The High Country

Step outside almost anywhere in Wyoming and your lungs will notice something the body registers before the mind catches up: the air is thinner here. You are standing on the high plains or in the mountains of the Rocky Mountain West, and the land beneath your feet sits higher than almost anywhere else in the lower forty-eight states. Wyoming's average elevation is the highest of any state in the country, somewhere around six thousand, seven hundred feet above sea level.

Much of it is higher still. The geography shapes everything. The Wind River Range runs through the center of the state, carrying peaks that top thirteen thousand feet, their flanks braided with glaciers that are among the last remaining in the American Rockies.

To the east stretch the high plains, a shortgrass sea of sagebrush and bunchgrass that rolls on for hundreds of miles before the land finally drops toward the Missouri River drainage. To the northwest the Absaroka and the Teton ranges cut the sky in jagged profiles. The Bighorn Basin to the north is a rain shadow world, semi-desert, pale and enormous.

Wyoming is the tenth-largest state by area and the least populous in the nation. On any given day there are more pronghorn antelope here than people, a fact that Wyomingites recite with something between pride and warning. The pronghorn is the fastest land animal in the Western Hemisphere and, biologists believe, evolved its speed to outrun a Pleistocene predator that no longer exists.

The animal is still running, in other words, from a ghost. This landscape made human history in Wyoming shaped by long distances, hard winters, scarce water, and the particular stubbornness of people who came and stayed anyway.