Wyoming

Casper, Wyoming on the North Platte River, is a local commerce hub, and the second largest city in Wyoming, with a population of about 60,000. To this Easterner living in a small city in central Pennsylvania, Casper is a small town. Wyoming is a huge state, about twice the size of Pennsylvania, but very sparsely populated. Its population density is the least of the lower 48, by a lot. Most of the far flung settlements we passed through had populations well below 1,000.

We left Casper on Wednesday to drive west across most of Wyoming, then up north to the Grand Tetons. There are a lot of mountain ranges in Wyoming, but most of our trip was through vast basins of high prairie. Rolling hills, short grasses, and lots of sagebrush. Every so often you'll see a few cattle grazing in this vast landscape. Once in a while, a ranch house shaded by a few cottonwood trees. Otherwise, the landscape is pretty treeless. Every so often, you'll pass an oil field, or maybe some isolated drills.  The only thing that changed much during our drive was the roll of the hills and the density of sagebrush as we headed west.

Wyoming Panorama

As we finally turned northwest, we could see the snow capped mountains ahead of us. And we finally hit a rise in the road where we could see in the distance the saw-toothed peaks of the Tetons.

First view of the Tetons