as gas seems to be an up and coming fuel.  It's a bad thing in that the price has been pretty depressed recently, but that may be a temporary thing.

Which leads us to where are now.

That probably should start with the state of the industry.

Which is actually pretty hard to flesh out.

At the time of my writing this, there are four oil rigs that are working in Wyoming.  There are five working in Alaska, half as many as were working last year.  In August 2019  the rig count in Wyoming was 37.  So things are not going great.

There's a lot that went into causing that situation to occur.  One of them was geopolitical.  Saudi Arabia and Russia got into a price war and the prices went down and down. During that time, there was speculation that the Saudis were intentionally depressing the price in order to attack the American industry, which had been hugely successful in the prior decade but which also now relies enormously on horizontal drilling and fracing.  This means U.S. drilling is comparatively expensive.  Saudi production is cheap, but they depressed their prices so low that they weren't making money on it, leading to legitimate questioning about how wise their engaging in a game of oil chicken was.  Whatever their logic, the price of oil has never returned to a break even place for them.  Indeed, all the benchmarks remain below $60.00 bbl today.

Recently there's been some real efforts on the part of the Saudis to get their act together, raise prices, and return to some sort of normalcy in the market.  That briefly boosted prices, although it didn't stick. The resolve is there, however.  If they stick to it, they can manage to dry up the current petroleum surplus and slowly rise out of the current situation. The problem is that they really need to, as prices have fallen so low that petrostates are now no longer able to balance their budgets. That oddly doesn't seem to be a problem with wester nations that never do, but with nothing to fall back on, it is a problem.

Indeed, it's a problem for Wyoming and Alaska, for the same exact reason, except we didn't bring this on ourselves through starting a price war.

That's part of the reason that the price of oil is low, but another has to do with a transition that's occurring away from petroleum.  It was subtle at first, but now electric cars are coming on strong.  And added to that, quite a few younger people are simply eschewing driving.  It's somehow lost its allure.

That means that demand is actually fallen.  And as it fell, technology entered the picture and is increasingly changing the market.

Environmental concerns have been impacting automobile manufacturing since the 1970s, but within the last 20 years it was clear that electric cars would be on the scene in the near future.  In Wyoming, and I'd guess Alaska, there are still a fair number of people who are steadfastly obstinate in their rejection of the concept of electric cars, but the fact of the matter is that the pace of electric car technology is accelerating dramatically.  "They'll never make a pickup that can take you into the sticks" is still heard here, but it isn't true. They will, and soon.  Ford  and General Motors are introducing full sized standard electric 1/2 ton pickups  Chrysler hasn't, but it's holding back to see where things are going.  It will very soon.  Harley Davidson has an electric motorcycle. Chrysler's subsidiary has an electric Jeep.  

Within a decade, just on the current trend line, it's safe to assume that more electric automobiles will be sold than petroleum fueled ones.  With the accelerating pace of technology in the industry, that's all the more certain.  While people will deny it even now, we're in the end stage of the gasoline engine automobile.

And now new technologies are being explored for aircraft as well.  Boeing is going to be introducing aircraft that fly on biofuel.  Airbus is going to be introducing hydrogen fueled aircraft which would be even "greener" than that.  We're not only in the end of the era of fossil fuel ground automobiles, but in the end stage of fossil fueled aircraft as well, although that will take longer.

The only thing left, after that, are railroads, currently the most efficient, and greenest, means of transportation that there is.  The technological evolution there is obvious and has been for decades. The longest railway in the world, the Trans Siberian Railway, is electric.  American railways could be as well, but for the fact that fossil fuels have been so cheap.  

All of this leads, we'd note, to the topic of "green" electricity generation. And its been a big topic.  Ironically, its been something that's boosted the petroleum industry in the past couple of decades as coal has faded.  Environmental concerns on the part of consumers, and the inefficiency of coal in comparison to natural gas, has lead to a shift over to gas, which is cleaner.  It's not as clean, however, as wind and solar, which have really come on in the past couple of decades.

What would really put the bullet in all things fossil fuel would be nuclear power.  Bizarrely, and stupidly, the western world public just can't get around to grasping t hat.  It actually is the energy solution.  Having used nuclear energy first for a field deployed weapon has arguably put us decades behind deploying it for power.

The point of all of this is that Wyoming, and Alaska, the two states most heavily dependent on petroleum production, are frankly facing a pretty uncertain future in regard to them.  Pretty soon, electric cars will be the norm everywhere.  Pretty soon, aircraft will be using alternative fuels.  Pretty soon, maybe. . . . railroads will be electric, again maybe.

It's not that this would mean there's be no need for oil. There still would. Petrochemicals are a really big deal.  But the need would be dramatically reduced.  Where would we then be?

That's pretty hard to tell, actually.

It's hard in part because humans are notoriously inaccurate in predicting the future, and tend to block out things they don't like about what they can in fact predict.

Having said that, one thing that is clear is that "alternative energy" is going to be a big thing.  It already is.  But the number of people it employs is another thing.  One of the ironies about wind and solar is that not only are they greener in power generation, they're low overhead in terms of employees. The real work associated with them is in turnarounds, when infrastructure is replaced. But like turnarounds at refineries, that's not work that goes to locals.  Indeed, in a further irony, it tends, just like petroleum facility turnarounds to go to companies located in Texas and Oklahoma.  Those companies travel all over, and their employees are based somewhere else.

That leaves us with what we can see, which isn't necessarily what will be.  And that is those portions of the economy, or as I'm dealing with two, the economies, that predated the oil in the form it became.  And those were land based industries.  Agriculture, silviculture, and in Alaska's case, commercial fishing.  Those industries have been there the whole time.

But can you build a modern economy, if that's what we currently have, on those?

The evidence would be yes, but it'll require some thinking outside of the box.

We've dealt with this before, but the thing that Wyoming has been poor at it.  We'll pick that back up where we left off with it last time.

 Agriculture

 Oats

Agriculture is the great ignored industry in Wyoming.

This will being the hackles up on some, because agriculture in Wyoming is generally conceived of as ranching, and ranching has some real opponents in the modern U.S., even though in the West, contrary to the anti's views, its darned near environmentally neutral.  In fact, truth be known, it's environmentally positive if objectively views. That's right, that's what I'm saying as that's the truth. An environmentalist, if they're realistic, ought to thank a rancher every time he sees one (and ought to be for nuclear power also, but that's another topic).

 

Laramie Range hayfield.

Agriculture is an economic constant in Wyoming. While there was some economic activity, even national economic activity, if we consider that courier du bois  and trappers were in fact part of an international industry, it's agriculture that really created the state and made it what it was, and is.

Agriculture made its appearance in a recognizable form in Wyoming as early as the 1840s when New Mexican laborers brought up to work on Adobe buildings at Ft. Laramie stayed on and started small vegetable farms on the "Mexican Hills" near there.  This gave them in an income in that the produce was available to sell both to soldiers at Ft. Laramie as well as to travelers on the Oregon Trail, who by that time no doubt were pretty darned ready for something green and fresh.  Unfortunately, while the area remains a farming area, as far as I know there aren't any farms in the area that are descendant from the original ones.

Cattle, of course, is what we think of in terms of Wyoming agriculture, although it was really farming that made its the first appearance and it certainly continues on in a big way.  Crop farming continues on in southeastern Wyoming which has a climate and soil much like Nebraska's, and hence is part of the giant corn and wheat belt that stretches all the way into the Mid West and which is a massive part of the economy in many such states.  It also exists in Fremont County as well, and in Big Horn and Washakie Counties.  Hay crop production exists in many places, as long as there's water to support it.

 

Porta-vet box of a large animal veterinarian.  A common ranch site in some times of the year.

Where there isn't sufficient water, which is most of the state we have cattle and sheep, although now days mostly cattle.  And Wyoming cattle live out on the range.  They're fed in the winter, but on the range.  Really, they're making use of the ground that in earlier eras buffalo made use of and in the same way, save for the fact that buffalo tended to crowd into Cottonwood groves in the winter and destroy them.

It's cattle and sheep that keep Wyoming wild.  This use of the land keeps the land open and natural. When that stops, you get houses and "ranchettes", something that environmentalist should keep in mind.  A strong cattle industry makes for a strong wild Wyoming.

Given this, and that it's so much a part of the background of the state, you'd think that this is an industry the state would seek to support in some ways.  But it doesn't.  Stockmen and other agriculturalist are largely on their own in all sorts of ways.  There is the leased ground, a very misunderstood public asset, but even this is under attack, unfortunately by agriculturalist as well as others.  At any rate, agriculture is an industry which, in spite of the slams against it, just keeps on keeping on by itself under its own steam, ignored by the state and by Wyoming communities.

It should and must be noted that employment in this industry has really changed over the years.  In the early days Wyoming ranches large and small employed a fair number of people directly.  That was due tot he nature of the operations, and even though a very significant amount of the labor on ranches remains the same now as it was in 1890, not nearly as many people are directly employed in the industry as once were.  There are a lot of reasons for this.

 

One reason is that barbed wire changed the nature of ranching and accelerated the change to smaller, in relative terms, family operations.  When that occurred large numbers of year around employees were not needed and to some extent those employees were members of the immediate family.  As this evolution took place family run operations relied on neighbors and friends for additional labor support during those times of the years which, at one time, caused large numbers of seasonal cowhands to be employed.

Another big factor was the 4x4 truck.  Up until World War Two ranches had to rely on cowhands stationed at the edges of their lands for winter feeding in many instances. The truck stopped that, and it reduced the need for labor as well.  Ranchers that once would employ several hands on remote areas of their ranches could now simply drive their with a 4x4 truck.  Such trucks were first available immediately after the war, and it was the war that really brought them on in strength and proved their utility.  So now many ranches, even large ones, employ no individual cowhands at all, although there are still quite a few that do.

 

World War Two era Dodge 4x4 truck.  With very little in the way of change, this model would go into civilian production immediately after World War Two.

The demise of the sheep industry also really played a large role in the number of direct employees.  There are still Sheepmen in Wyoming, but not like they once were. And this is because, in part, due to the fact that that sheep production was in fact one of the rare areas where there was government involvement, as up until the late 1980s the Federal Government supported the price of wool due to the Defense Wool program.  That program came in during the Korean War when the military had to purchase heavy woolen clothing in large quantities and found that there wasn't a sufficient supply of it. The wool program was therefore brought in but it carried on well after it probably should not have.  Even defending the program it has to be admitted that ending it in the late 1980s made sense, keeping in mind that we hadn't fought a cold weather war since 1954 (we would again in the 2000s) and the technology of winter clothing had changed a lot in that 30 year period.

 Sheep in Natrona County, Wyoming, 1940s.  This photo could have been taken at any point in the 20th Century up into the 1990s.

Also related to it, however, is that the United Kingdom joined the European Community which in turn caused the UK to dump the market policies that favored its former Dominions.  During the late Empire stage of the UK the UK had a policy of developing agricultural production in its Dominions but finishing the products in the UK. So Australian, New Zealand and Canadian wool all went to fine British wool mills for a finished product.  When the UK became part of the EC, however, that violated the EC's policies and the British stopped doing that, focusing on local markets instead.  Indeed, the EC has sort of a bizarre semi autarkic economic policy that heavily impacts agriculture in a negative way in some instances and which explains some odd things, such as a constant EU effort at serious beef production, which it really doesn't have an agricultural landmass to support properly.

When that occurred the Australians dumped their wool in the United States and an already ailing American wool industry was really hurt. So we see few sheep now, although they've come back a bit.

The sheep industry supported an infrastructure that was immediate and obvious, which brings us to the next part of this story.  While Wyoming has lost direct employment in agriculture, it's really lost the infrastructure over the years in a major way.

Early on, there was no infrastructure and everything produced here was shipped out for processing in some fashion.  We've almost completely returned to that.  Turning first to wool, when the sheep industry massively contracted all the supporting wool buyers and shearers, an immediate support industry, were hurt.  But its in other areas where the change has been more dramatic in some ways.  Wyoming once had a very large number of stockyards. Every city had them, and they were mostly associated with railroads.  Those are almost all gone, and that's due to the fact that commercial trucking has completely taken over that role from the railroads, although as late as the 1990s the railroads were still attempting to get back into this for sheep.  Perhaps nothing can be done about that and it was inevitable.

Less inevitable, however has been the end of the local meat processing operations on a large scale. There are still some, but they're really small custom houses.  It was this industry that brought my father's family to Wyoming, as we owned a packing plant here in Casper. Today there is no packing plant in Casper, or anywhere in Wyoming for that matter, of that type.  The plant produced not only meat for sale to stores, but other products as well.  Now, you will not find that in Wyoming.  The cattle are all here, but they are shipped out of state for finishing and processing.

 Closed packing plant, Omaha Nebraska.

You'll also not find much in the way of dairy production, although the Starr Valley in western Wyoming hands on in this area, producing cheese on a commercial basis. At one time most larger towns had a creamery that processed milk, and indeed my family had one for a time here in Casper. That meant that there were dairy cows nearby, which there were, and where you have dairy cows, you have to have a large quantity of high quality hay for them, which was also produced locally.

 

Former Jersey Creamery, Casper Wyoming.

Now all of this is gone.  National consolidation of these things is the reason why.  The situation in the meat packing industry is legendary and is the source of steady complaints from both ranchers and consumers.  Indeed, ti's slowly spawned a direct buy movement, which is now pretty common, where families will purchase a cow, i.e., a "beef", for a half beef, for slaughter.

Having said all of this, the direct economic impact of agriculture remains quite large in Wyoming, it's just not very well noted by anyone. Independent truckers, local feeds stores, professional services, and even local manufacturing all rely on it pretty heavily.  Seemingly nobody notices.  Indeed, in some instances, local governments can be a bit hostile to agriculture when some sorts of support facilities are proposed.

Before I depart from this topic, I'm going to note one thing that seems self evident but for some reason is never treated that way.  Silviculture, the raising of trees for harvest, is agriculture. That makes logging part of agriculture.  Indeed in Wyoming, all logging, to the extent any remains, and it isn't much, takes place on land that cattle are normally on.  Logging is an industry that's really been hurt in the US over the last thirty years and this may actually be one area where environmental concerns have hurt agriculture, although ironically here too its something that environmentalist should reconsider.  Growing trees are carbon sinks.  Full grown trees much less so.

 

 Cattle sharing ground with camping fisherman.

And, in the same thread:

So where do we go?

So then, what to make of this?

Well, usually when we go through a crash, we start to talk about diversification.  We also usually start to take about cutting back government spending.  And we're going to have to talk about a new government revenue sources, or having a state government that matches the money we take in.  It's probably time for all of that.

Maybe its' time to talk about building upon what we have, and actually realizing what that is.  And, as we can see from the above, in terms of private industry, that's agriculture, tourism and mineral extraction.  And, like it philosophically or not, we have a lot of government employment in this state and government entities that are pretty darned involved in some sectors of the economy, particularly oil and gas, already.

So, what do we have to build with?  Let's start with mineral extraction.

Mineral extraction?  Perhaps you're thinking "why I thought you were arguing against relying on that?"  No, I'm really not. I'm arguing that we have to be smart and realistic about that.

The boom and bust nature of much of the mineral industry is a feature of it that is pretty fixed, long established by history, and that's all largely beyond our control.  We have to accept that.  But these industries aren't going completely away.  Even coal, which is in real trouble, isn't going completely away and indeed even right now there's an effort by one coal company to start a mine near Sheridan.

The thing we can do, therefore, is to be smart in our planning on these industries.  And that would have to accept that they're going to have rocky periods.

We may also want to be very careful, and we very rarely are, about thinking that when times are good that they're going to go on forever.  There are those who will act that way and they nearly take any suggestion to the contrary as a hostile comment.  Planning for the crash ought to go on during the boom, rather than waiting until it occurs, and that's just smart.

It's also smart to recognize long term trends, none of which are hugely favorable towards the fossil fuel industry.  Recognizing that isn't being hostile, once again, it's just recognizing it.

And perhaps we also ought to at least ponder that, like the oil exporting nations of the Middle East, we really don't do much with the raw product anymore.  We did at one time with petroleum oil, in that we did refine it here, but we no longer do that.  Natural gas, because of its nature, is "refined", or rather processed here, and that will go on.  We ought to consider all of that, however.  We never processed the iron we mined, for example, even though we had all the things necessary to do it (except, perhaps, the large scale shipping necessary for that).

Now, at this point in time, I may have to admit that the ship has sailed on all of these things.  Down to a handful of refineries, I don't see that industry coming back.  There's a reason that super sized refineries are all located on the Gulf Coast.  But if we're not going to process our raw products here, maybe taxing slightly what we export would be a good idea.  Nothing radical, but to add a little bit of a tax in addition to the existing ones for what is departing would not impact the price and might help us out quite a bit in lean times, particularly based upon how the funds were earmarked.  And who knows, maybe that would encourage a little processing here as well.

All of which might do nothing at all, I'll concede.

Okay then, what about agriculture the one we ignore?

Well, here's something I think we can do a fair amount about.

Agriculture in the state has weathered all the storms. Everything we've ever raised or grown here we still do, we just don't do it in the same proportions as some prior eras, but that's not surprising. What we don't do is to process hardly anything here.  We don't pack any of the meat on a large scale.  We don't process any wool into woolens.  We don't mill any flour.  We don't do any of that.

Indeed, the only processing we do, and its a return to something we hadn't done in a long time, is to brew beer and bottle it and (and this is new) to distill grain and bottle that.

Maybe it's time to sit back and have one of those beers and ponder that.

There's a lot we can do here, but in some ways we have to be a bit bold and buck some trends.  There's a large multi-state industry devoted to processing remotely here, and to suggest we ought to do it locally means having to deal with that.

But it can be dealt with.

Let's start with the toughest aspect of that, the beef cattle industry.

At one time, Wyoming had at least one packing plant, indeed right here in Casper.  There was another just outside of the state in Scottsbluff, right over the border, and yet another in Denver.  There were probably others, including perhaps some in the state, but now there are none and all of those which I have mentioned are gone, although one remains in Greeley Colorado.

 February 1922 Casper Packing Company advertisement.

Now, they are gone because the meat packing industry has become amazingly consolidated and the profit margins in packing are, or at least were, low. But if the packing industry could be revived, it would be a natural for Wyoming.  We have everything it requires, at least in certain localities, that being cattle, agriculture for hay and feed corn, sufficient water, good roads and land.

The situation is similar when we consider sheep.  While the sheep industry has really taken a hit, it's slowly somewhat revived over the years and we do have sheep.  Sheep, as an agricultural animal, are interesting in that their primary crop is really wool, with meat being a secondary one.  The meat aspect of this is already addressed by the comments on beef above, but the wool part isn't.

Wool itself used to contribute quite a bit to the Wyoming economy in that there were wool buyers, sorters, and shearers, all in addition to the sheep ranchers, who employed themselves and their herders.  What we never had, however, was a woolen mill, to process raw wool into anything.  We could, but we don't.

This is also true of the milling industry; i.e., flour milling.

 Old elevator in Sheridan Wyoming. This elevator belonged to the Best Out West flour mill, and apparently this was the mill. The hotel next to it is named after the mill.  From Painted Bricks.

Wyoming grows a fair amount of grain, and grows it all over, even though we often do not seem to realize it.  Major agricultural areas can be found in southeastern Wyoming, west central Wyoming, northeastern Wyoming and northern Wyoming.  We grow a fair amount of wheat and corn and if milling facilities were here, we could go the next step.  We don't, however.

We've done better with sugar. We do have some sugar facilities serving, in particular, the Big Horn Basin. Those, it should be noted, are owned by co-ops that formed to operate them with the sugar companies pulled out of that area.  Elsewhere we haven't done as well with that.

Probably the one area that we've done well at recently that might point the way forward a bit is in the category of alcohol.  

A bottle of Wyoming Whiskey, depicted in a thread here on Lex Anteinternet.

I addressed the introduction of a local bourbon some time ago, indeed quite some time ago, on a thread that was once one of the most popular here on this page, that being The Rebirth Of Rye Whiskey And Nostalgia For 'The Good Stuff' & Beer and Prohibition.  That thread also addressed, a bit, the history of local beers.  On the whiskey, I noted; 

Wyoming Whiskey is a new brand of whiskey that's distilled in the tiny Hot Springs County town of Kirby.  It came about, according to what I've read, as the Meads purchased farm ground in the area in order to have a steady supply of corn for their cattle operation, and then hit upon the idea of distilling whiskey in the county.  Hot Springs County is otherwise famous for, well, hots springs, and is of course the location of Thermopolis, which features the same.

This trend has really continued since then, and there's apparently some sort of distillery in Teton County now as well, and there is one that is distilling a couple of different types of hard alcohol here in Natrona County.  I can't opine on the Teton County one at all, and I'm only aware of it as the state government recently turned down the request of an Idaho distiller for a grant to help relocate its headquarters over into the county, as another distiller opposed it.  For that matter, my experience with the local Natrona County distiller is limited to having had a single shot of its vodka, given to me by a friend as proof that not all vodka is bad.  While my position on vodka remains that the difference between the best vodka and the worst is the price, I have to say that I was impressed because . . . well, it didn't taste like vodka.

It's not only hard alcohol that's making inroads into Wyoming and processing the state's agricultural produce. Beer has made an amazing return in these regards.

Snake River Brewery in Jackson Wyoming.

I've commented on this before, but here too the trend has really developed.  And to an amazing extent.  There are now breweries in quite a few Wyoming towns putting out a really high quality product.  This industry has gone from one which, a few years ago, would have required a person to hunt for a Wyoming beer (and a few years before that there were none) to one in which a person could easily buy beer on any occasional and always find a high quality Wyoming beer of any type.  It's really amazing.  

Indeed, Wyoming beer is even canned now.  That may not seem so amazing, but a brewery has to put out quite a bit of beer before they begin canning it.  But that's now going on.  Indeed, beer is the Distributist Economic champion of Wyoming.

This revival, it should be noted, represents a return of an industry that once was all over and very local.  Casper, which recently saw local beer return at The Wonder Bar, an bar that dates back forever in Casper's history, once had a regional brewer in the form of Hillcrest Brewery.  

Bottles from Hillcrest Lager Beer, a beer that was once brewed locally but is no more. Casper doesn't bottle any beer anymore, but it does brew it once again.

There are even a couple of wineries in Wyoming. I don't know anything about them, other than that they exist, but this is additional evidence that at least in terms of processing a local agricultural product into a finished one, alcohol leads the way.

Okay, its one thing to point all of these things out, but what of it.  We don't have packing plants, mills, etc.  What, a person might ask, do you propose?

Well, I'd propose something that Wyomingites hate, state assistance for private enterprise, or even direct involvement in it.

Now, before people have their hackles up too much, let me point out that we only oppose this to a limited degree.  We're actually okay, based on our track records, of supporting start ups with grants.  We're also okay with investing in doubtful technologies, if they relate to the mineral industry.  Witness there all the money the state is sinking into Clean Coal Technology.  I'm not opposed to that by any means, but we must admit that the chances of it ever paying off are remote.

So, before we get too much further, let us consider North Dakota Mill and Elevator.

Eh?

Postcard of the North Dakota State Mill, 1915.

While nearly a neighboring state (it doesn't border us, but you can sprint across the corner of South Dakota and be there in no time at all), North Dakota, which we will return to when we discuss education, has a really different cultural history compared to Wyoming.  With a heavily Scandinavian immigrant population from early in the 20th Century, North Dakota had and still has a political culture that, quite frankly, was occasionally sympathetic to socialism.

Now, let me be frank, I'm not terribly sympathetic with socialism, but we can take a page out of an example of something that works, if it works.  And here's something that has worked for North Dakota.

It's a state owned operation, formed to address problems that farmers were experiencing, but it doesn't receive a subsidy from the state and its self supporting.  

This is the same model used by the other Dakota, South Dakota, for South Dakota Cement, an operation so successful that it has expanded even recently and markets its product in every state bordering South Dakota.  It even had a plant, at one time, here in Casper.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we need state run or owned industries everywhere.  But perhaps we can take an example where there isn't a private industry.  Critics would say, and they should be listened to, that if a private industry isn't operating it's for a good reason. But, we also have to admit that there are a fair number of industries that get their start from some sort of government support.  Indeed, the entire transcontinental railroad was such an example, getting state support in the form of massive land grants, which is essentially the same as a massive infusion of capital.  There's no reason to pretend otherwise.

So, where we don't have a local industry, perhaps we should consider if the state should help. The state's already helping the coal and petroleum industries via various studies at the University of Wyoming, including clean coal.  The very day I wrote this part of this entry, Governor Mead was appearing on the front page of the Tribune at a state funded facility studying clean coal.  And let's not forget the pile of administrative entities that help business one way or another, from the Farmers Home Administration to the Small Business Administration.

So, suing the North and South Dakota models, could the state infest in the infrastructure for milling, packing and wool processing?  Perhaps it could. And, after an initial start up, perhaps it could require those industries to run on a self-sufficient basis.

We could make a shift of this type, but as noted, it's going to take some outside the box thinking.  One thing it would also take is some inside the state, state investment.   And we have to do that now, like Frank Pantangeli has it in The Godfather Part II, "while we have the muscle".

What that would mean is that we actually do some thing that we claim we've been going to do forever, and diversify the economy, but in a way that we can actually do it, rather than on some wild hypothetical.

And we do have the cash, i.e., the economic muscle, right now.

Part of the evidence of that is that the state has been wasting money on long shot lawsuits to try to bend Montana and Washington to our will in order to ship coal to a coal shipping port yet to be built and which never will be.  That appears likely to come to an end here soon, as even Trump Administration didn't support Wyoming in the case pending in front of the Supreme Court (the Biden Administration may very well oppose Wyoming at that level, if it can).  And that's not the only place Wyoming is applying case even in an era in which we are stripping money from everything we can.  Wyoming gets the concept of strategic spending, but it's not strategically spending for a new economy, but in attempts to preserve the old one which has such an uncertain future.  Packing plants to process the state's livestock, grain mills to process the state's grains, wool mills to process wool, and other modern agricultural sector investments should be made right now.

People will look at this and thing "oh no, that's old fashioned", but the truth is that agriculture is the economic base of some states that do at least as well as we do.  And we have to build with what we have and, more importantly perhaps, what people want.  Right now the signs are there that people aren't going to be wanting petroleum the way they once did, and they don't want coal anymore at all.

Nuclear power would offer another opportunity to Wyoming as well, if only we could overcome the bizarre negative mindset about it, which we've also addressed  here before.

The POWER Interview: Technology Can Solve Problem of Nuclear Waste

The POWER Interview: Technology Can Solve Problem of Nuclear Waste: Debate continues about nuclear power's role in electricity production, particularly as it revolves around climate change. As a zero-emissions source of

Interesting article on this topic.

Nuclear power should be something that Greens, particularly radical Greens, should be screaming for night and day.  Indeed, any really scientific thought on energy that was designed to address safe, sustainable, and clean energy, would be based on nuclear power.  Opposition to it is so unscientific as to make Godzilla movies look like actual paleontology.  

Suggesting the state build a nuclear power plant is really going big, so to speak, but perhaps we really need to ponder the state getting into that somehow.  I can't see the state building one, although just a few months ago we were read to invest in the checkerboard lands to an extent that would have exceeded building a nuclear power plant.  Perhaps we should ponder it.  We should at least ponder backing one, and backing one or more in locations where others have just shut down.

And yes, I can hear the cries "Socialist!"

Now, granted, this is a species of socialism, albeit of an odd type that differs from the classic economy destroying the government owns everything variety.  The concept would only be, on sort of  Distributist basis, to form those entities aiding major Wyoming industries where we aren't able to finish the product ourselves on an reasonably economic level.  We can't, for example, create refineries and have them compete.  Nor power plants. But packing plants are another matter, and mills are a demonstrated different matter.  This wouldn't bring in an economic miracle by any means, but it would allow us to further make use of the resources that we do have, right here. And there would be a market for the product, including a small market right here, in that the state is already in the lunch business for kids up to age 19.  Moreover, tags like "Wyoming beef" do have a local price and maybe even a regional one that could be useful for a product grown and finished here, and that is already the case.

M'eh

We're going to have to do something, and do something with what we've got the resources to do that something on.  Doing nothing is never an option unless failure is.  

So what about Alaska?

Well, it seems its challenge is similar, but with different resources. The way out seems about the same.

Assuming it is a way out. But it seems to me it is.  Working in a flour mill or packing plant no doubt wouldn't be as lucrative as working on a rig, but its work.  Right now, with four rigs, it isn't as if there's that much work in that sector.  And a successful economy builds on itself.

So, we could do something about where we are heading, which is to focus on what we have, and where the future seems headed.  But will we?

I sort of doubt it.  

In today's Tribune there's an interesting op ed by Mike Leman, the Catholic legislative liaison in Wyoming, which had this interesting quote.

For decades, many who follow the legislature have quipped that Wyoming is the most conservative socialist state in the country. How so? Because we Wyomingites have never been averse to true benefits that come from government programs, but we have preferred to let the oil and coal industries pay for them, rather than reaching deeper into our own pockets. Due to declining revenue from mineral severance tax, local government agencies have been cutting services and putting in place hiring freezes for years. Last November, Governor Gordon announced an additional $500 million in cuts, which include layoffs.

The quote is amusing in that there's more than an element of truth to it.  Proud of our independence and conservative values, we sometimes fail to appreciate that we've had it good, except when we had it bad, because of the extractive industries upon which we've nearly solely relied for everything.  Even those who don't work for those industries do in some fashion, one way or another, as everything is dependent upon them.  We're getting a clear warning that we're going to now have to look elsewhere, and even if Leman doesn't really have the definition of subsidiarity really right, in my view, the principal is there and now its applicable to us in spades.

But that will require an overhaul of our thinking.  And that would require us to face grim reality that things are pretty rapidly changing.  There's no sign whatsoever that coal will "come back" and blaming that on the government or pinning hopes on a lawsuit pending at the Supreme Court level is hoping against hope.  The energy economy is rapidly evolving and with it transportation technology is rapidly evolving as well.  

We have, however, other resources upon which we rely.  We could build on those.

My prediction is, however, we won't.  Instead, we're going to hear, in this bizarrely polarized era, how the Federal Government must give the Federal lands the state forever eschewed when it became a state, to the state, based on strained theories. And we're going to hear railing against the Biden Administration, which is going to be blamed for everything.  The GOP will either unite in the state on those points or rip itself apart as some harbor the fantasy that there was some way that Trump could have received another term, if "only if", in spite of the rejection by over half the electorate, a half that has no sympathy whatsoever with Wyoming's economic woes.  We won't be building packing plants when we could, or flour mills.  And we'll continue to tolerate a situation in which agricultural land is needlessly busted up into patches that don't raise a single cow, and the passing of large ranches to out of state owners who hold them as playgrounds.

At some point, we'll ask the satirical question, "is this why we can't have nice things?", when in fact we have them, if only we had the vision to see that we do.

*Which is a reason, I'd note, that people who claim to speak for "Wyoming values" ought to be given a second glance, as often they don't have all that stout of connection with the state.

Related threads:

There are a lot of threads on the economy of Wyoming on this blog.  Here's a few, however, that are closely related to what we posted on here.

The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.

Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1. The Economy

Lex Anteinternet: Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (a). The Economy again. . . the extractive industries

Looking at the nature of Wyoming's economy again