The Wyoming Basin: The Long Empty Stretch

You have about three hundred miles of this ahead of you. The Wyoming basin, the high-altitude grassland and sagebrush steppe that fills southern Wyoming, is one of the most geographically unusual parts of the American West. The Rocky Mountains rise to spectacular heights on the Colorado border to the south and in the Tetons and Absarokas to the north.

But southern Wyoming is a basin, not a mountain range: a broad, cold plateau averaging around seven thousand feet in elevation, swept by wind nearly every day of the year, and sparsely inhabited not because it was never valued but because its value was always in passage rather than settlement. The Oregon and California Trails crossed this basin because it offered the lowest practicable route through the Rockies. The Union Pacific Railroad followed the same logic in eighteen sixty-seven and eighteen sixty-eight, choosing the Wyoming route over more spectacular but steeper alternatives to the north and south.

Interstate Eighty follows the railroad. Almost all transcontinental freight follows the interstate. The basin is, on a per-mile basis, one of the most important pieces of American transportation infrastructure in the country, and it is also, visually, one of the emptiest.

The Eastern Shoshone and the Arapaho share the Wind River Reservation in north-central Wyoming, north of this basin. This particular stretch of high plateau was contested hunting ground between the Crow and the Shoshone. The antelope you see from the highway are pronghorn, the fastest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere.

They can sustain about forty miles per hour for a mile or more. The interstate fences that cross their migration routes are an ongoing management problem with no clean solution.