It's a relief to enter Wyoming, you can feel the heavy cloak of civilization sliding off your back. It's not as though no one lives in Wyoming, but at 500,000 in 97,000 square miles, they are hardly weighing it down. As Gov. Lester C. Hunt observed on the 50th anniversary of statehood (quoted in a poster at the visitor center), "Times will change, but the character of Wyoming will never change. There will always be the brightness of her sunshine, the purity of her air, the music of her winds, the grandeur of her mountains, the inspiration of her forests, and the peace and security of her wide open spaces." We drove from one end of Wyoming to the other, and the views were always vast but constantly changing, somehow at once dramatic and soothing. This
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