So there we were, my wife Nancy and I, sorting through garbage in a dumpster at a campground at Flaming Gorge. 

It was dinnertime and a family from Rock Springs asked us if we wanted to eat with them? This was a mortifying testimonial as to how nice Wyoming people are to others in need.

But no thanks. We did not need their charity. Maybe just their pity.

Our plight, which was displayed as me standing on the edge of the dumpster holding my wife’s ankles in my hands as she scoured countless garbage bags and other ilk, was the result of actions by some Texans. An explanation will follow.

         Earlier in the weekend we celebrated our 45^th wedding anniversary with 16 family members by boating and enjoying that same campground.

         The lake was spectacular. Water, water everywhere. If there were rumors that Wyoming was in a drought, there was no way of telling it by looking at Flaming Gorge.

         It was less than three years ago that Wyoming was mired in the midst of a decade-long drought that seemed to have no end.

         It appeared that a key local component of climate change in the Cowboy State was going to be a scarcity of that most valuable of all commodities – water.

         And experts said if it was to ever come back, well, it might take at least seven years to restore the reservoirs.

         Major reservoirs like Boysen between Riverton and Thermopolis, Buffalo Bill west of Cody and the Bighorn, east of Lovell, were drying up. Recreational boating had been marginalized. The giant Flaming Gorge south of Green River had a dominant white bathtub ring around its perimeter showing how low the water levels had dropped.

         Today, things are a lot different.

         Early winter-type weather in the fall of 2009 and a wet spring in 2010 started to literally turn the tide. And then the winter of 2010-2011 was one of the wettest in history for most of Wyoming.

         Thus, today Boysen, Buffalo Bill and Bighorn are overflowing. The bathtub ring at Flaming Gorge is invisible. 

There is a channel at the gorge called the Short Cut that at times has been barely seven feet deep. Last weekend we took our boat through it and it was 14 feet deep. 

         Not sure my math skills will tell me how much water is comprised in a seven feet depth difference spread over a 91-mile long lake. But it is a lot. (Note: Former Wyoming House Speaker Fred Parady worked the numbers and said that some additional 325 billion gallons had been added to the lake.)

         All the new water in the gorge was not the only good news recently about Flaming Gorge.

The Army Corps of Engineers recently announced its abandonment of a several years long study of transporting 81 billion gallons of water per year from the Gorge and Wyoming’s Green River along the I-80 corridor and ultimately ending up as far south as Pueblo, Colorado.

         According to the seven-state compact on the Colorado River (of which the Green in the main tributary), residents of Colorado are not getting their fair share.

         Aaron Million of Fort Collins dreamed up a scheme costing billions of dollars to pump water out of Wyoming to the Front Range of Colorado. It was called trans-basin water diversion and would have been one of the largest such projects in the country.

The cities of Rock Springs and Green River plus Sweetwater County budgeted money and banded together to fight the project.

         However, the project has not gone away completely.

Million now wants to get a permit from Federal Energy Regulatory Agency, because he thinks he can generate electricity with the water because much of it will be headed downhill.

         It has been hard to be impressed with Million over these past few years. He was most recently under a federal investigation for allegedly stalking his girlfriend as she traveled around Europe.

         Not exactly a beacon of wholesomeness for government entities to endorse, it would seem. Frankly, his hands are looking pretty dirty.

         And speaking of dirty hands, my wife and I had sent all our relatives home and were enjoying a quiet Sunday night at the lake by ourselves when the cell phone rang.

         It was our Texas daughter Amber. Seems she had piled all their dirty clothes into a garbage bag and her dutiful husband Craig had thrown it in the dumpster.

         Hence, our first (and hopefully last) dumpster diving experience.

         Talking to people outside Wyoming about Wyoming often is about as much fun as it can get.

         You want to talk about tourism? Well, heck, we have Yellowstone. We have the Tetons. We have more glaciers than any other state in the lower 48. And wild animals, well, there is nothing like our fauna outside of Alaska.

         We are a very big state in land mass (#10 in the country) with a very small population (#50 in the USA.)

This situation of so few people spread over such a large area even drew the ire of the New York Times earlier this year. An editorial writer complained about how a typical Wyoming citizen is the most powerful individual in the country because we get to have one U. S. Senator per just 280,000 people, the best ratio in the country. Compare that to poor but gigantic California with one senator per 18,000,000 people.

         But if you really want to boast, talk to your non-Wyoming friends about energy.

         Wyoming truly is the energy breadbasket of the Western Hemisphere. And the man bragging the most about this recently was Gov. Matt Mead who appeared on the CNBC business show Squawk Box early one morning.

The CNBC business channel interviewer asked the governor about what she had heard, that if “Wyoming were a country, it would be the largest energy exporting country to the USA in the world.”

         The governor answered by referring to “the 10.76 quadrillion BTUs of energy that come from our coal, uranium, natural gas, oil and wind, being used both within our state and to the other 49 states.

         Ten point seven-six quadrillion? How many zeroes is that, anyway? I think 10,760,000,000,000,000,000,000 is sort of how that would look.

         He also mentioned in a very straightforward manner that we have nearly 15 billion dollars in the bank (that’s $15,000,000,000). Our state budget is balanced and our unemployment rate is down to six percent. “Although we want to improve on that,” he said.

         Apparently this cable channel show is going around the country and interviewing governors to find out how the states are doing. It could be imagined that the interviews with governors from Minnesota or Wisconsin were not any fun at all.

         To Mead’s credit, he was not smug at all. He did comment on Wyoming’s conservative nature, which is one of the reasons our budget gets balanced and there is money in the bank.

         When you ponder the state of state economies like Illinois, California or New York, it must hard for people across the country to even contemplate what is must be like to live in a state where things are predictable.

         Wyoming must have looked like some kind of oddball almost un-American place to people living with all the uncertainty that mucks up the status quo of these other states.

         Although the governor was cool and calm, I do not think I have ever seen him speak so quickly and cover so much stuff in just a few minutes.

         He was well-coached and well-prepped for the interview, which was staged outside the Cheyenne state capitol building about 6:15 a.m. He covered a large series of topics in rapid fire. His facts were clear and it was easy for the viewer to understand everything he said.

         You can only imagine how fortunate his situation looked to those other governors whose daily lives must be a lot like being the ball in a pinball machine, constantly getting battered this way and that from forces both expected and unexpected.

Plus it was so funny for an old-timer like me to hear the opening introduction where the interviewer commented to Mead “that Wyoming was not a boom and bust state” like so many other states. Wow.

         A couple of the questioners zinged him with questions about raising taxes on energy companies and would he not agree that raising taxes would be a good thing for the other 49 states?

         He answered that if the companies were taxed harder it would hurt Wyoming, so he did not favor it. Instead, he urged the reduction of the regulatory burden that the federal government puts on small businesses in states like Wyoming.

         Mead was also able to get in some positive comments about the growing technology sector in Wyoming, although they switched subjects and suddenly, just like that, the interview was over.

         Most of us love to brag about Wyoming. So does our governor. Good job, Matt.

         The Loop Road above Lander is one of the lesser-known and yet most spectacular tourist places in the state.

         But in my 41 years here, it never seemed possible that the Loop would be place to encounter both grizzly bears and wolves. But, alas, it is now true.

         The Game and Fish Dept. has confirmed a photo taken by a bear hunter’s motion-activated remote camera. It shows a five-year old grizzly roaming around a timbered area on Fairfield Hill. This is the hill on the right side of Sinks Canyon seven miles from Lander at the start of the Loop Road.

         Farther up from Sinks Canyon (named for the mysterious “sinks” where the Popo Agie River disappears underground and reappears 1/8 mile down the canyon) are the “switchbacks,” a series of back and forth turns up Fossil Mountain. This is the beginning of the Loop Road. The road takes travelers on a 25-mile journey through the Shoshone National Forest emerging at Highway 28 on South Pass.

         On the second switchback, local dentist Dr. Eric Sheridan saw two wolves frolicking recently. This is just one of many recent sightings of wolves in southern Wind River Mountains.

         Never in my wildest dreams did I think we could have grizzlies and wolves in our back yard. Heck, my neighbor even swears he found a wolf track in his garden.

Friends and relatives who are seemingly more enlightened tell me to embrace this wonderful influx of wildlife.

         So, gulp, I guess that may be our new attitude.

         But I wanted to write about what a fantastic and unique resource our wild animals are in this state.   Let me share a few experiences:

         • As a former chairman of the Wyoming Travel Commission, we in the tourism business embraced the Game and Fish campaign called “Wildlife Worth the Watching.”

         Our commission always pushed extensive tourist surveying along with our director Gene Bryan. We discovered tourists loved coming to Wyoming to see our wildlife almost as much as the big parks, high mountains and vast deserts.

         I once suggested to our tourism marketing folks to use the term “America’s Serengeti” to describe our vast herds of antelope, deer, elk and bison. They never used it, but I sure did to describe our unparalleled wildlife vistas to potential tourists.

         What a visitor sees when coming to Wyoming is unique in the lower 48. I have traveled extensively in Colorado, Utah and Montana where you do not see such herds of animals.

         • Another unique sight is our herds of wild horses. Alhtough not natural residents, they still offer a breathtaking look at what life is like in the wild. 

         The Sweetwater County Tourist Board has done of marvelous job of promoting tourists seeing the Red Desert herd, as have folks in the Lovell area.

         • Now let me tell you about a typical Wyoming day I had recently at my home, which is a small acreage on the edge of Lander but WITHIN the city limits.

         As I left my house at 7:30 a.m. to meet with my coffee group, known affectionately as the Fox News All-Stars, I watched a doe give birth to a fawn. The little guy wobbled and stumbled but pretty soon was nursing and hoppity-hopped away.

         Pretty special, huh?

         Later, on my way back to my house on the same lane, a hen pheasant and her brood of tiny chicks held me up, bopping along down the lane in front of me.

         Later that morning, I had to stop for a youthful fox that was frolicking around.

         For another example, earlier this spring, we had a professional trapper remove two beavers that had mowed down a dozen trees and blocked the creek. They weighed 60 and 40 pounds and were transplanted to the national forest, where there were plenty of other beavers.

         We have lived in our present location for 12 years but saw our first bald eagle in May slowly fly over our back yard. We hear this bird is a permanent resident of the Popo Agie River area.

         What happens at our place may seem unique but in reality it happens all across Wyoming. We Wyomingites do live in a wildlife paradise.

         So I guess, in my old age, it might not make sense to complain about the arrival of grizzly bears and wolves. I still am not happy about it but am trying to rationalize that if we like living where the wild things are, and, we do, well . . .

         Up until a couple of weeks ago, Wyoming seemed like a pretty big state to me.

         And the Cowboy State seemed pretty sparsely populated with less than six people per square mile.

         But then we went to Alaska.

         The place is massive. Our 49^th state is over six times bigger than Wyoming in land mass. Its population amounts to just over one person per square mile.

         Not sure why it took me so long to get to Alaska, but it was sure worth it. Wyoming is lumped together with Alaska in so many ways, it just makes sense to compare them up close:

         • According to USA Today, Wyoming had the fastest growing economy in the country in the first decade of the 21^st century.  Our rate of growth was 48 percent. In second place was Alaska with 47 percent.

         • Wyoming still is the lowest populated state with 568,000 people. In third place? Alaska with those 721,000 hardy souls.

         • Both states are energy powerhouses. Wyoming with coal, natural gas, oil and uranium (and wind). Alaska has oil and oil and more oil. Also natural gas.

         • When it comes to being on the frontier, well, both states qualify. Each had historical gold rushes, land grabs and homesteading.

         • Spectacular scenery also describes both places with Wyoming’s Yellowstone and Teton National Parks plus our towering mountains and the biggest glacier system in the lower 48 states. Alaska offers vistas that defy description. Plus mountains and glaciers are in abundance. Throw in seas, sounds, fjords and lakes and well, it is a water person’s paradise. And we should mention the largest mountain on earth (in land mass) is Mount McKinley.

         • Both states have imaginative severance tax programs that provide significant revenues to the states. Alaska has developed a much more enlightened system than Wyoming’s but they are both leaders compared to other states.

         • Did I mention that Alaska is a big state? It contains 663,267 square miles. If it were cut in half, Texas would become the third biggest state in the USA. A popular bumper sticker in Anchorage reported that fact under the sign “how to tick off Texans,” or words somewhat similar.

         • As Wyoming continues to head toward being the oldest state in the country, Alaska is heading toward being the youngest. My friend Bruce Pozzi of Anchorage said over 80 percent of the population is under the age of 30. Amazing.

         We enjoyed a short cruise on the Klondike Express on Prince William Sound that viewed 26 glaciers. We were floating near a huge glacier called Surprise Glacier and saw pieces of it “calving” as the broken pieces of ice turned into small icebergs.

         The port of Valdez is on a part of the Sound that we did not see. That was the location of the huge oil spill many years ago that was one of the world’s great ecological disasters.

The Sound is a huge body of water full of whales and dolphins. There was also a colorful critter called a sea otter, which rarely ever touches land. They float on the top of the water. Large groups of them form “rafts,” quite a sight.

         We were in Anchorage right after the summer equinox on June 21 and officially, there were 24 hours of daylight. Was truly odd to be heading back to the hotel at 11:30 p.m. and it seemed like mid-afternoon.

         Downside of this anomaly is that in December, Anchorage only gets seven hours of sunlight a day.

         Former Speaker of the Wyoming House Fred Parady and his wife Lisa Skiles Parady live in far-north Barrow, Alaska, and work for the school district there. 

         That area reportedly gets 90 days of “night” in the winter. Now that would require an adjustment to a person from sunny Wyoming. Fred and Lisa seem to love it, though.

         Another stop on our itinerary was the cruise port city of Seward. Very nice town and I would recommend the Hotel Seward and the Sea Life Rescue Center if you make it there.

         We had a wonderful dinner at the Seven Glacier Restaurant at the top of the Alyeska Ski Area tram. That ski area is managed by Mark Weakland, who used to be general manager of The Inn of Jackson Hole.

         The seafood all over the state was unsurpassed. 

         We were only there five days and look forward to going back for a more extended trip.

My next trip will definitely include some fishing.