I’ve only had one influencer in my life: my mother. Technically, I haven’t heard her voice in six years—she passed away in 2017 at age 83—but her advice plays on in the soundtrack of my mind, guiding me in my daily habits at home and at work.

From all of us at the Wyoming Truth, here’s to a happy Mother’s Day!

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of the Treasury announced this week that Wyoming will be among the latest group of states to receive tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to support the development of high-speed internet infrastructure.

A massive snowstorm that blanketed much of the nation this week did not spare Wyoming from being hit and resulted in minor to major to full road closures statewide.

It’s not where you start—it’s where you finish. That’s a lesson Taylor-Ann Smith, 30, learned the hard way when she moved to Jackson from Montana and took up mountain biking.

In 2019, Smith, a graphic designer, bought an entry-level bike and went on group rides at Cache Creek trails. “I had no idea what I was doing,” she said. “What I thought was mountain biking when I first started was just flat trails.”

Wyoming's embrace of Project Bison is one part of a much larger bet on traditional carbon capture utilization and storage technologies (CCUS).

Unlike direct air capture (DAC) technology, which pulls carbon from the atmosphere and can exist anywhere in the world, CCUS systems are placed atop smokestacks at power plants and other industrial emitters, capturing CO2 at the point of emission.

In the first six weeks of 2023, 20 people have lost their lives on Wyoming roads — a grim record high for the past five years. Many of the deaths can be attributed to vehicle wrecks on Interstate 80 along the southern edge of the state, but fatal accidents also have occurred on snow-covered roadways across Wyoming.

In 2021, a record high 36 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere, according to the International Energy Agency. Even if global emissions cease tomorrow, our world will continue to warm.

A livable future will depend on removing C02, and Wyoming has positioned itself as a leader in the growing carbon capture and storage industry through the establishment of the largest carbon removal facility in the world.

Casey Rislov spent many days riding horses and attending rodeos as a child growing up in Casper. But she never imagined she would create a children’s book series about a feisty female horsefly who did both.

For Rislov, education seemed the logical career path. Her father, Ronnie, taught drafting and engineering at Casper College; her mother, Randy, taught sixth grade at Fairdale Elementary. As a biology major at the University of Wyoming, Rislov flirted with becoming a physician assistant but ultimately earned a master’s degree in elementary education from Montana State University, which led her to the front of the classroom, where she read a lot of children’s books

CODY, Wyo. — A cowboy astride a bucking horse has been an iconic representation of Wyoming for more than a century—at least since 1921, when that silhouette first graced uniforms for baseball players at the University of Wyoming. And chocolate has been connected to Valentine’s Day since 1861, when Richard Cadbury sold heart-shaped boxes of chocolate candies adorned with roses and Cupids.

When Hunter Old Elk moved to the East Coast for college, she felt a bone-deep longing to return home to the Mountain West.

“Something on a molecular level said, ‘You need to be back into the mountains,’” Old Elk recalled. Mount St. Mary’s University was located in Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., and the crowded urban environment and the fast-paced lifestyle were vastly different from her upbringing in Montana.

On cold days this winter, many Wyomingites have warmed up their vehicles before heading to work or other destinations … and unwittingly become criminals.

The state of Wyoming encompasses around 62.3 million acres of land. And nearly 100,000 of them belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon or LDS church. Much of the land is agricultural. Some of it is historically significant, although Wyoming is also dotted with real estate in the form of church meetinghouses and other facilities.

Take a drive east out of Sheridan, toward Wyarno, and about 25 miles from town, you’ll be surrounded by rolling, grass-rich ranchland.

Keep going for 40 more minutes, and the same ranchland will still envelop you.

After completing an internship last summer at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Nick DelDuca hit the jackpot: He secured a full-time job as an auction writer at Wyoming Outpost Auctions—no small feat for someone fresh out of graduate school with a degree in museum studies.

It’s not every day you get to apply your language skills to a newly discovered dinosaur species.

But middle school students in the Fremont County School District on the Wind River Reservation did just that, working with tribal elders last spring to come up with a Shoshone name for the species, which was unearthed outside Dubois. (The name can’t be revealed since research about the discovery hasn’t been released.)

Viewing a bison herd from a respectful distance while learning how the Shoshone people used every part of the animal for sustenance and turning a felled tree into a tipi lodgepole are just a few ways students at Fort Washakie’s schools are meeting the state’s Indian Education for All standards.

WAPITI, Wyo. — A five-kilometer race, run or walk is a staple fundraiser for community nonprofit groups across the country. It’s relatively simple to organize, and draws a wide range of participants—some are zealous competitors, others show up mainly to support a beloved cause.

Students at Evanston Middle School are contemplating what people will eat on Mars.

Ashley Graham’s eighth graders recently learned they had created a winning entry in the NASA TechRise Student Challenge with their plan to see if they could control the conditions that seeds will experience in space.

LAS VEGAS—The Wyoming Cowboys’ (6-13, 1-6) first visit to Las Vegas this season showcased a matchup of similarly ranked teams that took difference courses to their standings.

Most classes end with a final written test, but Dorothy Tuthill’s students can expect a tent and a campfire instead. Tuthill’s students are participants in the Wyoming Naturalist Program, which prepares volunteers to become active conservationists who will protect the state’s natural resources.