"Empty except at the Corners" a Wyoming Travel Page by mtncorg

Wyoming is a rectangular state. It shares its unique shape with Colorado. Unlike Colorado, has no large metropolitan areas, no surplus of sports stadia, not even very many miles of traffic jams - with the exception of a bear sighting along a road in Yellowstone Park.

Colorado has some of its most magnificent sights directly in the heart of the state. Wyoming has Casper. Sorry, Casper.

It is on the fringes, that things really start to happen for Wyoming. Way up in the NW corner, the natural Disneyland of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks draws millions out of nowhere. Go 50 miles to the east and you will ask, where did all of the people go? The SW corner has the 'major' metropolitan areas of Wyoming: the state capital in Cheyenne, the university town of Laramie. The NE corner is a little quieter, but some people spill over from the Black Hills of South Dakota, making a daytrip to that icon of Steven Spielberg fame, Devils Tower. The SW corner is kept busy by the occasional boater on Flaming Gorge Reservoir and the freeway traffic of I-80, but also, just north is Kemmerer, home to the first JC Penney store and the interesting nearby Fossil Butte National Monument.

Not on the corners, but still on the outside fringes, you can find magnificent Bighorn Mountains on the northern border; the Medicine Bows bump up along the southern border; the old pioneer waystation at Fort Laramie National Historic Site is on the eastern border (along with muzak playing in the downtown streets of Torrington); on the west is the beauty of the Starr Valley, a Mormon outlier of the Utahn empire. In the middle? There is the majestic Wind River Range, a glorious range of mountains that threaten to extend into towards the middle of the state, but they are still west central. Look closely at the map. What do you see?