CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — A 13-year-old boy who became separated from his Boy Scout group during a hiking trip in the Wyoming wilderness survived partly on bugs and tree bark for the nearly 37 hours he was alone.

Searchers found Garrett Hunter of Draper, Utah, in good health about 10:15 p.m. Sunday after happening to camp near him for the night and calling out his name, according to Sublette County sheriff’s Sgt. Travis Bingham.

Rough terrain and darkness forced the group to camp overnight and wait until Monday morning to take the boy out of the mountainous Bridger Wilderness.

Garrett became separated from other Boy Scouts and their leaders around 9:30 a.m. Saturday when he went off a trail to go to the bathroom, Bingham said. The group of about 20 boys and adults were on the way out from a weeklong, 50-mile (81-kilometer) backcountry hiking trip.

Garrett had a sleeping bag, a water filtration device, a little food and part of a tent. Not sure how long he might be lost, the boy ate ants and bark to preserve what little food he had.

“He didn’t like bark so much, but the bugs weren’t too bad,” Bingham said after interviewing Garrett Monday. “He had trouble starting a fire with the fire starters staying lit. He improvised, using bug spray with his lighter even though his mom told him not to and did get a fire that one night.”

Searchers, aided by dogs and a helicopter, scoured the rugged terrain Saturday afternoon and Sunday. The search was suspended about 7 p.m. Sunday, but one group of volunteers decided to camp near a lake that night.

When one of the volunteers yelled out Garrett’s name, they heard a reply: “Help,” Bingham said.

The boy was found on a ledge overlooking the lake where he had stopped to wait for rescuers, Bingham said. Authorities said he did everything right to survive, including staying in one place after initially hiking about a mile.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — A proposal advocating for the collection of a fee at Yellowstone National Park to fund wildlife conservation efforts in the states surrounding the park is advancing through the Wyoming Legislature.

The nonbinding resolution, which passed the state House Travel, Recreation, Wildlife & Cultural Resources Committee on a 9-0 vote Wednesday. It also approved expanding the concept to Grand Teton National Park, which is just south of Yellowstone in northwest Wyoming.

It now goes to the full Wyoming House for debate.

Proponents say the idea will generate money for Wyoming, Montana and Idaho to deal with wildlife management issues, such as mitigating collisions between wildlife and vehicles and the spread of wildlife diseases.

Its primary sponsor, Rep. Albert Sommers, said about 4 million people visit Yellowstone every year.

“Sure, you want to see Old Faithful and you want to see the mudpots,”said Sommers, R-Pinedale. But visitors also want to see a grizzly, wolf, bison or elk roaming around. “People want to see that, and I think they’d be willing to support it.”

Since states cannot impose fees in national parks, the resolution seeks to start a conversation between the three states and the U.S. Interior Department and the National Park Service about the parks imposing a fee or sharing current fees with the states.

The Wyoming resolution does not specify the amount of the fee or how it would be assessed.

Sommers said those details would need to be worked out with the federal government.

Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk said Wednesday that he and other park staff have not been contacted about the proposal. He noted that Yellowstone remits about $10 million a year in taxes it collects inside the park to the state of Wyoming.

“The economic impact of Yellowstone and the surrounding communities is, I think, over $600 million a year,” he said.

Sommers said wildlife migrates in and out of Yellowstone and Grand Teton, creating conflicts in areas outside the parks.

He said Wyoming has spent millions building special fences and highway overpasses and underpasses to help protect wildlife near Grand Teton from collisions with vehicles.

In Montana, private ranchers outside Yellowstone are concerned about bison that leave the park during the harsh winters, spreading disease to their cattle. Bison that leave the park are caught and some are slaughtered to prevent disease from spreading.

“It’s important that we find ways to fund those efforts, particularly where there’s conflict or mitigation needs to occur and where human impacts are,” Sommers said.

Representatives of various conservation organizations, including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and The Nature Conservancy, voiced support for the idea.

“We think it’s a creative way to start a conversation about new ways of funding wildlife management issues,” said Siva Sundaresan, Wyoming conservation coordinator with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, said.

However, some have expressed concern about added costs to enter Yellowstone.

The National Park Service has proposed imposing steep increases in entrance fees at 17 of its most popular parks, including Yellowstone to help pay for needed maintenance and infrastructure projects.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — A proposal advocating for the collection of a fee at Yellowstone National Park to fund wildlife conservation efforts in the states surrounding the park is advancing through the Wyoming Legislature.

The nonbinding resolution, which passed the state House Travel, Recreation, Wildlife & Cultural Resources Committee on a 9-0 vote Wednesday. It also approved expanding the concept to Grand Teton National Park, which is just south of Yellowstone in northwest Wyoming.

It now goes to the full Wyoming House for debate.

Proponents say the idea will generate money for Wyoming, Montana and Idaho to deal with wildlife management issues, such as mitigating collisions between wildlife and vehicles and the spread of wildlife diseases.

Its primary sponsor, Rep. Albert Sommers, said about 4 million people visit Yellowstone every year.

“Sure, you want to see Old Faithful and you want to see the mudpots,”said Sommers, R-Pinedale. But visitors also want to see a grizzly, wolf, bison or elk roaming around. “People want to see that, and I think they’d be willing to support it.”

Since states cannot impose fees in national parks, the resolution seeks to start a conversation between the three states and the U.S. Interior Department and the National Park Service about the parks imposing a fee or sharing current fees with the states.

The Wyoming resolution does not specify the amount of the fee or how it would be assessed.

Sommers said those details would need to be worked out with the federal government.

Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk said Wednesday that he and other park staff have not been contacted about the proposal. He noted that Yellowstone remits about $10 million a year in taxes it collects inside the park to the state of Wyoming.

“The economic impact of Yellowstone and the surrounding communities is, I think, over $600 million a year,” he said.

Sommers said wildlife migrates in and out of Yellowstone and Grand Teton, creating conflicts in areas outside the parks.

He said Wyoming has spent millions building special fences and highway overpasses and underpasses to help protect wildlife near Grand Teton from collisions with vehicles.

In Montana, private ranchers outside Yellowstone are concerned about bison that leave the park during the harsh winters, spreading disease to their cattle. Bison that leave the park are caught and some are slaughtered to prevent disease from spreading.

“It’s important that we find ways to fund those efforts, particularly where there’s conflict or mitigation needs to occur and where human impacts are,” Sommers said.

Representatives of various conservation organizations, including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and The Nature Conservancy, voiced support for the idea.

“We think it’s a creative way to start a conversation about new ways of funding wildlife management issues,” said Siva Sundaresan, Wyoming conservation coordinator with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, said.

However, some have expressed concern about added costs to enter Yellowstone.

The National Park Service has proposed imposing steep increases in entrance fees at 17 of its most popular parks, including Yellowstone to help pay for needed maintenance and infrastructure projects.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Seventy-six wolves were killed by hunters and others in Wyoming last year when the state resumed its management of the animals.

Ken Mills, lead wolf biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, said 43 wolves were legally hunted and one illegally hunted in the state during a licensed hunting season from October through December.

That met the state’s hunting quota of 44 set by game managers.

“It got off to a pretty fast start in October and we closed a number of hunt areas early,” Mills said. “Then November was really quiet for the hunt areas that were open, and in December it picked back up, and I think probably snow had a part to do with it … which helps people with tracking and seeing wolves.”

About 2,500 hunting licenses were issued, meaning 1.7 percent of the license holders were successful in taking a wolf.

Mills said wolves are difficult to hunt because they are elusive and avoid people.

“So it’s hard to actually cross paths with one unless you really know a specific pack or put in a lot of time,” he said.

It was the state’s first licensed wolf hunting season since 2013. No licensed wolf hunting was allowed in Wyoming in the following years because wolves were placed under federal protection and management by a court ruling. A federal appeals court in 2017 lifted endangered species protection for wolves in Wyoming, allowing the state to take over management of the animals.

Mills said another 32 wolves were killed in 2017 in areas of the state where they are considered predators and can be killed without a license.

There are about 380 wolves in Wyoming. Wolves remain protected in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and on the Wind River Indian Reservation, and the state is committed to maintaining at least 100 wolves, including 10 breeding pairs, outside the parks and the reservation.

Areas adjacent to the parks are subject to a tightly controlled hunting season. However, in much of the rest of the state, wolves are considered predators that can be shot on sight without a license any time of the year.

Environmental groups have long taken issue with wolves being considered predators in Wyoming.

“In terms of ongoing policy problems, I guess I would still say that the most glaring one is that they treat wolves as vermin that can be shot on sight in 85 percent of the state,” Tim Preso, a lawyer with Earthjustice in Montana, said Friday. “If they want to do it in a rational way where they respond to conflicts or provide some kind of appropriate, responsible hunting regulation for wolves in certain areas, that makes sense, but to just throw the doors open and say go kill them whenever you want, however you want, that’s not something we’d ever support.”

Montana and Idaho also have wolf hunting seasons that have not been interrupted by legal challenges.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Hunting guide Mike Clark normally has more than 20 clients lined up each fall for trips deep into Wyoming’s western wilderness to shoot mule deer, prized by hunters for their size and impressive antlers.

But unusually cold weather and heavy snowfall that blanketed much of the Western U.S. last winter killed off many young deer. And that prompted wildlife officials throughout the Rocky Mountain states to take measures such as reducing the number of hunting permits to try to help devastated wildlife populations rebound.

Clark took only six mule deer hunters out in September and October who were lucky enough to get permits. He estimated that he lost 40 percent of his income as a result. If it wasn’t for the hunters he was guiding this year to shoot elk that generally survived the brutal winter, Clark said, “We’d pretty much be selling out.”

In one remote part of Wyoming’s backcountry where peaks soar to 11,000 feet, state wildlife managers documented the loss of all fawns they had been monitoring in a mule deer herd.

To help the herd recover, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission reduced the number of deer permits for out-of-state residents from 600 to 400 in the area where Clark operates, cut the hunting season to 22 days and limited hunters to killing older bucks.

Officials won’t know how effective their efforts will be until hunting season ends in January and hunters submit reports saying how many deer they killed.

Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Utah and Washington state also imposed hunting limits to help isolated wildlife herds recover from the winter. Deer were hit hardest in most of those states, while Washington had severe losses among several of its elk herds.

In southern and central Idaho, last winter’s fawn survival rate was just 30 percent, prompting a reduction in deer hunting permits to help herds boost their numbers, said Mike Keckler, spokesman for the Idaho Fish and Game Department.

“We’re trying to bring them back up,” he said.

And in Washington, the number of elk hunting permits was cut drastically in some parts of the state where elk died in droves, said Brock Hoenes, statewide elk specialist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The area of Wyoming where Clark takes hunters is known as one of the best places in the world to hunt mule deer, state Game and Fish spokesman Renny MacKay said. He added that the decision to limit permits was difficult for state officials to make.

Clark said his business will survive the downturn but that his future guiding hunters is uncertain if wildlife managers reduce the number of mule deer hunting permits for nonresidents again next year.

“Otherwise, none of us are going to have any deer hunters,” he said.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — For the first time since 2013, licensed wolf hunting will take place in Wyoming.

Wyoming’s wolf hunting season opens Sunday and runs through Dec. 31. It is confined to 12 trophy game hunt areas in the northwest part of the state.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department has set a quota of 44 wolves to be taken.

Wolf hunting continues to be prohibited in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, the National Elk Refuge near Jackson and on the Wind River Indian Reservation.

Outside those areas and the trophy game hunt area, wolves are considered predators and can be shot on sight as long as the kill is reported.

Earlier this year, a court lifted federal protection for wolves in Wyoming. Montana and Idaho already have established wolf hunting seasons.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Monday’s total solar eclipse turned out to be a record-breaking event for Grand Teton National Park as people from around the world jammed into the northwest Wyoming park to get a glimpse of the eclipse against a backdrop of scenic mountain peaks.

The weekend before the eclipse and the day of the eclipse resulted in the “busiest weekend in the history of the park,” park spokeswoman Denise Germann said Friday.

Park traffic data indicates that there was about a 40 percent increase in park visits, or about 10,000 extra people, in the park on Monday.

For the first time in park history, all backcountry permits were issued for three days straight. Neighboring Bridger-Teton National Forest accommodated campers who couldn’t stay in Grand Teton.

“People came in over a couple of days and stayed those couple of days and then stayed through the eclipse,” Germann said. “It definitely was a record event for visitation.”

Despite the crowd, Germann said there were no major incidents reported and the park was able to handle the influx, although traffic was slow getting out of the park, which sits just south of the more popular and better known Yellowstone National Park.

Wyoming was one of the states in the path of the total eclipse. Thousands of astronomers and people from around the world poured into the state for the view, causing massive traffic jams that are normally seen in major metropolitan areas.

The Wyoming Department of Transportation reported imprecise traffic counts that showed an increase of more than 550,000 vehicles compared to a five-year average for Aug. 21.

“It impacted the entire state of Wyoming,” state tourism director Diane Shober said. “It wasn’t just one location. We rely heavily on our national parks as our destination drivers, and people as a rule travel by automobile in and out of the state of Wyoming. But this was something where people came and stayed in local communities — Lusk, Torrington, Douglas, Glenrock, Casper, all throughout Wind River country and then in places outside the path of totality.”

However, the number of people who traveled to Wyoming to view the eclipse isn’t known right now, Shober said.

The Wyoming Office of Tourism is conducting an economic impact study that will come up with estimates on the number of visitors and how much they spent.

Still, Shober said the event was highly successful and benefited Wyoming in many ways, such as the international media exposure.

“I believe that what’s really powerful is that we had a way to introduce Wyoming to the world, to the rest of the United States in a way that we’ve never been able to do before,” she said.

Shober said the hope is that people who spent a little time in Wyoming might make the state a future vacation destination.

“And so our office will continue to leverage this event while we’re on the crest of this wave and continue to utilize it and leverage it as an economic impact opportunity, not only for the summer of 2017 but going forward as well,” she said.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Its jagged, soaring peaks rise high over northwest Wyoming, but Grand Teton National Park is always in the shadow of its world-renowned neighbor, Yellowstone National Park.

But thanks to the total solar eclipse Monday, Grand Teton is expected to outshine, and overshadow, one of the nation’s most popular parks — at least for the day. Grand Teton is directly in the path of the eclipse — where the sun is completely blocked by the moon.

“We anticipate it to be the busiest day in the history of the park,” Grand Teton spokeswoman Denise Germann said. “We’re trying to create realistic expectations for visitors as well as our staff that there’s going to be congestion, there’s going to be traffic gridlock.”

Yellowstone, the world’s first national park that is famous for “bear jams,” where motorists stop on roadways to watch grizzly bears, will see just a partial eclipse.

“We are planning for an August day in Yellowstone, which is usually pretty busy anyway, and we anticipate that there will be a large influx of visitors that will be in the neighborhood for the eclipse,” Yellowstone spokesman Jonathan Shafer said. “We don’t know whether they’re going to end up coming to see us or not.”

Grand Teton, which counted 3.27 million visitors last year compared with Yellowstone’s 4.26 million, is one of two U.S. national parks and 21 National Park Service-operated sites that the total eclipse will pass over. The other park is Great Smoky Mountains National Park spanning Tennessee and North Carolina.

It’s not clear how many people will drive into Grand Teton on Monday, but the park has prepared detailed plans for the eclipse that include waiving vehicle entrance fees to help keep traffic moving.

Once inside, any rooms and campgrounds that take reservations will have long been taken.

Those flying in to the area are facing a crowded airport. Grand Teton is unique in that it is the only national park with a commercial airport within its boundary.

It is always busy during the summer months, but the eclipse has increased traffic with additional commercial flights, said Jim Elwood, airport executive director.

The park has also brought in reinforcements. About 10 additional rangers, including some from Yellowstone, have been brought in to help the park’s normal contingent of about 160 permanent and 300 seasonal personnel.

“Everybody is focused on the eclipse,” Germann said. “They’ll be staffed at a trailhead, they’ll be staffed at the pullouts or parking lots. They’ll be staffed at the viewing areas. So it’s an all hands-on-deck.”

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Online: https://www.nps.gov/grte/index.htm .

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Follow AP’s coverage of the total solar eclipse here .

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — Sometime within the next four to six years, Yellowstone National Park is expected to reach its capacity for being able to handle all the vehicles that tourists drive through the park to see sights like Old Faithful, wild wolves and grizzly bears and spectacular scenery.

Potential solutions include instituting a reservation system or passenger shuttles to control the number of visitors during peak times for the busiest attractions in the park, but no decisions will be made for at least a couple of years, according to the National Park Service.

“Historic and recent trends demonstrate that visitation will increase over the long-term, therefore, it is imperative for us to plan now,” Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk said in a statement. “Good visitor use management will allow the park to protect resources, encourage access, and improve experiences.”

The agency on Thursday released a pair of studies looking at traffic and parking in the nation’s first national park and visitor demographics and expectations.

Based on conservative estimates of visitor growth to the park, the traffic study said the nation’s first national park should expect to exceed its overall vehicular capacity by 2021-2023.

“The more popular areas of the park are already over capacity under current conditions during peak season,” the study noted.

Two-thirds of the more than 1,250 visitors surveyed in August 2016 said that finding available parking is a problem and more than half think there are too many people in the park.

The report recommended additional traffic studies within the park and the Greater Yellowstone region to help park officials develop solutions that could include developing a plan that “evaluates and defines visitor capacities for key locations in the park.”

One suggestion the report made was that park service officials might consider managing the number of visitors to the busy geyser basin attractions during peak time through “reservation systems.”

Using shuttles, which have been adopted by some other national parks, is another possible solution.

The park service pledged to gather more information through 2019 that “will guide the park in evaluating trade-offs in visitor experience and developing the most appropriate strategies to address summer season visitor use challenges.” It promised to listen to all concerns to help shape any actions.

Yellowstone spokeswoman Morgan Warthin said Thursday that no decisions are imminent and that the park considers the matter to be in a “pre-planning phase.”

More than 4.25 million people visited Yellowstone in 2016.

According to the survey of park visitors, 83 percent of Yellowstone’s visitors come from the United States and 17 percent come from abroad with people from Europe and China the top two respectively among international travelers.

CHEYENNE, Wyoming — Gray wolves killed a record number of livestock in Wyoming last year, and wildlife managers responded by killing a record number of wolves that were responsible, according to a new federal report.

The report released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that wolves killed 243 livestock, including 154 cattle, 88 sheep and one horse, in 2016. In 2015, 134 livestock deaths attributed to wolves were recorded.

Last year’s livestock losses in Wyoming exceeded the previous record of 222 in 2009.

As a result, wildlife managers last year killed 113 wolves that were confirmed to be attacking livestock. In 2015, they killed 54 wolves.

Previously, the most wolves killed in Wyoming in any year for killing livestock was 63 in 2007.

Scott Becker, wolf program coordinator in Wyoming for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said managers can only speculate on why conflicts between wolves and livestock increased so much last year.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know with any certainty why one year is bad and another year not quite so bad,” Becker said. “It’s just the dynamic nature of managing wolves, and as managers we try to do our best to minimize that chronic loss of livestock if at all possible.”

Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, said the problem is too many wolves are allowed to populate areas where cattle and sheep graze.

“Even though Wildlife Service was responsive to livestock losses, their approach has been that they wouldn’t remove any wolves anywhere in the state until there had actually been losses,” Magagna said.

Andrea Santarsiere, senior attorney of the Center for Biological Diversity based in Victor, Idaho, blames ranchers for not using nonlethal methods, such as portable electric fencing, to keep wolves away from livestock.

“And so when you have native predators on the landscape and non-native livestock on the landscape, it’s not surprising that the predators are going to view them as prey,” Santarsiere said.

At least 377 wolves were counted in the state in 2016, according to the federal report.

Unlike Wyoming, neighboring Montana and Idaho are no longer subject to federal monitoring and are not part of the Fish and Wildlife Service report this year. Both states are still monitoring their wolf populations but are working on different and less expensive ways of counting wolves.

Montana estimates its wolf population at 477 in 2016, while Idaho does not have a count for 2016. Idaho’s last wolf count was 786 in 2015.

Wyoming has had a complicated history with wolves, which were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s after they had been hunted and trapped out of existence throughout most of the continental U.S. last century.

Wolves were a protected species in the state until 2012, when they were delisted and handed over to the state to manage. A federal judge in 2014 reinstated federal protections for the wolves in Wyoming, but that ruling was overturned by a federal appeals court last March, allowing Wyoming to regain management.

When wolves in Wyoming were under federal control, they enjoyed protection throughout the state.

Under Wyoming’s management, wolves remain protected in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and the National Elk Refuge. Areas adjacent to the parks will be subject to a tightly regulated hunting season, which is expected to be approved soon by the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission. In the remainder of the state, wolves can be killed throughout the year without a need for a license, except on the Wind River Indian Reservation, which oversees management of wolves on its land.

Ken Mills, large carnivore biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, said Wyoming’s wolf management plan seeks a reduced but stable population of wolves.

“Usually the fewer wolves you have, the less conflicts you have,” Mills said. “It’s not 100 percent but that is certainly the goal of the state.”