re: #181 teleskiguy

I live in the inner mountain west. I’ve driven the lonely highways of Montana and Nevada, Wyoming, northern Arizona. The country is not full. In very many places surrounding my house for 500 miles in every direction, there’s a whole lot of nothing, bare expanses of land, rugged mountains, no houses or stores. There’s a 150 mile stretch of Interstate 70 in Utah where there are no gas stations.

I drove a friend from Boston down I-15 in Utah once. He couldn’t believe how empty it was. What I told him then and I’ll repeat now is: yes, it’s empty, but there are water issues in the Intermountain West. We have to be careful about just putting people there willy nilly because the land isn’t really able to support a lot of people without careful resource planning.