Around the 307
News, commentary, and other items of interest from the greater Wyoming landscape.
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For the week of January 5th, 2025, here are a few Around the 307 news items of interest:
Here’s an interesting story to start out the week. On Monday, January 6th, 2025, Cowboy State Daily published this article about a rare leucistic fawn spotted amongst the Wyoming Range Mule Deer herd. Leucism is not the same as albinoism (the latter being when an animal has a complete lack of melanin resulting in an all white coat, pink eyes, and nose). While both are genetic mutations, leucistic animals suffer from a loss of pigmentation leading to a variety of coat colors (white, gray, brown, black or piebald) as well as the possibility of having blue eyes (such as the little guy in the photo below). Leucistic deer have a better chance of survival in terms of predation given they don’t stand out as dramatically as an all-white albino deer. They’re also generally healthier than albino animals. We’ll keep our fingers-crossed this unique little fella makes it through the winter as we need as many fawns growing to adulthood in the Wyoming Range mule deer herd as we can get!
Thursday, January 9th, 2025, the Star Valley Independent (via the Wyoming News Exchange) published a report revealing a new rule may soon go into effect allowing concealed carry by members of the public within the Wyoming Capitol complex. This pending change is a result of a promise made by Governor Mark Gordon to reconsider the applicability of existing gun-free zones after he vetoed a bill in 2024 that would have removed all gun-free zones statewide. This new rule would still prohibit firearms from rooms where government meetings are held and would only apply to the public area of the Capitol and its underground corridor. You can read the full story here.
Also this week a number of news outlets across the western states published stories dissecting the statistics compiled in U-Haul’s recently released one-way rental data for calendar year 2024. The report titled “U-Haul Growth States of 2024” ranks states by their net gain or loss of one-way movers in a given year. This most recent report indicates Wyoming fell from the number 14 spot in 2023 all the way to number 36—that’s a tumble of 22 spots on the list! You know what that means? Well, based on the data, it would seem a lot less people are flocking to the Cowboy State these days. Perhaps unsurprisingly California occupies the number 50 spot on the list indicating the Golden State as the least likely choice for movers. You can peruse more U-Haul moving stats by visiting their migration page here. Interesting stuff!
That’s all for today folks! Thanks for reading and have a great week!
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