Wyoming. Summer.

Wyoming. Summer. These may be the two most beautiful words in the American language. Maybe it’s because I spent a big chunk of my childhood in Utah, but it’s only in the Rocky Mountains that summer seems real to me. Here, summer has size, heft, you don’t ignore it. In Wyoming, in August, you wake to a world that smells of alfalfa and stream water, and feel the heat build as morning proceeds toward noon. You want to splash in a creek, run in sprinklers. Around 2, a flotilla of clouds, battleship gray, bulky, martial, bring a wind that ruffles the aspen leaves and, building, shakes the limbs of the cottonwoods. Smell of ozone, crack of thunder, zigzag scars of lightning, the mountains jolting purple, then blue then black. Now rain, Biblical, roof-pounding, expensive-waterproof-jacket-defeating rain. And then peace, the clouds sail to the east, the afternoon eases, guilelessly blue, into dusk and the first evening star appears.

By a Sunset editor named Peter Fish.
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