If you think Wyoming is not a place of variety, just attend an event involving tourist professionals who like to boast about the attractions in their part of the state.

         Those of us from the Wind River Basin never cease bragging about our Wind River Mountain Range, the Shoshone and Arapaho Indian Reservation, South Pass, Oregon Trail and Sinks Canyon.

         Folks from SW Wyoming brag about the Red Desert, Flaming Gorge, the Green River, Wild Horses and Fossil Butte.

From Casper to Cheyenne, we hear about the North Platte River, Medicine Bow Mountains, Vedauwoo and Fort Laramie.

         NE Wyoming folks from Sheridan to Sundance talk about the Bighorn Mountains, The Medicine Wheel, Devil’s Tower, Wyoming’s Black Hills, the breaks north of Lusk and Thunder Basin National Grassland.

         And my friends from Jackson and Cody are insufferable because of the Tetons and Yellowstone and all things miraculous to do with those spectacular places.

         These thoughts were rolling through my head as the vast panorama of Wyoming stretched out below me as I took a commercial flight over our state. I was on a trip that went from Riverton to Denver over open country.

It always makes a unique impression to look down and see so much space. Wyoming has such vastness. Critics might call it empty spaces. We locals prefer to call it open spaces.

A tourism survey indicated that our vast amounts of open land is one of the biggest attractions to people coming here from more populated places. There are even cases of tourism buses full of Asians pulling of the road between Casper and Shoshoni to take photos of "nothing."

So much space with seemingly nothing in it, is immensely impressive to the foreign visitor who lives in such crowded conditions. There have been cases of those people suffering "reverse claustrophobia" where they actually got ill from the strange feeling of being in a place so open.

There was a national best-selling book some years ago titled The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich that described our vastness. Some of her comments pulled from the 12 stories in the book include the following:

• The geographic vastness and the social isolation here make emotional evolution seem impossible.

          • In all this open space, values crystallize quickly. People are strong on scruples but tenderhearted about quirky behavior.

• If anything is endemic to Wyoming, it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.

• The emptiness of the West was for others a geography of possibility.

• The solitude in which westerners live makes them quiet. They telegraph thoughts and feelings by the way they tilt their heads and listen; pulling their Stetsons into a steep dive over their eyes, or pigeon-toeing one boot over the other, they lean against a fence with a fat wedge of Copenhagen beneath their lower lips and take in the whole scene. These detached looks of quiet amusement are sometimes cynical but they can also come from a dry-eyed humility as lucid as the air is clear.

• Sagebrush covers 50,000 square miles of Wyoming . . . despite the desolate look, there`s a coziness to living in this state. There are so few people . . . that ranchers who buy and sell cattle know each other statewide.

• To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground. When I asked an older ranch hand to describe Wyoming`s openness, he said, "it`s all a bunch of nothing wind and rattlesnakes and so much of it, you can`t tell where you`re going or where you`ve been and it doesn`t make much difference." Ms. Ehrlich`s comments were beautifully written and I`d strongly recommend people buy her book.

From my vantage point in that airplane, Wyoming didn`t look empty. It looked like a kaleidoscope of colors, as river-formed valleys, mountains and hills jutted and swirled along. Patches of snow would indicate how fast or how recently the wind had been blowing across the high plains.

Wyoming isn`t empty. It`s full. It is just a matter of knowing what you are looking at . . . and looking for.

         Elk harvests, a Cold War state park, a governor laments and lots of other news kept popping up for me over two days last week at a meeting in Casper.

         My reporter nose was twitching with all this news. 

Now I had recently been out of the country for two weeks, so maybe everybody already knows what I am about to write here, but this all seemed pretty new to me:

         • Gov. Matt Mead is still looking for a “lull” time as governor. “Last year, it was the floods. This year it was the fires,” he said.

         “We had 400 fires in Wyoming, 35 of which were major,” he stated. Price tag for fighting those fires is $90 million and soon the state and the federal government will determine who owes what. It will be expensive, he says.

         • Mead said he repeatedly heard from firefighters how much they appreciated the signs “Thank You Firefighters,” plastered all over Wyoming. 

Best story was about the two Laramie Vohland sisters, Kellen 6 and Emerson 3, who pulled a little red wagon full of popsicles around for the firefighters. Mead ultimately invited those girls to his office for a “popsicle party,”

         • Our next new state park might be the first state park in the country that commemorates the Cold War.

North of Cheyenne is a missile silo and Milward Simpson, head of state parks, told the crowd at the State Tourism Summit in Casper, they are considering making a state park out of the site.

         As someone who has spent most of his life living in the Cold War, I think this is a great idea.

         For those too young to remember, the Cold War was the 44-year period after World War II. The USA and Soviet Russia dominated the world and kept every citizen on earth nervous about an impending holocaust.

         More nuclear missiles were based around Cheyenne than anywhere on earth.

         • Game and Fish Director Scott Talbott talked about the comparisons often made around the country that Wyoming animals are more difficult to harvest than those in neighboring states. 

         Not true.

         He says that fully 30 percent of the bull elk hunters in Wyoming made kills last year. This compares to a paltry 19 percent in Colorado, which finished second.

         Deer kills in Wyoming were 45 percent, according to Talbott, compared to just 30 percent in Colorado, which again finished second.

         Nobody offers up a better hunting experience that Wyoming, he concluded.

         • When it came to fishing, Talbott said, “right here in Casper is one of the world’s great fisheries in the North Platte River.”

         In one place, perhaps the “Miracle Mile,” the G&F counted 28,000 fish in a one-mile stretch of the river.

         In my new book, U. S. Sen. Mike Enzi wrote the chapter about the North Platte because he is such an avid angler who fishes this river every chance he can all over the state.

         • Sen. Enzi talked to the mainly tourism crowd at the Summit about the bad state of politics in Washington, D. C.

         He pleaded for the election of Mitt Romney and said we “are on an economic cliff” not daring to take another step.

         Enzi says he can balance the budget in five years with his “one percent solution,” which involves every program cutting itself by just one percent each year for five years. Still would not cut the debt, but it would stop the annual bleeding, he says.

         • Legislators Jim Anderson (R-Glenrock) and John Hines (R-Gillette) both talked about possible increases in gasoline taxes as a way to fix our roads.

         Raising taxes in Wyoming is such a hot potato, they both said, they worried that funds will not be forthcoming to make necessary repairs.

         Hines said there are three ways to raise funds – increase the state sales tax, increase registration fees or increase the fuel tax.

         Toll roads are almost impossible because they can now only be used for new construction, which is very unfair to Wyoming.

         I was told some years ago that out-of-state drivers pay 55 percent of our gasoline taxes

         One person argued with Anderson that since Wyoming has so little mass transit, people have to drive a long ways to get to work. His answer was that Wyoming’s tax is very low compared to surrounding states and that those same roads used by people driving to work have to be fixed, too, so they can get to work.

         Emmy - Ian Lee, son of Bill and Sue Lee of Lander, was recently honored as one of the winners of an Emmy for Spot News Reporting.

         Ian courageously reported for CNN from Cairo during the revolution that occurred in Egypt last year. He was even slightly injured while trying to get the story.

         A big honor for a young man working on a big story a long way from home.

         Lion – Wyomingite John Wendling has been getting lots of playing time for the Detroit Lions and recently was featured on the cover of their game program.

         Wendling also was named one of the captains of the team, which is quite an honor according to his brother Beau Wendling, who helps bring our coffee group’s average age down by about 10 years.

         The Wendlings were both standout high school football players in Rock Springs and John played at UW and Beau at Chadron State.

         Wagner honored – Former Wyoming Tourism Director Randy Wagner was honored by being selected to the Cheyenne Frontier Days Hall of Fame.

         Randy, a native of Lander, but a long-time Cheyenne resident, also wrote a chapter about South Pass in my new book plus added a great many wonderful photos. Congrats.

         Longmire – Author Craig Johnson continues to live it up concerning the use of his books for a very successful TV series called Longmire. It recently concluded its first season and will have a 13-show second season next year.

         It was a huge hit for the AMC cable channel with more than 4 million viewers for each show.

         Johnson recently toured Wyoming, signing books and talking about the show, and according to his Facebook posts, had a wonderful time.

         He recently reported that his wife was upset with him when he was if they could “sit in” on a saloon scene and Johnson demurred. He considered it bad karma. His wife, according to Craig, was not happy.

         When not traveling around, the Johnson’s live at Ucross.

         College students - Some Wyoming college students told me they certainly hope theirs isn’t the worst off generation since World War II.

         Many reports state that the job outlook is so bad across the country that this is the first generation of young people who can look forward to a life “worse off” than their parents. Up to now, every generation seemingly had it better than their parents’ generation.

         I was asked to talk to community college students from around the state at a State Leadership Conference in Riverton recently. There in front of me, aged 18 to 20, were young men and women from colleges in Gillette, Sheridan, Casper, Rock Springs and Riverton.

         They were sons and daughters of architects, ranchers, accountants, bartenders, schoolteachers and oil field workers.

         They stared up at the white board behind me where I had written topics for them to discuss.

         Under “spoiled generation,” I asked them how many times they talked on their cell phones to their parents? Many said at least daily, which verifies a recent report on National Public Radio about how different this crop of students is from 10 years ago. Professors said in that report the biggest trend today is how much parents interfere with their college student children’s relations with their teachers. 

         These young folks are wide-traveled. Just about everyone had been to a foreign country and one 20-year old girl just returned from Africa where her family drills water wells for poor villages. Name of that company is Matheson of Gillette. We are proud of them.

         I talked to them about the importance of actually “getting understanding” of whatever kind of work they intended to do after school. One young man who is a bronc rider said he was already pretty understanding of this job! He needed to be to save his life, he said.

         More on China – While I was in China recently, so was David Wendt of Jackson, who has been trying to convince coal producers, both in America and in China, to make coal usage as environmentally clean as possible.

         Wendt proposed: “the international trade in coal can ideally be justified within a context of similar clean energy standards, in which one country does not take advantage of lower clean energy standards in the other.  China is making great strides in this direction,” he concluded. 

         Joe, remembered – Joe Meyer was a true Wyoming original. He was a friend of thousands of folks here in the Cowboy State. We will miss our State Treasurer. Happy Trails, friend.

         In you really want to feel small and insignificant, leave a place with just five people per square mile and go visit a place that has 45,000 people per square mile.

         Hong Kong is such a place.

         Nancy and I just returned from a place 9,000 miles away and perhaps a few years into our future.

         If gigantic buildings are signs of the future, then we saw them. If millions of people dashing here and there are a sign, we saw that, too. And if getting to know Chinese people who are stressing out as they try to get their solitary child the best education possible, well, we saw that, too.

         Biggest shock was the lack of a need for a foreign language “phrase book,” which is always the first thing I did when visiting France or Germany or Italy.     

         We visited four areas, Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, Macau and Shenzhen. English signage was everywhere we needed to go.

         As fast as the Hong Kong/Kowloon area is growing, it is surpassed by Macau’s 50,000 people per square mile, the most densely populated place on earth. Nearby Shenzhen is considered perhaps the fastest growing industrial area on the planet with 10 million hard-working folks.

         We got sidetracked in Shenzhen by protests involving thousands of flag-waving Chinese angry at Japan over some barren islands.

         In the past the Chinese have often been passive during such events, but no more. They have a very positive attitude about their country’s world status and they were itching to stuff it down their old adversary Japan’s throat.

         You could see this pride everywhere.   While we were there, the country launched its first aircraft carrier. They consider it another giant step in becoming a preeminent world power.

         We made some friends and learned about how their lives work. They seem to work hard. Rush hour was 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. because the workday usually ran that late for them.

They live in massive 40-story high apartment complexes. Often they will maintain an apartment in one place and a tiny rental space in another so their child can go to the best school. 

Education appears to be all about merit. If you go to the best schools, you get the best education. If you get the best education, you get to go to the next level’s best schools. Biggest concern of my friend was if his 11-year old son could get into the best school.

         With all these resources being focused on just one child in a family compared to our 2.5 kids per USA family, well, it gives you some pause when you think of worldwide education dynamics as it affects our next generation.

         Here are some touristy highlights:

n   The 118-story tall International Commerce Center has the highest hotel in the world in its top 15 floors, the Ritz-Carlton. Having a drink on the 118^th floor at Ozone or having dinner on the 103^rd floor at Tosca, you had the feeling you were in a jet plane flying above the city. 

n   In Macau, we found ourselves in the largest casino in the world at the Venetian, which contains 10.5 million square feet. The gamblers seemed to be all Asian. The reason Macau is growing so fast (it far surpassed Las Vegas in gambling revenue) is there are a billion people within a three-hour plane ride.

n   Two restaurants in the Venetian, a Chinese place called Canton and an Italian place called Portofino served some of the best food that we have ever enjoyed.

n   We also stayed at Kowloon’s Hyatt Regency, which dominates the Tsin Sha Tsui area. What a great place to be based if you are going to that part of the world. Its restaurant Hugo’s featured a chef serving up fiery dishes at your tableside.

n   With my sore back, the spa on the 116^th floor of the Ritz-Carlton provided an amazingly restorative feeling.

n   We climbed the stairs to the biggest Buddha in the world in Tung Chung. Wonderful experience.

n   I had to visit Hong Kong Disneyland to get homesick at their huge (and accurate) re-creation of Yellowstone geysers.

n   To my journalist friends, the Foreign Correspondents Club was the best bar I have been in for a long time. If they let me in as a temporary visitor, they might let you in, too.

n   The House of Dancing Water in Macau was one of the best Las Vegas –type shows we have ever seen.