When Zach Lentsch and Chris Allen of Wyoming learned that only 27 percent of their home state’s voter-aged population participated in the statewide 2024 primary elections, the Legislature’s anti-conservation rhetoric began to make sense.
A number of concerns came to mind for the two outdoorsmen: The bill calling for a system in which Wyoming landowners profit from the sale of their specialized elk tags; the resolution backing a transfer of federal public lands to state ownership, which only failed by one vote; the sense that some things happening in Cheyenne did not accurately reflect what Wyoming outdoorspeople of all stripes wanted for their open landscapes and wildlife.
This disconnect was likely coming from what Lentsch characterized as a “paltry” level of voter engagement — something he and Allen wanted to fix by forming Protect Wyoming, a new political action committee focused on public lands and wildlife conservation issues in state government.
“Some 300,000 people hunted in Wyoming last year,” Lentsch pointed out in an interview with Mountain Journal. “Granted, some of those 300,000 are nonresidents, but hunting and fishing are part of our culture, and that’s at risk. So getting people who hunt or otherwise use public lands interested in the state Legislature is our priority, and a PAC fit the bill.”
Wyoming’s public lands advocacy community can still find glimmers of hope and consensus in Cheyenne. On March 9, Gov. Mark Gordon signed a pro-public lands joint resolution introduced by Republican Sen. Eric Barlow, which cleared both the House and Senate in landslide votes. The resolution puts the percentage of Wyomingites who use public lands for “work, recreation, and subsistence” at 91 percent — the highest of any state in the nation, the resolution reads.
But the goal of Protect Wyoming, which Lentsch and Allen formed in November 2025, is to further force the issues of federal public-land management and science-informed wildlife management to the surface of the public’s consciousness. Since such a large portion of Wyoming’s population participates in outdoor recreation, informing and engaging more voters would likely mean increasing the role hunters, anglers and the conservation-minded play in electing some of the state’s most influential leaders.
Lentsch and Allen met through mutual friends at the beginning of 2025. Between the two, they represent user groups from nearly every type of outdoors pursuit you can undertake on public land in the West. Both grew up hunting and fishing — Lentsch in Worland, Wyoming, and Allen in the rural western slope area of Colorado. Lentsch got into ice climbing and rock climbing, and he now guides both full-time out of Cody.
“You’re starting to see money and politics really play into hunting and wildlife here. I think some of these legislators want to turn hunting into a country club event.
Chris Allen, cofounder, Protect wyoming
Allen grew up with horses, then married a three-time American Ranch Horse Association world-champion-turned-trainer. Now he’s in farrier school to fit horseshoes while helping with his wife Karla’s boarding and training operation in Clearmont. From bagging peaks to leading packstock, Lentsch and Allen understand the myriad ways public lands serve the Equality State. Now, in reciprocity, they’re trying to serve those public lands in return.
“We both have been seeing the writing on the wall over the last three to five years,” Allen says. “There are a select few legislators in Wyoming who have desired the sale of public lands and public wildlife for profit. As we saw more attacks work through the Legislature, we decided we needed to do something to inform the public on who is for and who is against public lands.”
The Wyoming Legislature is comprised of 93 part-time elected officials — 62 in the House and 31 in the Senate. Just eight of the 93 are Democrats, the rest Republicans. Leading up to the 2026 state elections, Protect Wyoming will start publishing legislators’ public lands and wildlife conservation voting records on their website, with an eye toward those facing re-election. Every two years, Wyomingites vote on the entire House of Representatives and half of the Senate. (Senators have staggered four-year terms, similar to those in the U.S. Senate.)
In a state where tourism is the second biggest industry by economic impact behind energy and mineral extraction, Lentsch and Allen don’t see either position as particularly partisan. Support for both manifests across party lines, they say, from Yellowstone to Cheyenne.
“All polling that I’ve looked at shows that public lands and wildlife are consensus issues in Wyoming,” Lentsch says. “It just seems like the Legislature is deeply out of touch with reality on the ground and how most Wyomingites feel about this, regardless of whatever party they are registered to vote for.”
Despite this, 2025 saw the anti-public lands movement “reach a fever pitch” in Wyoming and elsewhere. Lentsch and Allen specifically called out Senate Joint Resolution 2, introduced by Republican Sen. Bob Ide. The resolution demanded that Congress “extinguish the federal title in those public lands and subsurface resources in this state that derive from former federal territory.” In other words, the resolution states that federal lands and minerals should become Wyoming lands and minerals.
While a piece of state legislation can’t force the federal government to take action on federal property, resolutions of this sort are often seen as symbolic. At most, they are intended to carry weight in how federal elected officials consider the issue at hand. U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, Sen. Cynthia Lummis, and Sen. John Barrasso have all signaled willingness — if not outright enthusiasm — for transferring federal public lands to state ownership in the past. Ide’s proposal fell right in line with that rhetoric, Lentsch says.
“He said on the floor of the Legislature that the intent was to then sell those lands off,” Lentsch recalls. “I thought that was abhorrent.”
As far as wildlife management concerns go, a particularly hot-button issue has been what the hunting community refers to as “transferable landowner tags.” Like in other Western states, Wyoming landowners who meet certain parameters can get extra elk, deer, antelope and wild turkey tags that are otherwise unavailable or hard to access for non-landowning resident and non-resident hunters. The intention in part is to give landowners with 160 acres or more additional opportunities to prevent game damage on their fences, crops, feed supplies and gardens. But these tags are also seen as a way to show appreciation for the quality wildlife habitat these landowners often steward.
“Some 300,000 people hunted in Wyoming last year. Granted, some of those 300,000 are nonresidents, but hunting and fishing are part of our culture, and that’s at risk.”
zach lentsch, cofounder, protect wyoming
By making those tags transferable to other licensed hunters, landowners would be able to sell them at competitive prices and keep the profits — an idea that has surfaced in other Western states time and again. In Wyoming, it recently manifested in Sen. Laura Pearson’s Senate File 118, introduced to the Legislature in January 2025. One year and thirteen days later, she brought it back in the form of Senate File 51.
Proponents saw the move as a way for landowners to boost their bottom line. But opponents see transferable tags as running horribly awry of the North American model of wildlife conservation, which urges against any instance of individuals profiting directly from the sale of wildlife. Examples of transferable landowner tags in practice reveal how the model can turn a system meant to honor landowners into a system that honors the wealthy. In New Mexico, for example, a resale landowner elk tag can run for upwards of $10,000, depending on where in the state it covers.
“Right now, you can charge someone to come on your property to hunt,” Allen points out. “But [transferable tags] divest all the license money from the state. You lose that revenue to private interests, rather than keeping it in Game and Fish’s hands to put toward biologists and managing wildlife.”
Senate File 51 died in a 6-25 vote on February 9. But the sentiment will likely continue to simmer, according to Allen, a symptom of broader shifts in the conservation power dynamic.
“You’re starting to see money and politics really play into hunting and wildlife here,” he says. “I think some of these legislators want to turn hunting into a country club event. ‘Come to my ranch, you’ll wine and dine, shoot an elk, we’ll go grab it, quarter it, and cook it up for you that night.’ That’s the whole a la carte deal that I see happening. But that’s not what the whole idea of the Wild West is supposed to be about at all. Hunting is one of the few things left that’s not just spoon-fed to people.”
Lentsch and Allen both highlight Protect Wyoming’s grassroots nature. They aren’t making money from their work, and currently all the money they raise goes toward their information campaigns for upcoming primary races. The 2026 candidate filing period runs from May 14 to May 29 and the primary election is on August 18. Their favorite strategy so far? Face-to-face conversations about something most Wyomingites can agree on: the value of time spent outdoors.
“We live in an era when people are flooded with social media, traditional media, crazy mailers from who knows where out-of-state, and monied interests,” Lentsch says. “But a lot of that is actually intended to disengage the electorate and get really low voter turnout. One of the best ways to get people to the polls is to organize in person. Talk to someone you think you disagree with. Have that conversation about protecting public lands and wildlife.”
