The One Minute Geographer: The Wyoming Top Ten
We’ll start with Wyoming. The next time you travel, if you sit next to someone on a plane from Wyoming you’ll be ready! (LOL do people actually talk to strangers on planes anymore? Everyone is wrapped up in their headphones and videos.)
- Few People, Low Density, Small Cities
Wyoming has the fewest people of all fifty states. After Alaska, it’s the second least densely populated state. All of its few cities and metropolitan areas are tiny.
Wyoming’s population of 585,000 people is about the size of a typical medium-sized US metropolitan area — places like Spokane, Washington or Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania or Chattanooga, Tennessee. Wyoming has 6 people per square mile — about 1/200 that of New Jersey. If Wyoming were populated as densely as New Jersey it could hold 120 million people — more than a third of all US residents!
Wyoming has only two metropolitan areas, Cheyenne and Casper, and neither of these has 100,000 people. Cheyenne, the capital, has 96,000 people and Casper has 82,000. There are seven micropolitan areas (small cities between 10,000 and 50,000), the largest of which is Gillette in the northeast…
