Posted: Saturday, October 25, 2008 12:00 am
Officials seek deer underpass
RAWLINS - A Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist is pushing to build an underpass on the state highway north of Baggs, in Carbon County, to reduce the number of deer being killed there in collisions with vehicles.
Tim Woolley, wildlife biologist in Savery, said the rate of deer dying at the spot on Highway 789 amounts to nearly one a day. He said a deer migratory corridor crosses the highway there.
Woolley is leading a combined effort to find funding to build an underpass under the highway large enough that deer and other big game animals will use it.
"I think this is going to become a reality," Woolley said. In addition to the game department, he said the Little Snake River Conservation Service, the Wyoming Department of Transportation and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management are involved in the project.
Highway department workers have kept track of crash data by collecting deer carcasses from the stretch of highway in the migratory corridor for the past three years.
Woolley said 1,000 deer have been killed during the three-year period. "And that's not counting the ones that were injured, maybe had a broken leg, and wandered off to die," he said.
Montana's park tourism down
BILLINGS, Mont. - Park visitors in Montana have declined from comparable periods in 2007.
National Park Service statistics for the year through the end of September show that recreational visitors to Yellowstone National Park dropped by just more than 1 percent, to 2.86 million. The park largely is in Wyoming but has Montana gateways. Visitors at Glacier National Park, 1.93 million in 2007, fell by about 2.6 percent.
Summer visitors to the state parks fell by about 9 percent from the 1.85 million recorded last summer, said Chas Van Genderen, an administrator in the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
"Gas prices definitely are changing the way people are recreating," Van Genderen said.
Profiles of park visitation suggest people stayed closer to home. State parks near major population centers such as Billings, Great Falls and Helena saw increases, Van Genderen said, but isolated parks posted declines.
Rick Hoeninghausen, marketing and sales director for Yellowstone concessionaire Xanterra, said retail sales in the park this summer were 7 percent to 10 percent below figures for the same period in 2007.
Yellowstone's hotel rooms were full and other sources of revenue were strong, Hoeninghausen said.
Man pleads guilty to murder
LARAMIE - Luis Valles-Estrada pleaded guilty to second-degree murder Friday in Albany County District Court.
He testified that he shot and killed Carlos Guzman-Luna in February after he refused to sell him cocaine.
Prosecutor Richard Bohling said the state will consider dropping other charges including first-degree murder against Valles-Estrada at sentencing. The charge of second-degree murder carries a penalty of from 20 years to life in prison.