When Jaelin Kauf zipped through moguls and jumps to win two world freestyle skiing titles this winter, she was far from the cowbells, gluhwein, chocolate and other slopeside paraphernalia that speckles historic European ski venues.

She skidded to a stop March 1 at the bottom of Kazakhstan’s Shymbulak Mountain Resort, a central Asian slope on the other side of the globe from her hometown of Alta, Wyoming. With two more races still on her international schedule, Kauf had just beaten Japan’s Rino Yanagimoto in the dual moguls event and secured the season’s crystal globe trophy for that discipline.

In besting Yanagimoto, she had also accumulated the most points for the season in both mogul events — the head-to-head duals and the single-skier competitions.

Her phone started buzzing.

“I was texting my parents … checking,” she said. “They said, ‘you also just secured the overall.’”

Kauf couldn’t believe it.

“Are you sure?” she texted back. “Are you positive? I don’t want to believe it or say anything if it’s not actually true.”

It was all true, but only half the season’s story. Within a couple of weeks, Kauf went on to Livigno, Italy, to win the freestyle single’s globe and then to fabled St. Moritz, Switzerland, to win the duals medal in the world Championships.

All those points, globes and medals might be as confusing to flatlanders as a mogul field is to an intermediate skier, but they shake out to simple truths.

Wyoming’s Jaelin Kauf, 28, dominates the freestyle moguls circuit. She won an unprecedented American crystal globe hat trick on the International Ski Federation tour this winter. She won the 2025 dual mogul world championship and is headed to next season’s Olympics in Cortina, Italy, where she hopes to add gold to her 2022 Beijing silver.

360s at the ’Ghee

Born in Vail, Colorado, to parents who skied on the pro mogul circuit, Kauf and her family moved to Alta and Grand Targhee Resort when she was three. Moguls — German for “small hills” — didn’t suit her at first. But she was determined to follow her older brother Skyler through the obstacles.

Then came mother Patti.

“My mom taught us how to do 360s off a catwalk or [by] just hitting road jumps or things around the mountain,” she said.

Skiers have long tested one another by racing down smooth courses and between gates set tightly for slalom and farther apart for giant slalom and downhill. Moguls were mine fields where grooming machines and racers didn’t venture.

That’s until the 1970s when Canadian Wayne Wong donned his white-rimmed mirror shades, got in the back seat and twisted his way through bumps in a new, expressive style — hot-dogging. Wong even incorporated a flip, the Wong-banger, into a bag of tricks that catapulted him onto posters found above many ski tuning benches across North America.

Today’s freestyle competition requires racing through manufactured snow moguls and over two kickers that enable skiers to perform aerial acrobatics. Judges rank competitors on time, style and form. In duals, skiers race side by side.

Kauf’s hometown hill, Grand Targhee, is blessed with snow and even moguls, but it’s not a mecca for budding aerialists. Kauf’s best simulation was on a trampoline. By the time she entered high school, the family had moved to Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

That town is home to storied Howelsen Hill, a rare natural ski-jumping venue. Building on that heritage, the town also created one of the few American ski water ramps where athletes can practice aerial maneuvers in summer above a safe landing.

With aerials under her belt, Kauf in 2016 earned the rookie of the year title on the World Cup tour. Since then, she’s bumped and jumped her way to glory.

She has 16 World Cup victories, 50 World Cup podiums, a World Championships gold medal, seven U.S. Championship titles, and an Olympic silver medal. Along with Breezy Johnson, this year’s world champion downhill and team combined alpine champion who calls Jackson Hole Mountain Resort home, Kauf has again elevated Wyoming to the top of the world podium.

On to Cortina

At the culmination of Kauf’s season in St. Moritz, her family — mother Patti, stepfather Squeak Melehes, father Scott and stepmother Muffy Mead-Ferro — joined a smallish band of spectators and fans. Freestyle hasn’t captured the Europeans as completely as downhill and slalom, events in which stars bask in as much limelight as NFL quarterbacks do in the U.S. Nevertheless, “the locals or people free skiing would definitely stop and check out the event and see what’s going on,” Kauf said.

Regardless of the immediate audience, Kauf has been on the largest sports platform, including competing at two Olympics. In Beijing, even though COVID clouded her experience, the Olympic aura shone through.

“I got to walk out in opening ceremonies and perform on that stage,” she said. “It was still the Olympics.”

Kauf visited China again this year when Beidahu hosted a moguls event and where she found welcoming hosts. “They are very excited to have us there,” she said. “Everyone was really friendly and nice.”

She’s now focused on Cortina, which last hosted the winter Olympics in 1956. The coming games offer a double chance — individual and the duals medals.

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“It’s not just focusing on that singles run,” she said. “You have to think about duals strategy as well.”

She’s eyeing “a very clean, zipper line right down the middle … hoping to bring in a bit higher degree of difficulty into my jumps.”

Wyoming will be there with her. Kauf wears “Deliver the Love,” on the back of her helmet, “Grand Targhee” on the front. In her gear bag, she said, she’s even got “a few brown and gold things.”

The post With freestyler Kauf, Wyoming celebrates another world ski champion appeared first on WyoFile .

April eases Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks into the hustle of summer, coaxing cyclists to dust off their steeds for car-free exploration of otherwise heavily trafficked scenic routes.

In Wyoming’s two federal reserves, workers plow a winter’s worth of snow from highways, then open the roads exclusively for bicyclists and pedestrians. And in Yellowstone, for a bison or 10.

“It’s a rite of spring,” said Jackson resident Anna Davis, who rode 28 miles along the base of the Teton Mountains with a small band of friends Sunday. “To be able to bike in that setting, under those peaks with no cars, there’s not a lot of things like it.”

The internal-combustion-engine-free window is brief, however. Yellowstone opened the 49 miles between West Yellowstone and Mammoth to cycling last weekend and will allow motorized vehicles April 18. In Grand Teton, the Teton Park Road will not open to cars until May.

It’s not only cyclists who enjoy the open roads. On sunny weekends, thousands flock to Grand Teton’s Taggart Lake Trailhead to stroll with the family, rollerblade or skateboard. The first mile is a gallimaufry spiced with every color and brand of outdoor togs.

“I just love the sort of carnival atmosphere,” Davis said of that popular starting point. “Everyone’s so excited to be there. It’s hectic, but everybody’s being nice.”

The post Wyoming’s national parks offer weeks of car-free cycling, strolling appeared first on WyoFile .

In a battle over taxes and access to Wyoming’s wide open spaces, U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis voted against a measure that would have blocked the government from selling public land to help fund the federal budget.

Wyoming’s two Republican senators voted Friday evening against a budget amendment brought by Colorado’s Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper that would “prevent[…] the use of proceeds from public land sales to reduce the Federal deficit.”

Democrats and conservationists have decried the GOP’s openness to sell federal land to fund the budget, saying such a divestiture of beloved public assets would be used to offset tax cuts for the wealthy.

“Republicans are saying that they need to sell off your public lands to solve the housing crisis,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat who co-sponsored the failed budget amendment. “But we already have laws that allow for targeted land transfers for things like housing,” he said in an Instagram post.

Instead, Heinrich said, selling public land under budget reconciliation “means their goal isn’t housing — it’s selling your public land to pay for a tax cut for people like Elon Musk.”

Wyoming public land users should take note of their senators’ votes, said Jordan Schreiber, an Equality State native and director of government relations with The Wilderness Society.

“I think it’s a signal to Wyoming [that Barrasso and Lummis] are OK with selling off public lands for the benefit of America’s wealthiest people,” she said.

The Wyoming Outdoor Council also criticized the Wyoming senators, saying their “disappointing” votes “leave our public lands vulnerable in this budget reconciliation process.”

Their vote “completely ignores the vast benefits that our public lands in Wyoming provide for rural communities and our quality of life,” Alec Underwood, Outdoor Council program director, said in a statement.

Neither Lummis nor Barrasso responded to a request for comment Monday.

False hype?

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah called the anti-sales budget amendment “false hype” that would only restrict use of land-sales funds. “It doesn’t stop land sales,” he said, promoting the effort.

Opposition to federal land sales “restricts our ability to do anything, everything, develop, plan, build houses, which we desperately need, even to fund our schools, our search-and-rescue, our police services,” Lee said. “This is disgraceful,” he said of the amendment just before it failed Friday.

While Republicans say sales will resolve affordable housing problems in expensive real estate markets near national parks and other desirable locations, Democrats and conservationists see the move as more insidious.

That’s because Republicans have put federal land sales on a menu of items Congress could use to pay for the budget, according to a document obtained by Politico. The menu catalogues as a “savings” any action that “increases sale of federal land.” The value of such sales to the budget is “to be determined,” the document states.

“This vote [on the amendment] is a wake-up call and part of a concerning, larger campaign being waged against public lands at every level of government,” said Wilderness Society President Tracy Stone-Manning, who served as director of the Bureau of Land Management under President Joe Biden. In a statement, she ticked off other anti-conservation actions by the Trump administration, “including mass firings of land managers and executive orders that demand more drilling and mining.

“It appears,” she said, “their ultimate goal is to destroy our conservation heritage, totally contrary to what Americans actually value.”

That conservation heritage underpins Wyoming’s outdoor recreation and tourism economies, both of which are centered around the Yellowstone ecosystem. Tourism is Wyoming’s second-largest industry and generated $4.8 billion in 2023, employing 33,000 people, according to a University of Wyoming study.

Wyoming residents and lawmakers have supported the industry and public lands in a number of ways. This year, the Legislature defeated a resolution calling on Congress to begin the process of turning over all federal land in the state, except Yellowstone, to Wyoming.

In 2024, Wyoming lawmakers also authorized the sale of the square-mile Kelly Parcel of state school trust land in Grand Teton National Park for conservation, not for development or affordable housing.

The state itself, through Gov. Mark Gordon and Attorney General Bridget Hill, also refused to back the grossest claims in a fast-track Utah petition to the Supreme Court that sought to give the Beehive State 18.5 million of federal land. Wyoming’s official filing tepidly supported Utah but stopped short of demanding federal property.

The Supreme Court rejected Utah’s effort, dismissing strong Utah backers like Wyoming’s lone U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman and Wyoming Freedom Caucus members. Critics of Western states’ efforts to take over ownership of federal property say the states could never afford to manage the land and would end up selling it to private interests, destroying the public access to public lands enjoyed by all Americans.

Colorado’s Sen. Hickenlooper, who sponsored the anti-sale budget amendment that died Friday, said his measure would have “prevent[ed] this reckless fire sale of our campgrounds, our forests, our national treasures.”

The post Barrasso, Lummis vote to allow selling federal land to fund Trump budget appeared first on WyoFile .

The Wyoming Supreme Court has dismissed a Teton County water-protection group’s challenge of a state-issued sewage permit for a glamping hotel in a polluted watershed.

The court ruled Tuesday that the nonprofit Protect our Water Jackson Hole doesn’t have standing — sufficient stake or investment in the issue — to challenge a Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality permit issued to the glamping owners. Although Protect Our Water is not the object of the DEQ decision, it claims to be affected by the development’s impacts, thereby allowing it to sue, its lawyers maintained.

The Supreme Court said some of POWJH’s arguments were vague — and that it hadn’t met other requirements — as the justices sided with a lower court that had dismissed the complaint.

“We are unable to conclude that POWJH has shown a tangible interest in the water quality in Fish Creek that is distinguishable from any other member of the general public,” Chief Justice Kate Fox wrote for the court.

The interests of POWJH and its supporters are real, the group’s executive director Phil Powers said. “We live in a beautiful single-source aquifer on the Snake River,” he said, “it’s fragile and we need to protect it.”

Protect Our Water claimed that DEQ had turned over its responsibility to issue permits to Teton County and therefore had no authority to approve sewerage for glamping operator Basecamp. The Utah business operates the Tammah fabric-covered dome hotel on state school trust land in the Fish Creek drainage west of the Snake River near the ski resort at Teton Village.

“Somehow Tammah managed to get a permit directly from the state,” Powers said. “That just skipped over the expectations we have in the county — we think that’s inappropriate.”

DEQ lists Fish Creek as a Class I waterway, meaning it should receive the highest level of protection. In 2020, the agency concluded the creek was impaired for the purposes of recreation — people fish there and float down the creek in innertubes — due to E. coli. The harmful bacteria can cause illness and death and is associated with sewage.

Drastic development threatens the watershed with other pollutants, Teton County officials say. The water-quality group has fought pollution in the area and seeks to help Teton County abate pollution.

“You can’t just run roughshod over that shallow aquifer,” Powers said, “and expect all of us to maintain clean drinking water and great recreation water as well.” 

To demonstrate its bona fides and interests, POWJH said it has spent approximately $164,000 for water quality monitoring in Fish Creek, another $88,000 for stakeholder involvement and some $250,000 for the Teton County Water Quality Master Plan. Protect Our Water “briefly alleges that its ‘supporters’ use Fish Creek ‘for a variety of recreational, scenic, and aesthetic purposes,’” the court said in summarizing the complaint.

That’s not enough

Without challenging POWJH’s assertions regarding its expenditures and supporters’ use of Fish Creek, the court rejected the group’s challenge. It based its decision on the “standing” issue and said the organization’s arguments were vague.

POWJH alleged “its water quality initiatives were intended to ‘improve’ the water quality in Fish Creek and … the activity authorized by the permit will harm that water quality,” the court wrote. But the group “has not described any improvements that have actually resulted from its efforts.

“It is difficult to tell exactly what ‘stakeholder involvement’ might mean or how that might improve water quality,” the decision reads. “Likewise, POWJH has done nothing to elaborate on ‘the Water Quality Master Plan process’ except to say that it ‘is underway in Teton County and has important implications for the Fish Creek watershed.’

“Just what these implications are is not apparent from POWJH’s submissions,” Chief Justice Fox wrote.

“Finally, though POWJH claims that its supporters use Fish Creek for certain recreational purposes, it does not identify them, allege that those supporters are formally affiliated with POWJH, or make any attempt to claim standing through any of its members or affiliates,” the opinion reads.

The group doesn’t explain how pollution will hinder its efforts to monitor water quality, involve stakeholders and work on a water quality master plan with Teton County, the decision said. Those were key elements in POWJH’s arguments.

Protect Our Water “has not sufficiently described its three listed activities so that even a favorable reading of the complaint could support a conclusion that those particular activities would become more expensive due to a reduction in water quality,” Fox wrote.

The Basecamp/Tammah glamping hotel has drawn significant opposition in Teton County ever since 2020, when the Legislature targeted state land in wealthy and expensive Jackson-area for revenue-generating development. Opponents object to a lax oversight and permitting, changing development sideboards and other problems at the development along a scenic road.

Basecamp and Tammah have repeatedly said they have abided by all conditions required in their lease of the state property.

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As access advocates celebrated a court decision guaranteeing access to 3 million acres of public land in Wyoming and five other states, they asked for caution, common sense and respect when corner crossing.

Hunters, hikers and others who corner cross need to understand the entirety of the recent decision by the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, parties in the dispute said this week. A voice for ranchers said cattlemen were disappointed in the ruling. Jim Magagna raised the prospect of Wyoming still imposing “conditions” on corner crossing to ensure all uses of public land are “compatible.”

Corner crossing is the act of stepping from one piece of public land to another in the checkerboard landscape of public/private ownership. Corner crossers do not set foot on the kitty-corner pieces of private land but necessarily pass through the airspace above it.

The March 18 appeals court decision affects access to 3 million acres in 10th Circuit states — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Kansas and Oklahoma, according to onX, the digital mapping company that’s been a key player in the five-year legal drama.

Western ranching custom and culture treated corner crossing as a trespass; a prosecutor in Carbon County brought the practice’s legality to a head in 2022 by citing four hunters for corner crossing to hunt public land on Elk Mountain. The 10th circuit said it is illegal to block access in such cases, meaning the public can reach its checkerboard land without fear of being convicted of trespassing.

“I didn’t go cheer,” said Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. “There’s real concern,” he said, citing potential for trespassing and conflicts between hikers or hunters and herds of stock.

Buzz Hettick, co-chair of Wyoming Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, saw less worry. “There’s more work in the future to educate landowners and [the public] on how we go about this in the right way,” he said. His group spearheaded the hunters’ defense in criminal and civil court cases.

16 feet

The digital mapping company onX uses GPS satellites combined with public land records to show cellphone app users their location in the field. With the app, public land users can locate property boundaries with a measured degree of accuracy.

In the Carbon County case, four Missouri hunters used the app to approach a surveyed monument at a common checkboard corner. Once they sighted it, they were able to pass over the corner without touching private land.

All of those details, and more, are important, onX said on its website. The 10th Circuit ruling relied on an 1885 law that guaranteed access where “access to public lands is otherwise restricted,” the company states.

“This ruling indicates that if there’s another public route into a parcel of public land, the corner may not offer a short cut or alternative access point,” onX cautions. The company states that it is not giving legal advice and says the particular alternative-access issue “is not clarified” by the appeals court.

Most GPS systems are accurate to only about 16 feet, but corner crossing is “a game of inches,” the company says. “You need to have absolute certainty about the location of the legal corner.

“Don’t cross unless you can find a physical survey marker, usually called a ‘pin’ or ‘monument,’” onX states. Corner monuments need to be “survey-grade.” Although almost all of the Western land boundaries in question have been surveyed, not all of the corner monuments are easy to see or locate, and some may have been removed by one force or another.

Magagna, Hettick and onX agree that fences may not be exactly on property boundaries, so hikers and hunters must be aware of that. It is a hunter’s responsibility, Hettick said, to know where she or he is.

Finally, it’s possible a local sheriff could cite a corner crosser for trespassing. Although the federal court case would likely nullify that citation, “unfortunately, that would only happen when the case got to court,” onX said.

Fence lines

“We may have to live with this,” Magagna said of the six-state decision. However, he noted, Elk Mountain Ranch owner Fred Eshelman, the Carbon County landowner who sued Missouri hunters Brad Cape, John Slowensky and Phillip Yeomans and Zach Smith in civil court, could ask the entire 10th Circuit Court to review the case. He could also ask the Supreme Court of the United States to take up an appeal.

“I think there’s real concern … issues,” Magagna said. “All these fence lines and corners are not correct.”

What can a hiker or hunter do, he asked, on public land where there’s a herd of cattle or sheep?

Ranchers wonder, “are there conditions I can place on [public access] to make it compatible with other uses?” he said. The court decision “opens some opportunity to us to do something different in Wyoming.”

What that “something different” might be and whether it blocks access in a way the 10th Circuit said would be illegal is uncertain. But the court appeared to conclude that any blockage, threats, intimidation, fences and Wyoming trespass laws cannot be used against corner crossers.

Right now, the Wyoming Legislature has proposed taking up the issue as a study topic before the next legislative session begins at the start of 2026. The Joint Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee has proposed corner crossing as its fourth-priority topic.

Discussion would begin with the 2025 House Bill 99, “Access to public lands-corner crossing,” according to the proposed study topic. That measure would have made corner crossing legal under Wyoming law, but it never saw debate during the session and died.

Badass chapter

Conservationists hailed the 10th Circuit decision. Green Latinos, Western Watersheds Project, Earthjustice and Sierra Club Outdoors for All Campaign all issued statements applauding the decision.

“This case was about a multi-millionaire trying to prevent access to public lands so he could have it for himself,” Earthjustice said. The ruling “facilitates wildlife management, supports ecological research, and deepens people’s connection with the landscape,” Western Watersheds said.

Backcountry Hunters and Anglers “and our badass Wyoming Chapter” led the charge for the favorable corner-crossing decision, said Patrick Berry, president & CEO of the nationwide Backcountry Hunters and Anglers group. “BHA chapters helped raise over $200,000 for the legal defense of the hunters,” he said in a statement.

“The fundraising was a big deal,” Wyoming chapter co-chair Hettick said. MeatEater television and podcast host Steven Rinella offered his platforms for fundraising, Hettick said. Others helped, including access advocate Jeff Muratore, who wrangled attorneys for the hunters’ defense, Hettick said.

“Of all the conservation organizations out there, it was BHA and MeatEater that stepped up to the plate,” Hettick said. “It was one core group of guys willing to put themselves out there for access.”

“It was something that needed clarity,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing that [the 10th Circuit] did take their time and get it right.”

Although disagreeable, the decision that corner crossers “stay in the air” and not touch any property is far better than a ruling that would have said someone can actually set foot on private land, Magagna said. “It was rather narrow,” he said of the decision.

The post As corner crossing opens 3M acres to public, advocates urge caution appeared first on WyoFile .

The American climbers sent the bad news the fastest way they could. In this instance 62 years ago today, it was “carried by runner.”

From Everest’s basecamp, where the mountaineers were preparing to climb the world’s highest peak, a Nepali courier set off at a trot. He carried a message as he wended his way across the fractured detritus below the Khumbu Glacier. His calloused feet padded down the shadowed valley where gravity and time wear the mountain’s granite, gneiss and limestone.

He ran down trails worn smooth by a million soles, following the Lobuche Kosi and Imja Kosi rivers that mill boulders into flour. He jogged by mani stones, past rope bridges, loped by the storied Sherpa villages of Lobuche, Pheriche and Dingboche.

In about 15 miles, the messenger climbed out of the shadows to the hillside hamlet of Tengboche, a holy crossroads between Nepal’s capital Kathmandu and Qomolangma, Sagarmatha — Everest. As the courier arrived, Jackson Hole alpinist David Dornan was inhaling the clear Himalayan air, perhaps scented by a Sherpa’s yak-dung fire or incense drifting from the Tengboche Monastery.

Dornan was on an expedition to the Sherpa homeland, an expedition separate from the American climbers’. He was building a school and waterworks with Sir Edmund Hillary who, with Tenzing Norgay, had been the first to climb Everest 10 years earlier in 1953.

But seven of the 19 Americans who were just up-valley from Tengboche had worked professionally in Wyoming’s Teton Range. That was Jackson Hole native Dornan’s back yard, and Dornan knew and had worked with a bunch of them.

The messenger arrived apace at Tengboche, an ethereal world ornamented with Tibetan totems, a world almost touching the heavens. Here temple lions with the eyes of God guard the monastery entrance. A golden spire juts from a bedazzling white stupa. Dozens of prayer flags flutter in the breeze. Inside the lamasery, saffron-robed monks and devotees spin prayer wheels that hold scrolls of Tibetan-script mantras.

In this rare aura, Dornan scanned the top of the world.

“It was a clear, beautiful day, and I was just totally absorbed looking at the mountains and being where I was,” Dornan said. Then came the runner’s dispatch.

“An American had been killed.”

Which American?

But which American?

There were 19. Seven of them had climbed professionally in the Tetons, as had Dornan, a mountain guide with the Exum guide service.

Was it a Teton veteran? Was it Barry Corbet, the handsome Dartmouth dropout and skier; Willi Unsoeld, the gregarious Peace Corps volunteer who would sprout a national forest of a beard, or Jake Breitenbach, the tow-headed mountaineer who wore his alpine beanie at a rakish angle?

Could it be Dick Pownall, or David Dingman, two more of Dornan’s fellow Exum guides from the Tetons? It could be Richard Emerson, Grand Teton National Park’s chief climbing ranger. Or possibly Tom Hornbein, a Colorado climber, ranger and anesthesiologist who worked with search-and-rescue teams at Grand Teton one summer and had designed the expedition’s oxygen masks.

“I had a rare intuition,” Dornan said. “Jake did have some history of bad luck; he was never able to summit Mount Owen, for example. Once guiding the Grand Teton, he was hit by lightning, “actually knocked out,” Dornan said. “There were other stories where the mountain turned against him.”

“I instinctively knew,” Dornan said, “that it was Jake.”

John Edgar Breitenbach was only 27 when a tower of ice collapsed and entombed his body among the crevasses of the Khumbu Glacier on the first climbing day of the American’s 1963 expedition to Everest. Born in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1935, he graduated from Oregon State College, as it was then known, majoring in mathematics.

Heaven in Jackson Hole

He moved to the climbing crucible of Jackson Hole in the mid 1950s and guided clients up the 13,775-foot high Grand Teton in the summer. There, he met and married Mary Louise McGraw, a transplant from the East Coast. She was Lou to those who knew her, Mary Louise McGraw Breitenbach, M.Ed., of Harvard, to the rest of the world.

“He was blonde and beautiful and adventuresome, and so [Lou] loved all those things about him,” said Joseph Piccoli, Lou Breitenbach’s second husband.

In the Jackson Hole winter, Breitenbach was one of a corps of young skiers and alpinists establishing a ski hub at the base of Snow King Mountain that they hoped would sustain a year-round life in the mountains. Corbet had built the A-frame Alphorn Lodge at the base of the “Town Hill” and ran it with his wife Muffy Moore. Lou Breitenbach ran a restaurant, the White Cupboard, next door. Jake Breitenbach bought and operated a ski shop nearby. “We were all pretty young and trying to find our way,” Moore said.

In a cowboy town, the alpinists with their sun glasses and ski sweaters stood out. “I was impressed with these guys,” said Rod Newcomb, who arrived in Jackson Hole around that time and eventually became a guide and co-owner of the Exum guide service. One of Breitenbach’s gang would walk around town in an overstuffed expedition jacket from a groundbreaking climb of Denali, Newcomb said, “and everybody knew who he was.”

Breitenbach himself “was humorous and inventive and had a gaiety of spirit,” said Corbet’s wife Moore. “He was just a delightful person to be around,” even as he fended off depression, something he did best by climbing a mountain.

The Jackson Hole cadre skied where nobody had skied, camped in the snow on extended alpine traverses and probed the corners of the Teton range in summer. “What a gift that was,” Moore said, “having your own personal paradise to spend the winter months in. “Jackson in those years really was just heaven. Young as we were, we even recognized that at the time.

“And then Everest came along,” she said, “and kind of ended it all.”

What Jake wanted

The American mountaineers regrouped on the Khumbu Glacier after Breitenbach died on March 23, 1963.

“These things happen instantaneously,” Corbet said in a taped message he made at the 18,000-foot base camp 10 days after Breitenbach’s death. “And while we were all stunned for a couple of days, we’ve all come back, and we’re doing battle with the mountain again.”

The team would forge on, “just as Jake would have wanted us to,” Corbet said.

Forge on they did, as plotted by expedition leader Norman Dyhrenfurth, a Swiss-American mountaineer who had assembled the team and its bankroll. Dyhrenfurth secured key National Geographic backing only after traveling to Jackson Hole to hand pick team members from the Tetons. At the time, the range was one of a handful of American climbing centers, a town with a mountaineering colony.

“There was a harmonic convergence between a Swiss-American climber [Dyhrenfurth], this sweet spot of climbing here [in the Tetons] and the possibility that America could actually head off to Everest,” said Brot Coburn, a Wilson resident, Nepal historian and author of “The Vast Unknown: America’s First Ascent of Everest.”

The peak had only been climbed once, perhaps twice before (a Chinese ascent was contested). Dyhrenfurth was bent on putting an American on top, whatever logistics it took.

“So Norman came to the Tetons and he saw the right stuff — Willi Unsoeld, Dick Pownall, Barry Corbet and Jake Breitenbach,” Coburn said, ticking off some of the Teton climbers who would join the team.

“These were scrappy, energetic, innovative climbers. They were more than ready and willing to take on challenges.”

Dyhrenfurth, however, knew where the butter was on his sliced American bread. Above all, he needed a photograph of an American on the top of the world, perhaps hoisting an ice axe with a flag, maybe even a National Geographic banner. That image was best secured by following Hillary and Tenzing’s 1953 line up Everest’s South Col route.

Although that route has little rock climbing, there’s a corniced ridge near the top and a stinger in the tail — the near vertical Hillary Step a snowball’s throw below the summit. Plus, it’s bitterly cold, there’s scant air to breathe and what oxygen is available rips past in the jet stream.

Towering Jim Whittaker, a Seattle volcano climber, was among the Dyhrenfurth contingent and with Sherpa Nawang Gombu became the leader’s choice for the first summit team. Despite the distinction an Everest ascent held, Teton climbers were decidedly unexcited about following Hillary and Norgay’s 10-year-old footsteps.

Beatnicks on belay

Here’s maybe why.

“The young Teton climbers were, perhaps as a function of their youth, their adventuresomeness and their audacity, also intrigued by some of the cultural changes that were just beginning to happen at that time,” Coburn said. “During that period, beatnik sensibilities and creativity was leading into anti-establishment types of thinking, and definitely, these Teton climbers had that.

“They knew that they were different from the rest of straight 1950s American culture,” Coburn said. “They knew they were outliers, almost outlaws in a way, and so they differed from the approach of the National Geographic and the volcanos climbers, rather fundamentally.”

The Teton group also had “mixed mountaineering” skills, Coburn said. They took on, professionally, steep rock bands and serrated ridges, snow gullies walled by granite faces, glaciers and their deadly crevasses. They handled rucksacks of gear — ropes, ice axes, carabiners, pitons, crampons.

Importantly, they hauled those loads to untrammeled places. “They were knocking off new routes like crazy,” Coburn said. They yearned to explore.

On the weeks-long hike into Everest’s base camp, rebellious chatter, especially among what Unsoeld called the Teton Tribe, began. As they approached Everest, one mountain feature looked strikingly familiar. Unsoeld saw the Grand Teton, Hornbein saw Colorado’s Longs Peak, albeit on a larger scale.

This rocky spine jutted above the expedition’s planned 21,350-foot-high advanced base camp. A combination of snowfields, ramps, a huge couloir and an unavoidable Yellow Band of rock — all unexplored mountain — rose 7,678 feet to the summit.

Unsoeld and Hornbein “just had this bug,” said Renny Jackson, Teton guidebook author and former Teton Park climbing ranger, “‘Let’s go check something else out.’”

“They were out for a new experience, and that’s definitely why they were up for the West Ridge,” former Exum owner Newcomb said. “It had never been climbed. It would be a first ascent.”

“We wanted to make America proud and [show we] were as good as the Europeans,” Dornan said of the expedition. “For the first time, they had to start respecting American climbers.”

The West Ridge was a plumb, albeit high on the tree. Nevermind that the climb would require trespassing into China during the heat of the Cold War. The Teton climbers were social bandits in any case. And who would be watching?

Wyoming’s outsized role

On May 1, the mismatched “big Jim and little Gombu,” made good on their Mutt-and-Jeff diversities and climbed Hillary and Tenzing’s South Col route to the 29,028-foot summit [Everest’s elevation is refined somewhat regularly]. Now the West Ridgers were able to claw supplies to their side of the mountain to support their audacious plot, an effort that had caused friction.

“They were denied the resources that they needed,” Dornan said, “not only in personnel, but supplies. It was nasty.”

They spent weeks ferrying loads to a high camp where two of them would climb the last of the West Ridge, meet a second American South Col team on the top, and descend that easier side of the mountain. It would be the first traverse of the peak.

Remarkably, the first ascent of Everest’s West Ridge would be an almost exclusive endeavor of climbers who had been Teton pros. Among those, Breitenbach was gone and Teton guide Pownall, “very beat up,” from the icefall collapse.

But Teton ranger Emerson hauled loads up the route. Exum guide Dingman was there, too, with Corbet, Unsoeld and Hornbein. Fifteen Sherpas lent heavy support. At Corbet’s insistence, Unsoeld and Hornbein would be the West Ridge summit team.

Corbet, perhaps the strongest of the lot, said later his hardest day in the mountains was when he humped a load up through the huge gash, later named the Hornbein Couloir, to Unsoeld and Hornbein’s high camp 5W at an elevation of 27,250 feet. The supply team left the tented summit pair to spend a night sleeping with oxygen.

On May 22, Unsoeld and Hornbein set off, abandoning their camp for a one-way journey. “The going was a wonderful pleasure,” Hornbein wrote in “Everest, The West Ridge,” “almost like a day in the Rockies.” They summited at 6:30 p.m. and found the footprints of Barry Bishop and Lute Jerstad who had been there hours before. Lower down the South Col route, the four bivouacked for the night in the black void.

The groundbreaking effort cost. National Geographic photographer Bishop lost toes to frostbite. It’s said that Unsoeld also lost nine, but that’s inaccurate. After they came off, he preserved them in a jar and would show them off to his students.

Om mani padme hum

“When someone you know dies young, they remain frozen in time in your memory,” a climber with the social-media handle “rgold,”  wrote about Breitenbach on a climbing thread. “He remains forever a golden-haired boy with a smile that could light up the countryside.”

To the world, Breitenbach would always be as the camera caught him, tossing what Coburn called “a mischievous shock of Dennis the Menace blond hair,” drawing elegantly on a cigarette, dashing around a mountain town in Teton toggery behind the wheel of a new Volvo.

Those images stop on March 23, 1963, when Breitenbach’s partners cut his rope where the twisted nylon disappeared under tons of ice. It was the end of a star-crossed affair with the mountains. From that time, the Khumbu Glacier ground unsentimentally on. Seven years later, in 1970, the Khumbu disgorged Breitenbach’s remains.

“There wasn’t much to speak of,” Piccoli said. “They identified him from his clothing.”

Bishop went to Nepal and buried Breitenbach above Tengboche.

Meantime, Lou Breitenbach packed a box of memorabilia including Jake’s letters, condolence notes from around Wyoming and other things and shipped them to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. More recently, the family of Breitenbach’s friend, Frank Ewing, pulled a cache of about 500 Breitenbach slides from a closet and revived tales of the golden years.

Forty years after Breitenbach’s death, Piccoli convinced Lou Breitenbach to leave Jackson Hole and visit Tengboche. It wasn’t an easy trek. Lou, 66 at the time, battled dysentery, but soldiered on. She passed paddy and pagoda, even a trailside mystic who told her she would live to 83, to arrive at the Buddhist friary.

“She made it all the way to a puja ceremony performed by the monks at the monastery,” Piccoli said. There, she heard the drone of long Tibetan horns, the auspicious ring of Tingsha cymbals, the lamas deep-throated incantations.

“They were burning incense and setting up rice cakes and all kinds of stuff and reading from the scriptures,” Piccoli said. “It was an amazing little ceremony.”

Lou Breitenbach strived to live to her 84th birthday but died in Jackson Hole in 2020, two weeks shy of it. Just as the trailside soothsayer said. But she had managed to visit Jake’s grave, just above the monastery and look down on the site where Jake penned his last letter to her.

“Thyanboche, March 14, 1963,” he scrawled.

He described the carefree path of an adventurous young man in an exotic milieu that the world would soon wash over. A few days before, down the trail at Namche Bazaar, “it turned into quite a night for three of us who ended up eating wild goat and drinking chang in some Sherpa’s house … lots and lots of very good chang.”

Breitenbach looked toward the mountain, too.

“We’ve been divided into two groups now – one for the South Col and the other for an attempt on the West Ridge,” Breitenbach wrote. “Barry [Corbet] and I are both on the West Ridge and happy about it.

“The fact that we’re going to try the West Ridge is definite, but is still not to be public knowledge,” the letter reads. “Attempting this route reduces our chance of climbing the mountain at all and makes it most unlikely that any of us going on the West Ridge will see the summit. Nevertheless, the opportunity of trying a new route cannot be passed up.”

He closed after five pages as the Himalaya became moody.

“The afternoon clouds are coming up now,” Breitenbach wrote. “I probably won’t have another chance to write until base camp. I miss you very much – Love, Jake.”

A standard 4 by 9 1/2 inch envelope, addressed to Mrs. J.E. Breitenbach and marked with red, white and blue airmail slashes around its edges carried the letter to the United States. A line drawing of Mount Everest, Lhotse and Nuptse graces the envelope’s bottom, right corner. “American Mount Everest Expedition 1963” is printed on the envelope in three places. “Hotel Royal, Kathmandu, Nepal” is the return address.

Another inscription is stamped at an angle.

“CARRIED BY RUNNER”

Sources: American Alpine Journal; Jackson Hole News&Guide; The Breitenbach Collection at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; James Ramsey Ullman’s, “Americans on Everest,” and other historical material.

The caption in the photograph of the Teton alpinists and skiers has been corrected to identify John Harrington, not Neal Rafferty, next to Pete Sinclair. Also, there were no photograph of Breitenbach taken after March 23, 1963, not May 23 as originally published — Ed.

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The same Teton County judge who tossed Wyoming’s two abortion bans last year dismissed on Friday a separate lawsuit filed in Jackson that sought to block two new Wyoming abortion laws, saying the case belonged in Natrona County, home to the affected Wellspring Health Access clinic.

Ruling from the bench after a hearing that lasted more than 90 minutes, 9th District Judge Melissa Owens said that “any injury that occurred, occurred in Natrona County.” The ruling means that Wyoming women who have not had access to abortion services since the de facto ban went into effect Feb. 28 will have to wait until the case is presumably refiled and then considered by a different judge.

In the five days after one law went into effect, Wellspring referred 56 patients to other clinics for abortion-related services, almost all of them out of state, according to court papers.

Two doctors, two abortion care providers and an individual woman filed a nearly identical suit in Natrona County when one of the new laws went into effect, challenging its constitutionality. That law imposes a series of new regulations on abortion clinics by mandating they be licensed as “ambulatory surgical centers.” A second, which went into effect days later, requires abortion patients to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound and a 48-hour waiting period before receiving abortion medications.

The plaintiffs sought emergency court action on requests for a temporary restraining order and an injunction. But when a Natrona County judge did not respond to their emergency request in what they perceived as a timely manner, they dismissed their case there and filed the carbon-copy action in Teton County.

“We could not get any type of response” 12 days after filing the action, five business days after the last communication from the court, said Marci Bramlet, an attorney representing the plaintiff doctors. One of her clients, Dr. Giovannina Anthony, has an OBGYN clinic in Jackson and refers clients to Wellspring, the only clinic in the state that provides procedural abortions.

Wellspring has ceased offering those services because of the new laws and has turned away at least three clients from Teton County, Bramlet said. She rejected an argument by state Senior Attorney General John Woykovsky that the group was “forum shopping.”

In November, Owens decided two other anti-abortion law challenges — those involved outright bans — in favor of nearly the same suite of plaintiffs.

The Teton County filing was “not because of what we were hearing,” Bramlet said, but “because we were hearing nothing.” Her clients did not believe their case was being taken seriously and, meantime, “injury is ongoing and could be catastrophic.”

Woykovsky said Natrona County District Judge Dan Forgey couldn’t act until he received proof that required court papers had been served on defendants there. Owens appeared to agree there was no foot-dragging on Forgey’s part, that the doctors had waited only a few days before dismissing one suit and filing the other.

Regardless of Judge Forgey’s timing, Bramlet said her clients had a right to dismiss their action as they saw fit and refile it anywhere in Wyoming, given that the new laws cover the entire state. Although Woykovsky’s court pleading was for a change of venue back to Natrona County, Owens saw it as a request for dismissal and acted thusly.

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A ruling by a federal appeals court in a widely watched corner-crossing case cements the principle that a congressional act preempts a state’s power to impose and enforce its own trespass laws.

A three-judge panel at the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals adopted that “preemption” argument made by the attorney for four hunters when it ruled in their favor Tuesday.

In a unanimous opinion, the judges sided against Carbon County ranch owner Fred Eshelman, who sued the hunters in 2022 after they passed through the airspace above his property on their way to hunt public land on Elk Mountain.

Corner crossing is the act of stepping from one piece of public land to another where those two parcels meet at the common corner with two private parcels, all arranged in a checkboard pattern of ownership. Corner crossing does not involve stepping on private land.

Experts say corner crossing is now legal in the 10th Circuit’s six states — Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Eshelman sued to block the hunters, and everybody else, from corner crossing to reach some 11,000 acres of federal and state land enmeshed in his 50-square-mile ranch at Elk Mountain, a wildlife haven where the North Carolina resident hunts.

In siding with the hunters, the judges stated that Wyoming trespass law can’t supersede a congressional act that guarantees public access to public land in the checkerboard area. A different ruling, the panel wrote, “would place the public domain of the United States completely at the mercy of state legislation.”

“I’ve been banging this [preemption] drum since January of ’22,” the hunters’ attorney, Ryan Semerad, said Tuesday after learning of the decision.

A 2023 ruling by Wyoming‘s Chief U.S. Judge Scott Skavdahl for the hunters — the ruling Eshelman appealed to the 10th Circuit — didn’t land squarely on the preemption issue, Semerad said.

Skavdahl relied primarily on a case — sheepherder Mackay v. the landowning Uinta Development Co. — the judge wrote in his 2023 decision. In his 32-page ruling, he never used the word “preempt.”

So the appellate decision emerges as even stronger support for corner crossing than what Skavdahl decided, Semerad said.

Unlawful Inclosures Act

The checkerboard pattern is a relic of the railroad construction era of the 1800s, created to finance a transcontinental route. Each checkerboard square is 640 acres, a square mile, and the alternating pattern of public/private ownership originally extended 20 miles north and south of the Union Pacific line across Wyoming.

Congress soon saw that new private landowners who bought from Union Pacific were blocking access to the public sections, effectively controlling public land they didn’t own. That “evil … became so great,” one court later explained, that Congress enacted the Unlawful Inclosures Act in 1885.

“No one may completely prevent or obstruct another from peacefully entering or freely passing over or through public lands,” the act says, according to the appellate judges. The Unlawful Inclosures Act “explicitly prohibits obstructing transit over public lands by force, threats, intimidation, or by any fencing or inclosing.”

In 2020, Missouri hunters Brad Cape, John Slowensky and Phillip Yeomans corner crossed to hunt on Elk Mountain and did so again with Zach Smith in 2021.

Eshelman, through his Iron Bar Holdings company, which officially owns the ranch, sued the hunters claiming that allowing corner crossing devalued his 22,045-acre ranch by more than $7 million.

The appeals court ran through numerous reasons for siding with the hunters, including rejecting Eshelman’s arguments that an “inclosure” refers only to fences. One can “inclose” a piece of public land using threats and intimidation, including the threats of lawsuits or even threats of criminal prosecution or civil action under state trespass laws, the court determined.

The appellate panel also rejected another of Eshelman’s arguments that proposed UIA became obsolete at the end of the “open range” era in 1934 when Congress enacted the Taylor Grazing Act requiring permits to run stock on federal property. “The UIA remains good law,” the panel said. It even was amended in 1984 at which time Congress could have done away with it completely if it wanted, judges said.

Baa baa Leo Sheep

The panel also dismissed Eshelman’s argument that a Wyoming case, known as Leo Sheep, settled the corner crossing question in 1979. (Leo is a Wyoming neighborhood north of Rawlins; Lee Emmett Vivion established Leo Sheep Co. in 1903.) In that case, courts ruled the federal government could not construct a road across a corner to reach the public Seminoe Reservoir.

Eshelman contends that corner crossing relies on an implied easement, and Leo Sheep determined that the government did not hold any easement at the checkerboard corners. But the corner crossing case doesn’t claim an easement, the appeals judges said.

Instead, Eshelman’s actions — signs, fenceposts, chains and lawsuits blocking free travel to the contiguous public checkerboard — constitute a nuisance under the Unlawful Inclosures Act, they concluded.

“No easement was needed to remove a nuisance that was unlawfully inclosing federal lands,” judges wrote as they rejected Leo Sheep’s relevance in the hunters’ case. “Leo Sheep did not speak to, and is not controlling for, the type of limited airspace intrusion ratified by [Skavdahl’s] district court,” the panel said.

Essentially, a right to access is not an easement, the court stated.

Further, Iron Bar cannot use an exception to the Unlawful Inclosures Act that allows homesteading, an exception that would allow it to fence people out, the panel said. Elk Mountain Ranch, Eshelman’s self-stated retreat from his busy pharmaceutical world in the East, is just that.

He bought the property from another private owner, the appeals court found. “Iron Bar is no homestead,” the panel wrote.

Not a taking

As it struck down one Esshelman argument after another, the appellate panel relied in part on an 1897 case known as Camfield in which a landowner used a fence on private land to prevent access to checkerboard public property beyond. Camfield’s fences were illegal under the Unlawful Inclosures Act, the case determined.

Addressing another Eshelman point, the appeals panel said allowing corner crossing doesn’t constitute a taking for which the Constitution requires compensation. Wyoming landowner Taylor Lawrence, who built fences blocking antelope migration to public checkerboard land, claimed such a taking in 1988.

Courts ruled that Lawrence’s assertion fell flat because what he claimed to have lost — the right to exclude others in the checkerboard area — was something he never had in the first place.

When the government enforces a pre-existing limitation on a property owner’s rights, that’s not a taking that requires compensation, the panel said.

The right to pass to public checkerboard land necessarily diminishes a landowner’s rights, the appellate judges held. Congress diminished those rights through the Unlawful Inclosures Act, removing that important privilege from the checkerboard landowner’s entitlements, the appellate court said.

“Iron Bar theoretically acquired its private land subject to those preexisting restrictions,” the panel said.

Eshelman also argued that Wyoming law allows him to stop trespassers from crossing through his airspace. But the federal Unlawful Inclosures Act “supplants conflicting state law,” the panel said.

“The UIA and case law interpreting it have overridden the state’s civil trespass regime in this context,” the panel said.

The court’s ruling is important because “there is a presumption against preemption,” hunters’ attorney Semerad said. “The first principle is we should harmonize state and local laws with the federal law — we don’t want there to be a collision of laws.”

Judges and courts are reluctant to bring down the preemption hammer, he said. With preemption, “you’re saying to state legislatures and local government governments, ‘whatever you do, it does not matter, because Congress decides this issue.’”

“There are many judges these days who are reluctant to say that for all sorts of philosophical and jurisprudential reasons.”

Unsatisfying

“We appreciate this may be an unsatisfying result for property owners within the checkerboard,” and issues such as liability remain unresolved, the judges wrote. They recognized that Eshelman could ask the entire suite of 10th Circuit judges — there are 19 — to weigh in on the case.

“The Supreme Court can also reconsider the scope of Leo Sheep as it applies to this case,” judges said.

We corrected the spelling of Lee Emmett Vivion’s middle name — Ed.

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The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver has backed four hunters sued by a wealthy ranch owner for corner crossing on Carbon County’s Elk Mountain, preserving public access to millions of acres of federal property.

A three-judge panel ruled Tuesday that a Wyoming federal judge concluded correctly when he said that Fred Eshelman, the owner of the Elk Mountain Ranch, could not block four Missouri men from passing through the airspace of his property when they stepped from one piece of BLM land to another, without touching Eshelman’s land.

Corner crossing involves stepping from one piece of public land to another at the common corner with two pieces of private property — without touching the private land. While it stands to affect much of the American West, the practice has particular resonance in southern Wyoming where millions of acres are laid out in a “checkerboard” of alternating public and private mile-square sections. 

By blocking passage at such corners, whether by physical obstruction or threats or trespass citations issued by law enforcement, private landowners are able to enjoy exclusive access to public land.

Eshelman sued the hunters in 2022 after they corner crossed to hunt elk and deer on federal land enmeshed in his 22,045-acre ranch.

The law doesn’t allow private landowners to prevent others from corner crossing in the checkerboard area of Wyoming — as long as they do not touch the private property — Wyoming Chief U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl ruled in 2023. Federal appellate judges David M. Ebel, Timothy M. Tymkovich and Nancy Louise Moritz unanimously sided with Skavdahl’s ruling in the just-concluded appeal.

In reaching their decision, the judges relied on case law and the Unlawful Inclosures Act of 1885, which prohibits blocking access in such situations.

“The western checkerboard and UIA reflect a storied period of our history,” Tymkovich wrote. “Whatever the UIA’s merits today, it—and the case law interpreting it—remain good federal law.” 

“Applying that law here, [Eshelman’s landholding company] Iron Bar cannot implement a program which has the effect of ‘deny[ing] access to [federal] public lands for lawful purposes[.]’” he wrote. “So the district court was correct to hold that the Hunters could corner-cross as long as they did not physically touch Iron Bar’s land.”

The case has implications not only for the 2.4 million acres of “corner-locked” land in Wyoming, but also for 8.3 million acres across the West.

This is a breaking news story and may be updated – Ed.

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The ongoing halt to abortions in Wyoming will continue for at least another week after a judge Thursday said it will take that long before she could even set a schedule to hear arguments for an emergency pause on new abortion restrictions.

The debate over two new laws restricting abortion procedures took place via a telephone conference before 9th District Judge Melissa Owens of Teton County. She was ready to set a date to hear arguments on a temporary and emergency ban against two new laws — one established a string of new regulations that forced Wyoming’s only full-service abortion clinic to stop seeing patients two weeks ago — when attorneys for Gov. Mark Gordon objected.

They recently filed a motion asking Owens to transfer the case to Natrona County. That’s where lawyers for abortion providers filed their original suit, along with a request for an emergency hearing and temporary halt to the new regulations, on Feb. 28.

Eleven days after that filing and without any action from the Natrona County court, the doctors and clinics dismissed the case in Casper and refiled it in Teton County.

Gordon’s attorney, Senior Assistant Attorney General John Woykovsky, claimed the abortion providers, their backers, two doctors and another woman, purposefully refiled in Teton County seeking a friendly judge. Owens has ruled on other litigation challenging Wyoming’s anti-abortion laws, striking down two abortion bans passed in 2023. That case is currently in front of the Wyoming Supreme Court.

Court papers filed by the abortion providers make it clear “that this is a case of forum shopping,” Woykovsky said. “They essentially state that they were dissatisfied with Judge Forgey’s response to their motion for a [temporary restraining order] and hope to obtain a more favorable result in this court.”

Woykovsky made Gordon’s point formally in a motion to change the case’s venue back to Natrona County.

Citing her court’s packed schedule and the issues at hand, Owens set a hearing for Friday, March 21, on Gordon’s change of venue request only.

“The only thing the court can at this point be prepared to hear next Friday with the time we have allotted would be the change of venue hearing,” she said. “So that’s all that we’ll be setting at this point.”

One issue at a time

Lawyers for the providers and doctors argued for an earlier hearing and for one that would consider both the change of venue and an emergency request to block the two new abortion-restricting laws. But Owens didn’t agree to those requests.

The doctors and providers filed the case in Natrona County, site of Casper’s Wellspring Health Access, which provides in-clinic abortions. They refiled the case in Teton County because a doctor in Jackson refers patients to various other clinics and advises patients who seek medical care, including abortions.

“Plaintiffs and their patients are experiencing ongoing, severe, and irreparable injury — including direct harms to Plaintiffs and their patients in Teton County,” the providers said when they dismissed the case in Casper and refiled it in Jackson. “Plaintiffs have no choice but to dismiss the Prior [Natrona County] Action … and re-file it … in the hope of securing a timely hearing.”

At issue are two new abortion-restricting laws. One creates a series of new regulations on abortion clinics in Wyoming by requiring them to be licensed as “ambulatory surgical centers.” The second requires abortion patients to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound and a 48-hour waiting period before receiving abortion medications.

Because of the new laws, Wellspring Health Access, the only clinic in Wyoming that provides in-clinic abortions, said it has stopped performing abortions. It had performed 71 abortions between the start of the year and Feb. 27. In the five days after the laws went into effect, it referred 56 patients to other clinics for abortion-related services, almost all of them out of state, according to court papers.

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