One Rock Springs hotelier with no room at the inn suggested to me that the oil boom in Rock Springs was influenced by the Vice President of the US whose Wyoming ties are strong. That was at about 2am.

I wasn't sure what to think about that.

Then we got caught behind a wreck on I-80W. There we were, sleeping in our car off of I-80, unprepared for a weeknight with no accomodations anywhere for miles and miles. Construction on the interstate meant concrete barriers channeling barreling trucks through Rock Springs with what seemed to be a minority of automobiles. We sat immobile for 2-hours among lines of rigs as far as we could see in both directions.

At 6am in Evanston, Wyoming we rolled into a Best Western and the young man at the desk said he had no room until 2pm. We inquired about other hotels. He made some calls. He said he'd called "all" of the hotels and they were booked. As we drove from the lot, our dog barked at some uniformed men in SUVs and it seemed there was some HS language on their blue unis.

As we drove wearily back toward the interstate, I said, "Let's try that hotel there. It's locally owned." I thought maybe the man who was desked to a chain had overlooked it. Sure enough, we found room at the High Country Inn, an older but clean property in Evanston, Wyoming.

We then drove through Utah, we witnessed wildfires and unknowingly passed through a soon-to-be state of double tragedy due to the coal mine cave-in and rescue failure.

Read the comments by travelers here to understand the reason for the title. Scroll down to first of 5 reviews a month in advance of our trip there and read to the last one. Accurate, and perhaps, symbolic of a rough and ready approach to infrastructure exploitation without investment.

Elswhere, I'll post a longer related essay on the impact of recent and perennial politics on the US, borrowing from the Western landscape observed in a July/Aug. travel journal entry. More on that later.