It’s a cool, misty morning in the rolling hills and sand dunes northeast of Casper, Wyoming. It’s the middle of archery elk season—September 18, to be exact. A handful of bulls are bugling and fighting before dawn as Mark (a pseudonym, at request of the hunter) and his three buddies move into position. Both the elk and the hunters are on a small parcel of state land surrounded mostly by private ranches, save for a sliver of BLM through which the hunters hiked in from a nearby county road. It’s the last morning of what’s been a difficult few days of hunting, but it’s finally on.
As the sun begins to rise, a faint buzzing grows louder and louder overhead. Mark recounts to MeatEater what happened next: “As soon as the sun cleared the horizon, we saw a plane in the sky. Soon afterward four-wheelers joined the plane in pushing the elk out of the area. Two from our group were in the elk, one pinned down—surrounded—as the plane made pass after pass on the elk.” Mark says that three ATVs joined the mix. From his perspective, it looked as though they were pushing the elk off the state land and onto private, as though they were herding cattle.
The hunt was blown. Mark and his buddies, pissed off, snapped some pictures and videos of the plane—a small blue-and-white single-prop—and began the trek back to their cars. But they weren’t in the clear yet.
“While leaving, we were shadowed by one of the four-wheelers, which eventually confronted us for recording and taking pictures,” Mark recounts. “Soon after another joined, shadowing but not confronting us. The plane circled us, keeping track of our location and finally the last four-wheeler showed up—the ranch foreman or owner [identified later as Jon Nicolayson, a co-owner of Cole Creek Sheep Company]. We were accused of attempted poaching, hunting out-of-season, and finally a threat of getting us charged with trespassing.”
At the time, the hunting party was standing on public land, with valid archery elk tags in their pockets.
Mark, and two other members of the hunting party, recall the interaction as tense and confrontational. According to Mark, Nicolayson told the hunters that “he would feel bad if we were hunting deer or antelope, but he had to move his cattle, and the elk were in the way.”
All three hunters told MeatEater that there are always cows present in the area, but on that particular day there were only a few in the vicinity. From their vantages, the plane and four-wheelers were nowhere near the cattle. After the conversation, Mark called the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) to report what had happened.
Nicolayson, however, recalls the interaction differently. “I felt like the interaction was positive,” he told MeatEeater. “It was like, ‘Hey guys, I was just checking to see where you were, and sorry, we’re moving all these cows.’ And I guess maybe that’s not how they thought it was, but I certainly wasn’t trying to intimidate. I felt like it was a friendly encounter.”
Nicolayson says he might’ve been confused about recent changes to elk tags in the area, but maintains that he never demanded to see tags, and that it’s not his job to check, anyways.
The ranch, he explains, has contracted with a private pilot for about a decade to round up cattle in the area, both on private rangeland and on adjacent public land for which the ranch has grazing leases. The area has rolling topography, making it hard to locate cows, especially if they’re tucked into draws and depressions between sand dunes. Using a plane makes it easier to spot the cows, and their location is then communicated down to the ranch hands on ATVs.
Sometimes there’s unfortunate overlap with elk, Nicolayson explains: “We have never done anything like use an airplane to harass or herd wildlife. And harassing hunters, that is not at all what we were doing. Now, I acknowledge that it might have ruined their hunt. But if you have elk and cattle in the same 100 yards or whatever, and we’re relying on the airplane to help us find the livestock, then, you know that’s kind of the way it goes. We’re not chasing the wildlife away. We’re not chasing the hunters away. And if the pilot says, ‘Hey, I think there’s some guys on the ground out here, just so you know,’ then because the land is not fenced separately and it’s split ownership out there, I do have the right as a private landowner to kind of see if they are abiding where they’re supposed to be.”
Nicolayson says he’d had the day planned to move cows for a long time, and he couldn’t change his ranch operations on account of hunters in the area. Indeed, Mark and his hunting buddies corroborated that before the 18th, they’d had several days of good, uninterrupted hunting in the same spot.
The whole interaction that day could’ve been chalked up as an unlucky run-in between public land user-groups if the story had ended there. But it didn’t. One of the ranch hands recognized someone in the hunting party as a prominent member of the local community, and passed that information along to ranch management.
That afternoon, one of the hunters received a text message from Peter Nicolayson—Jon’s brother, a co-owner of the ranch, and a local Natrona County commissioner. Peter texted the hunter, asking for the names of everyone in the hunting party, and questioning why the hunters had reported the incident to WGFD. The text string, which MeatEater viewed, left a salty taste in the hunter’s mouth. Peter declined to speak with MeatEater, saying Jon would be the ranch’s spokesman.
Ultimately, two Wyoming game wardens and a BLM law enforcement officer paid the ranch a visit to assess the situation. WGFD declined to comment, but Jon said that no citations were issued. Someone familiar with local BLM operations told MeatEater that law enforcement essentially slapped the ranch on the wrists, and said knock it off.
Still, something about it didn’t sit right with Mark. This wasn’t a one-off experience. Mark said that he hunted the area roughly 20 to 25 days this fall, and estimates that he saw a plane in the air about 95% of the time, and that from his vantage, “the elk were under that plane or darn close to it every time.” Other public-land hunters, he adds, have similar stories from hunting in the area.
“Threatening hunters on public land and harassing them is beyond okay,” Mark said. “Harassing wildlife is another disgusting practice as well. Making excuses, trying to find hunters that are involved, and possibly attempting to intimidate them…that doesn’t work for me.”
On the ranch’s behalf, Jon said a couple phone calls before the hunt could’ve gone a long way. “He doesn’t need my permission to get to BLM or state land if it’s legally accessible…but it would be kind of nice if somebody is like, ‘Look, I got four guys, we saved up all this time and money to hunt, this is the day we’re going to go out there, this is the week we want to go out there.’ I mean, I’m easy to find. I could have said, ‘Hey, I am so sorry, but I’ve got this airplane and we’re moving 600 cows and we’re going to be in and out of there. If you can do it like the day before or the day after, it’ll probably be a much better hunt.’”
There are different interpretations of what occurred out on the Wyoming prairie that day in mid-September. What is clear, however, is an underlying tension between public-land hunters and landowners in the area. In this case, the hunters were understandably upset that their hunt had been ruined. And the ranchers, for their part, might not have exercised very good discretion by engaging them, or by trailing them with ATVs and possibly a plane. The mutual respect that guides interactions in the field was missing.
Ultimately, Casper is a small community—the hunters, ranchers, and law enforcement mentioned in this article could all contact each other with one or two phone calls. Though unconfirmed, there doesn’t seem to be any ongoing investigations in the incident, leaving it a matter of morals and ethics in acting while afield, both for hunters and landowners.
In coming forward with his story, it’s Mark’s hope to stand up for both the wildlife and hunters, and to make it known that unscrupulous behavior shouldn’t be swept under the rug, even in the boonies of Wyoming.
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