If you fish Kleenburn Pond, you've probably heard the number by now. Eleven and a half pounds. That's the largemouth bass pulled out of the water there in 2018, a fish that broke Wyoming's previous state record by four pounds and stood as one of the biggest largemouth ever caught west of the Mississippi. It's the kind of fact that makes a pond ten miles north of Sheridan feel like a finished, permanent thing. A place that got built once, got stocked, and now just sits there producing trophies and songbirds year after year.
It isn't finished. Sheridan County commissioners just approved a $606,000 agreement to stabilize the stream banks along the Tongue River where it runs past the ponds, and if you look at the paperwork trail behind that number, this is not a one-time patch job. It's the latest entry in a pattern of public reinvestment that stretches back more than a decade, and understanding that pattern changes how you should think about the place you already visit.
What everyone already knows about Kleenburn
The basics are well established among anyone who fishes north of town. Kleenburn Pond sits just east of the Acme exit off Interstate 90, and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department's Tensleep Fish Hatchery keeps it stocked with catchable rainbow trout. It's also one of only two spots in the area where tiger muskie are stocked, the other being Ranchester City Pond seventeen miles north. The site is jointly managed by Sheridan County and Wyoming Game and Fish, and it carries a real fishing pier built to be handicap accessible.
None of that is new information if you've spent an evening there. What most people driving out to cast a line don't stop to consider is what the ground under their feet used to be.
The mine before the pond
Kleenburn Ponds exist because of open-pit coal mining, not in spite of it. Padlock Ranch donated the land to Sheridan County in the 1970s after mining operations left two pits that filled with water, along with overburden piles, coal slack, and leftover concrete foundations scattered across the site. For decades the area got used informally for target shooting, camping, and off-road vehicles, which is a different kind of wear than the walking paths and fishing docks see today.
The turning point came in 2009, when the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality's Abandoned Mine Land program partnered with Wyoming Game and Fish to reclaim the site properly. Crews regraded more than 73,000 cubic yards of coal waste and revegetated close to 18 acres of dangerous piles and embankments. They built handicap-accessible walking paths around the water, fenced out motorized access, and engineered a channel connecting the two ponds so fish could pass between them and avoid winterkill, complete with a pedestrian bridge over the top. In August 2011, the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining gave the project its Western Regional Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Award, recognizing it as a model for turning a hazardous industrial site into public recreation space.
Sometime after that, Wyoming Game and Fish partnered again with the nonprofit RENEW and the county to add the accessible fishing pier that's there today. The Bighorn Chapter of the Audubon Society, working with Audubon Rockies and the county, also got Kleenburn Ponds designated an Important Bird Area, recognition of its value as habitat even though the designation carries no legal protections on its own.
By any normal measure, that's a completed project. Award-winning, publicly celebrated, done.
The agreement nobody outside county hall noticed
Except the county has been quietly working a new phase since at least October 2025, well before this fall's funding announcement made local news. Commissioners that month considered a design agreement for what was then called the Kleenburn Stabilization Design Water Resources Improvement Project. The Sheridan County Conservation District agreed to cover design costs up to $75,000, with the county responsible for anything beyond that out of the county engineer's own budget. At the time, County Engineer Ken Muller told commissioners he didn't yet know what the final costs would run.
Now there's an answer. Earlier this month, commissioners approved the follow-up agreement, this time named the Tongue River Kleenburn Stream Stabilization-Water Quality Improvement Project, with a total price tag of $606,000. Here's where that money is actually coming from:
| Funding source | Amount |
|---|---|
| Wyoming Wildlife Trust | $375,000 |
| Wyoming Game & Fish Foundation | $40,000 |
| SWPP | $35,000 |
| Sheridan County | $156,000 |
The county's share is the remainder after the outside grants, roughly a quarter of the total. That funding split is nearly identical in spirit to the coalition that paid for the original 2009 reclamation, which suggests this isn't a scramble to fix a sudden problem so much as the same set of institutional partners returning to maintain something they've already invested in once.
The county hasn't published a detailed engineering breakdown of exactly which stretch of bank triggered this round of work, but the project's own name tells you the target: the Tongue River channel where it runs past the ponds, and the water quality that channel feeds downstream.
This has happened before, just a few miles away
If you want to understand why a river bank that was stabilized once needs stabilizing again, look downstream to Dayton, where the same basic story already played out. The Sheridan County Conservation District ran a two-phase Tongue River Corridor Rehabilitation Project starting with an assessment of problem areas in 2013 and 2014. Phase two, completed sometime before the end of 2018, rehabilitated close to 750 feet of eroded stream bank on the south side of the river just west of Dayton. Crews planted a seed mixture of water-adapted vegetation to trap sediment as it matured, and installed two bank protection vanes, one built from boulders and one from a large cottonwood log, angled to redirect the river's flow away from the bank and back toward the center of the channel.
Travis Cundy, an aquatic habitat biologist with Wyoming Game and Fish, explained at the time that the problems tend to worsen in years when flows run particularly high, when the river fills existing pools with sediment and builds up center-channel bars that push the current back into the bank, creating a cycle that feeds on itself. Additional erosion control work was already planned near the Highway 14 bridge in Dayton as a result.
Five years after that, the Bureau of Land Management opened public scoping on a separate restoration proposal for the Welch Ranch Recreation Area, further downstream on the same water trail north of Sheridan. Years of monitoring had documented increased riverbank erosion along a mile and a half of that stretch, with sedimentation and channel degradation that the BLM said posed a safety risk to the public, to livestock, and to wildlife.
Kleenburn's $606,000 project fits neatly into that same timeline. This river corridor gets engineered, monitored, and re-engineered on a rolling basis, because a working river doesn't hold still just because a reclamation crew declared victory over it once.
What this actually means before your next cast
A few things worth carrying with you the next time you're loading gear for a trip up Highway 87:
- The ponds and the pier remain part of a site jointly managed by Sheridan County and Wyoming Game and Fish, the same coordination that's kept the place open and functioning through every prior phase of work.
- Design work on this project has been underway since at least the fall of 2025, which means the county and the Conservation District spent the better part of a year sizing the problem before committing real construction dollars to it.
- The list of funders, the Wyoming Wildlife Trust, the Game and Fish Foundation, and the county itself, is essentially the same coalition of partners who backed the original 2009 reclamation, which points to continuity of stewardship rather than a one-off emergency response.
None of this changes what makes Kleenburn worth the drive. The trout are still stocked out of Tensleep. The tiger muskie are still down there somewhere. The birds that earned the site its Audubon recognition aren't going anywhere because a stream bank is getting rebuilt. What changes is how you should think about the place. Kleenburn isn't a finished park that happens to need the occasional repair. It's a managed piece of the Tongue River, still actively shaped by the same water that made it worth mining in the first place, and every few years the public picks up part of the bill to keep it working the way it's supposed to.
That's a decent way to think about most of Sheridan County, honestly. The landscape looks settled from the road. Underneath, somebody's always maintaining it.
If you're weighing a move to this part of Sheridan County and want a straight read on what's happening on the ground, not just the listing photos, Chad A Conley can walk you through it. Let's connect.
