My month in Wyoming

 My take on Wyoming

where I went this month

You can see there are a few gaps where I didn't manage to get to this month.  But considering that Wyoming is the 10th largest state, I think I did pretty well.  One thing I noticed when I was first planning my month here is that there are large chunks of the state with only unpaved roads, if there are roads at all, which made getting around more of a challenge.

Wyoming's land
The lack of roads in places is mostly due to mountains being in the way.  The eastern third of the state is an extension of the Great Plains, which is where those allegedly boring 81½ miles from Newcastle came from.  Nearly treeless, once covered with tall grasses, the land the early Indians and pioneers crossed looked nothing like the land does today, after all those farmers busted up the soil held in place by those grasses.

The western two-thirds is partly mountains and partly the basins between them.  Wyoming's mountains are indeed wonderful and rightly draw visitors from around the world to see them.  But to my mind (having once lived in Alaska where there are plenty of mountains), the geological wonder is what's under Yellowstone.  That volcano exploded 640,000 years ago and left behind a huge crater measuring 30 x 45 miles.  

What's amazing to me is the amount of volcanic activity that still goes on there - all the magma that still sits just beneath the earth's crust.  It constantly lets off steam - literally - and the entire area steams like a witch's pot (of dry ice) at Halloween.  There's so much energy that multiple geysers continue to spew liquid multiple times a day.  Yellowstone has more geysers than anywhere else in the world.  The park says people could spend a year exploring there, because there're so many different things to see.  I doubted that before I visited, but I don't doubt it now.  I was really sorry I had so little time to spend there and look forward to going back sometime.

Wyoming's land also includes a great deal of history, both of the Indians who first lived here (pictographs, petroglyphs) and also of the mostly white settlers who moved west for various reasons (gold, cheap land, religious freedom) in the 1800s and early 1900s.  I've tended to think that Wyoming was almost geographically cut off and didn't play much of a role in anybody's history.  Now I know that just the opposite is true.  Wyoming was practically a crossroads for centuries of human history.

It's almost incidental that it's also stunningly beautiful.  Well, it was incidental in its early history.  Now that's what brings people here again.

Wyoming's people
Wyoming has the lowest population of the 50 states.  I imagine it ranks only 49th in terms of number of residents per square mile because Alaska's got a lot more land to cover and not a lot more people to do it with.

I found that Wyomingites are almost proud of having so few people (though I saw that the Chamber of Commerce types are making efforts to convince people to move here).  The people who are already here, though, like feeling as if they have a chance to know everybody in the state.

These are almost all friendly, helpful folks.  Most all are willing to go at least a bit out of their way - some, quite a bit out of their way - to help other folks - even if they're tourists.

They're all glad to be living here and aren't interested in moving anywhere else.  They all say they like the small towns they're living in because they're small.  Except for all the wealthy people moving into the Jackson area, people tell me Wyoming is affordable, which they appreciate.

Wyoming is nearly last in the US in terms of value and quantity of manufactured goods.  What it does have is agriculture - Wyoming ranks #2 in the US in wool production - and mining.  Wyoming ranks #1 in the US for both coal and bentonite (an absorbent) and is #1 in the world in trona production (used to make glass, soap, paper).  There's still oil and gas production and uranium and precious stone mining.  But the federal government is Wyoming's largest employer, what with all those national forests and parks and monuments, and an air force base at Cheyenne.  I think tourism runs a close second.  I mention this employment information because I think it says something about the way people think around here.

Driving in Wyoming
When I first came into the state from South Dakota, I was headed for Devil's Tower.  Because I couldn't be sure that this state knew how to build roads in mountainous areas, I was a little apprehensive at first.  But I learned fairly quickly that Wyoming does as good a job of that as South Dakota and West Virginia (and unlike Colorado and Pennsylvania).  I could drive all over the state, on mountains or flat land, and not worry either before or during.

When I take these photos of license plates, I just pick some random car parked somewhere, and try to choose one that's not too dirty and isn't obscured by a license plate holder.  That's what this one is.  I've just noticed that it's also expired.  Maybe the cops are casual about that sort of thing here.

The first number denotes the county it's registered in.  I saw them up to 23, I think, and when they're double digit, they make the numbers half size and put them in the same place, but vertically.

Drivers like to go fast on Wyoming roads, but I didn't see much really blatant law-breaking.  They tend to stick pretty well to the posted speed limits; they don't usually tail-gate; they're usually willing to let other traffic merge in front of them.  Generally nice drivers, which I suppose fits with their generally friendly attitude towards others.

What I didn't see that I wanted to see

Not much other than what I mentioned in my daily posts.  But there is one place I wanted to get to and couldn't squeeze the time in for.  It's in that chunk of the state north of Cheyenne and south of Lusk and Douglas.  Near the town of Guernsey is the Register Cliff State Historic Site and the Oregon Trail Ruts State Historic Site.  Those ruts were left by wagon wheels 150 years ago.  And the Register Cliff was one of the checkpoints for westward travelers, prominent in 19th century guidebooks, and a place where many carved their names in the sandstone.  None of my relatives got past Texas and Oklahoma, but I'd still like to see these places.

I guess, rather than see new places, what I'd most like to do is spend more time in some of the places I visited this month.  There're some fascinating sights and sites here.

My conclusion

I liked Wyoming a lot but I could never live here, which is a shame.

Wyoming has so many natural wonders and interesting historical sites that I could happily spend a lot more time here getting to know them.  I liked the people I met and in general liked the towns they lived in.

What deters me from living here, aside from its obvious distance to an ocean (and I really do want to be closer to one than WY offers), is its political stance.  I really do want to move somewhere where there are 2 viable political parties.  If I wanted to live in a state where everybody thought the same, I could just stay in Texas and live away from the big cities.  Although I'm getting too old to really enjoy long harsh winters like I used to, that doesn't bother me nearly as much as the extremely strong streak of conservatism here.  Nothing at all wrong with conservatism in my book.  It's just that here, it's very strong and very deep.  

Wikipedia says there's only 1 reliably Democratic county (Teton, with its influx of affluent voters) and 1 swing county (Albany, where the Univ. of WY is).  Together they have less than 16% of the state's voters.  Otherwise the state is deeply Republican.  Although Congresswoman Liz Cheney is being opposed in the upcoming election because she believes in following the Constitution, the fact is that she's been an extremely conservative, and reliably conservative, vote in Congress - and in that sense, she's represented the views of her constituents well.

I'm honestly not sure why Wyoming's politics have gotten so conservative when they didn't use to be.  Nothing I saw in my month here told me what the basis is for such a strong strain of thought.  The only thing I can guess is that there are so many rural areas here, so few cities (the largest, Cheyenne, has only 65,000 residents), and rural areas everywhere tend to skew conservative.  So, I don't know why it's this way, but it is, and I'm looking for more choices.

But overall, my month here was a happy one and I'm glad I had the chance to come spend some time here.