Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over. – Quote attributed to Mark Twain.

Dry as a bone.

That describes the status of much of the American West in recent years, although Wyoming has had a reprieve recently.

Worrying about drought has always been an everyday occurrence in Wyoming. Most of our state is known as “semi-arid,” a nice way to refer to a high plains desert country that gets sparse amounts of rain and suffers from low rates of humidity.

For example, here in Wyoming, one of the largest glacier systems in North America is shrinking rapidly.

The vast Wind River Mountain range, which I can see from my backyard, has seen its glaciers disappearing over the last 30 years at a precipitous rate.

The Winds are home to glaciers covering 17 square miles, including seven of the 10 largest glaciers in the Rocky Mountains, according to Greg Kerr of the University of Wyoming.

Two glaciers, Gannett and Dinwoody, have lost gigantic amounts of water due to shrinkage in the past decades. Gannett has lost 48,000 acre-feet of water and Dinwoody has lost 52,000 acre-feet since 1958. This amounts to 1.5 billion gallons and 1.6 billion gallons of water. A single acre-foot of water is a huge amount of water (325,000 gallons) - meaning an acre, 43,000 square feet is under one foot of water deep. 

These are just two of the 63 glaciers in the Winds, Kerr said.

As I travel around the country, here is what we have seen recently:

• During a recent trip to Southern California, folks there were talking about it being the driest it has been for over 100 years. Water cops patrolled neighborhoods levying big fines for folks washing their cars or sprinkling their back yards

Gov. Jerry Brown is desperately trying everything to get people to conserve more and to locate more water. So far, no luck.

• Las Vegas is so dry the city has offered to pay people to get rid of their lawns and install desert-like landscapes. 

During a recent trip to Hoover Dam, we were astonished to see how shallow Lake Mead had become. The “bathtub ring” along the shoreline revealed that the lake is about 50 percent of what it used to be.

The Colorado River and its string of reservoirs have been drawn down by 14 years of the worst drought in 1,200 years, according to reports.

Federal officials are warning Las Vegas that, this year, they intend to reduce the amount of water released from Lake Powell, upriver 180 miles, into Lake Mead and are encouraging even more stringent conservation measures by folks in that party city.

As an aside, we also spent time walking along and examining the gigantic new suspension bridge that replaces the highway over Hoover Dam. The new bridge is the highest such span in the country at over 1,000 feet above the Colorado River below.

View from the bridge of Hoover Dam is pretty amazing. Also pretty dry there.

• In Dallas, the local reservoirs are down to some of their lowest levels ever. Lake LaVon is down to a third of its capacity. It is the main source of water for the Dallas Municipal Water District.

Lake LaVon is now a huge field full of barren stalks. It reminds me a lot of how empty Boysen Reservoir looks this time of year.

Historically, Dallas yards are green all year round. No more. Brown as Wyoming yards.

• A sign that the federal government believes that states can no longer afford to fight wildfires is a proposal by President Barack Obama to have the feds pay for fires like they pay for floods and hurricanes.

He thinks this is all part of climate change and individual states should not have to foot the bill for something that is not a local caused issue.

This is good news for Wyoming, which had its share of wildfires in recent years.

• With snow recently falling on Wyoming in frequent dumps and our reservoirs starting to fill up, Wyoming suddenly is starting to feel like maybe our long-term drought is old news.

Snowpack levels are above average all over the state although the readings earlier this year did not mean much. Most of our moisture comes in late March and April.

The Jackson Hole Ski Resort is reporting abundant amounts of snow this season. Sheridan got 16 inches of snow last week. Cheyenne and other places got buried, too.

Drought, what drought?

        What a life! At the young age of 29, Wyoming’s AAron Ontiveroz just returned from covering the Olympics and prior to that, the Super Bowl.

         He also has been a photographic member of a Denver Post team that has won a Pulitzer Prize and a regional Emmy Award.

         AAron also has a razor-sharp sense of humor, which he shows through his blogs.

         Since I was involved in hiring AAron’s dad to one of his first newspaper jobs back in the 1970s, I have known young AAron his entire life. It has been quite a life to watch.

         Besides being an award-winning photographer, AAron has a humorous ways of writing as is shown in this blog he sent last week from Sochi about Russian food:

“What the crap is dried meat factory production? Horse meat and beef fat, really?

 “I come from a long line of eaters. Real champions of gut and glut. My dad’s family is not slight and they are proud to be well fed. Tortillas, beans, bacon, burritos, tacos, ham, cheese, fried pig fat for snacks, huge chunks of soggy cake soaked in whole milk, oh, and lard — lots of lard.

“Duh. Lard is actually a prominent fixture on our family crest — a big block of it sweating and emanating all of its wisdom and glory for the ages.

“Despite my family’s oxygen-like attachment to food, I wholeheartedly doubt they would get all Oliver Twisty here in Russia. I do not envision any one of them, no matter how hungry, asking, ‘Please, sir, I want some more dried meat factory production with horse meat and beef fat.’

“Sorry, Russia, your food is not good. We may eat lard and pig fat and a bunch of other bodybuilding foods where I come from, but they don’t taste like they’ve been sitting in the fridge since the Cold War.

“It’s no wonder everyone here looks like an unhappy competitive gymnast — no one could possibly binge on this cuisine.”

I have known the Ontiveroz family for a long time. I first hired AAron’s dad Milton when he was a Northwest College student in Powell. He worked for me for a year in Lander where he met his future wife, Liz Trimmer. Liz’s dad Harvey delivered papers to the newsstands for us.

For the past 20 years, Milton has been an Institutional Communication Specialist at the university in Laramie and is well–known all over the state.

Young Ontiveroz graduated from Laramie High School in 2003. He is a 2008 UW graduate.

AAron (the two upper case A’s were Liz’s idea, Milton says) launched his sterling journalism career at Northwest. While at NWC, he had a national award-winning article for the Northwest Trail, while competing against such schools as Harvard. 

The Pulitzer came while AAron was shooting for the Post. The newspaper won for its overall coverage of the Aurora movie theater massacre. Twelve people were killed and 58 others injured when a gunman began firing during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in the summer of 2013.

Among his other awards is a regional Emmy for a video he helped produce two years ago with videographer Mahala Gaylord.

AAron’s blogs can be found at http://blogs.denverpost.com/olympics/2014/02/19/sochi-2014-winter-olympics-hey-snow/26813/.

On other blogs, Ontiveroz had this to say: “Do you want to visit the coldest place on Earth? Go to southeast Wyoming and bask in the brutal cold, hair-stripping wind (it happened to me) and sun in the sky just for looks — not functionality.

“So, as it were, as they say, yada, yada, yada — what the heck, Russia? Why has it taken so long for winter to arrive at the WINTER Olympics? Why has my butt not yet frozen off?
         “Here, it seems everything is on what people have started referring to as Russian Time. A time frame in which a local says, ‘About five minutes,’ but really means 60 minutes in real time.

“Who knew the Russians had the power to delay even the weather? Buses, yes, but an entirely unpredictable system that has miffed TV weathermen for ages?
          “Russia cannot medal in hockey at their own Olympics with a total hometown advantage but putting a delay on an entire season … wow, bravo.

“The $50-billion games are an accomplishment all on their own, but their achievements of climate control are impressive.That’s not weird at all. Just very frightening.”

 (Note: Lander’s Ian Lee also covered the Olympics, for CNN).

         He doesn’t look rich.

         But if you examine his life and measure his level of happiness, there is a compelling argument he could very well be the richest man in the world.

         This is a man who loves the outdoors. He loves to hunt and fish. He loves to explore. He just happens to have a few gadgets around (his wife calls them “toys”), which are not necessarily new, but he keeps them in good repair. In fact, he loves tinkering on them.

         This rich man lives in Lander or Worland or Cheyenne or Laramie or Rock Springs or Evanston or any other Wyoming city or town. He gets up early each morning to greet the day with a big smile because he is in total control of his universe.

         The day starts off with coffee with his buddies. They meet every morning, rain or shine, and spend an hour telling tall tales to each other and occasional off-color jokes.

         Let’s call this guy Joe. With all due respect to the University, we might even call him Cowboy Joe because he is a big fan of UW and is rarely seen without some kind of brown or gold apparel that reads WYOMING or COWBOYS.

         Joe and his wife have good jobs and have saved up a little money. They live modestly and enjoy Wyoming’s outdoor experiences together.

         It is well-known that Joe married “up,” which means he found himself a very good wife. Everybody says that his wife should not put up with all of Joe’s hobbies, but she deals with them with a smile on her face, because she likes them, too.  

         These folks are among the richest people in history.

         Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or some Arab sheik may think his life is better than Joe’s, but do not try to convince Joe about this. He would not trade his place on the planet with any of them.

         He and his wife encouraged their kids to study hard and qualify for the Hathaway Scholarship because extra money was hard to find. The kids qualified and they also worked during their years at UW. They graduated debt-free and Joe smiles smugly to himself that he and his wife did a great job of raising them. Perhaps, most importantly, they taught their kids to be thrifty and to appreciate the truly finer things in life, such as the joys available in Wyoming’s great outdoors.

         Now there are grandkids and Joe and his wife are the best grandparents in the world. They take them fishing and hunting and camping. They have lots of time to spend with them. They are  never in a hurry. They listen to their problems because often the parents are too busy trying to make a living.

         At some point, according to the proverbial joke, one of Joe’s kids will lecture the old man about how if he worked an extra job and invested in scary investments, he probably would end up rich. And when he is 70 he would have time to do all the fishing and hunting he might want to do. 

         Joe sort of looks at him and shrugs. You can almost tell that he is thinking “It’s time to go fishing.”

         The Cowboy Joe described here is a stereotype of a lot of people I know in Wyoming. I wish that I could be more like him. In business, my wife Nancy and I have tried to get it all done but I missed out on a lot because of pressures associated with running a number of companies over the years. Sure could have spent more time hunting and fishing and camping.

         Perhaps the closest I ever came to the perfect life was when I aspired to be a newspaper publisher at a young age. I made it at age 24 here in Lander, which is sort of incredible, now looking back at it

         A friend back in those days invited Nancy and me to dinner where a third man showed up and gave us a pitch about how we could make all this money with some kind of pyramid sales scheme.

         “Just think, Bill,” the man exclaimed. “If you make all this extra money, you can be whatever you ever wanted to be!”

         My answer to him was: “Sorry, but I am what I always wanted to be.”

         Now that is what Joe would have said had he been asked that question, too. 

             During that recent cold spell of Feb. 4-5-6, Wyoming endured some of its coldest temperatures of the current 2013-2014 winter season.

            Powell dropped to -24, for example, while in my town, Lander, the mercury dipped to -20. Worland hit -24, Laramie -23, Cheyenne -22 and Sheridan had -19.

            Up to then, tough-minded Wyomingites had been quietly snickering when national news reports showed below freezing temps in Texas, blizzards in New York and folks shivering in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Although we truly sympathized with folks enduring something called a Polar Vortex, we also knew what cold weather is really like.

            The recent cold snap arrived with a vengeance. Back in the first week of January, Wyoming folks also saw temps in the minus-teens. Since then, it was balmy. Until this past week.

            This got me thinking about what were the coldest temperatures in Wyoming’s recorded history? Many folks sent me anecdotal stories, which I will mix here with a few facts.

            Personally, I recall the winter of 1978-79. Again, here in Lander, I think the entire month of January was below zero. Amazingly dangerous and bitter conditions.

            What is the official coldest temperature ever? Historian Phil Roberts from the University of Wyoming: “I think the record is still -66 recorded Feb. 9, 1933, at Moran. I heard the temperature was actually colder, but the thermometers didn`t have the capacity to register a lower reading!”

         Clay James, who operated Jackson Lake Lodge at Moran for decades, recalls -54 one cold winter day in the mid-1970s. “Thankfully we woke up as the power went off.  We called all of our employees to turn on the faucets and start the fireplaces.  The power was off for several days.  Never have I been so cold,” he recalls.   

            Former Cheyenne, Torrington and Sundance publisher Mike Lindsey recalled the blizzard of 1949, which history generally considers  the worst ever in the state.

“Up in Sundance, cattle froze standing up. Wind blew drifts into buildings through keyholes in doors. Machinery would not start. Kids who stuck their tongues to the door handle did not get thawed until their junior year!” Not sure about that last fact, which was reminiscent of the famous scene from the movie A Christmas Story.

            Jim Smail of Lander recalls snowmobiling with a group that included Charlton Heston at Togwotee Lodge in 1964 where the mercury dipped to -64. No, they did not go sledding that day.

            Wyoming Speaker of the House Tom Lubnau of Gillette recalls playing Laramie in football when the wind chill was -65. 

            Dewey Vanderhoff of Cody recalls: “It was New Year`s weekend of 1979 when Jackson Hole went -60. Friends from Meeteetse had gone to ski there but came back with horror stories of busted pipes, bone-cold motels, blackouts, everything closed, no skiing opportunity at all. Nothing fun except sharing beds for warmth and drinking a lot. Consolation prize I suppose. Was there a spike in babies born in September-October?”

            Jody Coleman of Riverton says about that same ski trip: “I was in Jackson that New Years of 1979. The power was off and we woke up at the Antler motel with the walls inside covered with frost. We went outside and started our pickup every hour. The next day we spent the day jump-starting other people`s cars. My mom bought me a ski suit. But urged me to move home to California.”

            Worland can get pretty cold. Debbie Hammons says: “That super-duper cold winter of 1978-79 was when the weather was sub-zero.  I moved home to Wyoming in September 1978.  Best New Year`s Eve ever was Jan. 1, 1979.  All the young singles in town packed into the Three Bears Bar downtown and kept their cars running into the New Year. We knew if we shut off our vehicles, we might not be able to start them again until March!”

            When Pat Schmidt was publisher of The Lovell Chronicle, folks there arranged a hay bale mission to rescue the poor wild horses in the Pryor Mountains. “The BLM and others organized a hay drop from a helicopter to bands of horses stuck on mountain ridges. I recall taking a picture with one hand as I was dropping a bale with the other. The effort only compounded the problems, we learned later, as the horses` digestive systems were not used to the protein in the hay. Their systems compacted, causing death. Only 75 survived.”

            These are some of my favorite “how cold is it” stories. What about yours?

So there we were, driving the most popular vehicle among what seemed like 25,000 cars and trucks stopped in a massive Southern California traffic jam.

         The reason for my vehicle’s popularity was the recently disclosed fact that our Wyoming license plate is viewed as the most attractive plate in the country. It could be assumed that all those folks had never seen one before and that was why they were honking at me and waving at me with strange gestures.

         We were sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I was trying to maneuver a 40-foot long motorhome and tow car from one lane to another at 5:00 p.m. on a Friday evening during the worst rush hour conditions possible.

         Rather than panic, I suggested to my shell-shocked wife Nancy that we savor this moment. “There might be more cars and trucks within our view than we would ever see in one place in the state of Wyoming,” I told her.

         “If we survive this, we can tell our children and grandchildren that we somehow managed to creep to safety from the relentless and never-ending stream of motorized vehicles stretching from one horizon to the other,” I cheerfully said. She did not say anything.

         Our iconic license plates were first designed by the late Lester Hunt, a former U. S. Senator, governor and secretary of state from Lander.

         Earlier we had driven to San Diego from Las Vegas on I-15 and were amazed both at the traffic jams that stretched for miles plus the lack of official rest areas. Why no rest areas? When you are in a motorhome, such off-ramp oases come in handy as places where you can pull over to check out your tow car or to make a sandwich.

         Nevada has nice rest areas but there were none from the California border to downtown San Diego.

         California prides itself as being at the forefront of trends affecting the rest of the country. 

         One trend that might make sense on our busy I-80 (with its 16,000 semi trailer trucks a day) is the California system of having a third lane on the right for trucks and vehicles pulling trailers. We were stuck most of the time in that lane. Your speed limit is limited to 55 mph and you are sternly warned to say out of the other two lanes. 

         Maybe on Wyoming’s I-80, we could restrict semis to the right-hand lane? Just a thought.

         And maybe we should make a lot more three-lane areas and/or restrict the semis to the right two lanes? Again, smarter people than me have been working on this.

         One of the more interesting sights along the way was what appeared to be a vast body of water off in the distance. It was a sea, all right, a sea of mirrors. There is a huge solar array along I-15 at the eastern edge of California.

Except for the ocean, there is no water in Southern California. Dry as a bone. My brother Jerry who lives in San Diego says water police are combing neighborhoods issuing big fines for people wasting water.

         We enjoyed our time in southern California especially when it was 75 degrees there and -16 back in Lander. But we are now back home and loving Wyoming. It was 53 degrees in Lander last week.

         It is probably appropriate to mention some of the top attractions that we visited. For example:

         • The San Diego zoo. This surely is the finest and perhaps the biggest zoo in the world. Tigers, lions and bears were there along with pandas and a rhino that you could pet. This vast area is a must-see if you get to Southern California.

         • The harbor at San Diego is an amazing place with all the military ships and awesome hardware. The boat tour was nice and the weather was good, too. We saw three aircraft carriers parked in the harbor, the Reagan, the Nimitz and one that carried just helicopters.

         • Torrey Pines golf course has hosted many PGA tournaments and U. S. Opens. A fun course to play with lots of ocean to distract you. Another distraction was a constant stream of those Marine Osprey flying machines that take off like a helicopter and then fly like a plane. Amazing machines and loud, too.

         • Coronado Island is wonderful and the 60-story high bridge you take to get there is a thrill, indeed. We also enjoyed the beaches called Mission, Pacific and Ocean, especially.