LANDER, Wyo. — The aroma of sizzling meat in melted butter wafts from a cast iron pan while Jaden Bales shows his favorite way to cook up the best steak cuts from a big game animal.
The deep red backstrap pieces, similar to filet mignon of beef, are organic and could hardly be more local. They’re from a mule deer hit by a car just down the road from Bales’ rustic home in a cottonwood grove beneath the craggy Wind River Range.
Bales was able to claim the deer thanks to a new state of Wyoming mobile app that’s helping get the meat from animals killed in fender benders from road to table.
State wildlife and highway officials rolled out the app — possibly the first of its kind in the U.S. — this winter when Wyoming joined the 30 or so states that allow people to collect roadkill for food.
The doe was crossing U.S. Highway 287 south of Lander early on the morning of Presidents Day just as Marta Casey was headed out in her Subaru to go snowboarding.
She hadn’t been snowboarding in years. A world traveler who’d settled in Wyoming only a year ago, she didn’t know she was in for a whole new experience in rural living.
“I tried to slow down and get around it,” said Casey. “It was very … yeah.”
After a Wyoming Highway Patrol trooper took a report and promised to shoot the injured deer, Casey was a couple runs into snowboarding when she remembered the app she had heard about from Bales, whom she had just recently met.
She alerted Bales, who soon found the doe and used the app to claim it by entering the species and verifying that it wasn’t killed illegally.
Next thing Casey knew, Bales had hauled the doe home in his pickup truck and Casey was helping cut it up so they could hang the quarters in Bales’ garage.
Wyoming’s new roadkill feature within the state Department of Transportation app helps people quickly claim accidentally killed deer, elk, moose, wild bison or wild turkey after documenting the animal and reviewing the rules for collecting roadkill to eat.
Another purpose is to help people follow the rules. For safety reasons, roadkill in Wyoming may not be collected after dark, along interstate highways or in construction zones.
National parks, such as Yellowstone and Grand Teton, also are off-limits for roadkill retrieval.
In Oregon, which allows people to claim roadkill with an online form, people must surrender the head and antlers to wildlife authorities within five days, but in Wyoming, the whole animal is fair game.
