Wyoming, post Brokeback Mountain, has a new tilt to it. If ever there was a place that had seemed stonily self-assured and righteous, it was The Cowboy State, but Annie Proulx's story of two mumbling and confused Wyoming ranch kids in 1963 who find themselves caught up in a love that is badly out of synch with their place and time casts The Cowboy State in a different light.
Myths had been called into question. So what's Wyoming really like?
The question was high on my mind as I fired up my Alamo rental in Salt Lake City one morning with the sun melting the snow on the high peaks of the Unita Mountains and headed east, crossed the Bear River and turned north along Highway 89 into the open-range country of Unita County, Wyoming.
The name, "Wyoming", means "place of the big plains", but Wyoming is more vertical than horizontal, a series of rippling mountain ranges guttered by vast river basins at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. "The Cowboy State", Wyoming brands itself, and the bucking bronco on every state licence plate reminds you of the fact. In fact, most of Wyoming looks like a backdrop for a Marlboro ad.
The average elevation is just slightly over 2 000m, and what is not under snow for most of the year is under sagebrush.
The next morning, I awoke to mountains. On the far side of my eggs benedict a sheer wall of grey rock and spruce pine rose into the sky opposite the glass-fronted restaurant at the Best Western Hotel in Teton Village. The village sits at the south-west end of Jackson Hole, the 130km long, 25km wide valley which is enclosed by the Grand Tetons on one side and the Gros Ventre Range on the other. This is also Grand Teton National Park, a giant slab of sagebrush, aspens and piney mountains, and a refuge for elk, mule deer, moose, buffalo and bear.
Scenic climax of the park is the Grand Teton Range, the snaggletooth grey peaks that rise almost 2 000m straight up from the edge of the valley, like a white capped wave snap-frozen at its breaking moment.
The Tetons are the classic post-card mountains - flinty-edged peaks girdled with glaciers, shining gloriously in the string of pine-rimmed lakes at their feet. In winter, Jackson Hole has some of the finest skiing in North America. In summer, the hills are alive with the crunch of trail boots, the fields of balsam are busy with mountain bikers, and ever since Ansel Adams set up his view camera and snapped a famously moody picture of the Tetons with the Snake River glittering in the foreground, this has been a sacred site for photographers.
The original spiritual benefactor of Jackson Hole was none other than John D Rockefeller Jr, and the area maintains the Rockefeller tradition of formidable wealth. It was Rockefeller who began quietly buying up ranch land to keep it out of the hands of the developers who were behind the flaky tourism parks invading the valley in the 1920s.
In 1943, he ceded 12 949ha to the National Parks Service as part of the Jackson Hole National Monument, although the choicer morsels remained in the family.
Bordering the Tetons to the north is Yellowstone. Sulphurous lakes, geysers, moose meadows, plains of elk and buffalo, mountains, forests, lakes, gorges, waterfalls, Yellowstone is an encyclopaedia of earthly wonders jammed together in 1 million hectares at the top left corner of Wyoming. So striking are its natural credentials that in 1872 it became the world's first national park.
Most of Yellowstone is above 2 300m and only accessible between May and September. When I arrived, at the start of spring, the park was bumper-to-bumper with 4x4 vehicles and Winnebagos and the benches that ring Old Faithful were crowded with spectators waiting for the geyser's next eruption.
During summer, when most of its 3 million annual visitors arrive, a few of the park's frustrated bison will gore a few of their more persistent admirers, and you cannot escape the feeling that in summer, Yellowstone is being loved to death.
While Grand Teton and Yellowstone dominate the Wyoming landscape, the state is littered with lesser-known wonders such as the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, a desiccated wilderness of scalped, sagebrush-covered hills, and one of the lesser-known geological glories of Wyoming. The canyon's piece de resistance is Devil's Canyon Overlook, where the boisterous Bighorn River has gnawed a 300m trench through the limestone and shale, like a cheese wire through gruyere.
Just as lively as its topography is Wyoming's history. Terra incognita to European minds before French-Canadian beaver trappers finally penetrated the region in the mid-18th century, Wyoming was the Wild West incarnate, a raw, remote, unfettered kingdom of buffalo herds, Plains Indians, the Bozeman and Oregon trails and the backdrop for such spirited and wicked personalities as Buffalo Bill, the outlaws Butch Cassidy, Tom Horn and "Big Nose" George Parrot, and Jeremiah "Liver-Eating" Johnson, who acquired his name from the revenge he exacted upon the Indians who murdered his wife and daughter.
A quick glance at a map of Wyoming will show you such raw-boned places as Lost Cabin, Sun dance, Cheyenne, Laramie, Dead Indian Pass, Hole-in-the-Wall, Spotted Horse and Medicine Bow, not to mention Dull Centre, which will tell you quite a lot about its temperament.
The town of Cody, at the eastern approach to Yellowstone, makes its living practically on the strength of its history alone. Cody took its name from Buffalo Bill Cody, when the city fathers decided that naming the town after the most famous personality of these parts was a lot more wholesome than the original name for the settlement - Colter's Hell.
Pony Express rider, Indian fighter, bison hunter, wilderness trail guide, friend to royalty and consummate showman, Buffalo Bill Cody was the complete frontiersman. Repackaged in dime store novels, his life was the template for the John Wayne image of the Wild West as a place where men were steely-eyed and swift on the draw, and buffalo and Inkings better watch out.
I was prepared to dislike Cody. I imagined a tourist town crammed with silver belt buckles, eager to cash in on the Wild West legend, but Cody was a solid and inoffensive little town with its boots still in the stirrups. At 6.30 in the morning, when I sauntered down from my room and into the bar of the Irma Hotel, built by William Cody and named after his daughter, the place was filled with tall, rangy men called Ed who sat straight-backed in denim jackets and Stetsons over mugs of steaming coffee, chewed their words then made courtly farewells and hoisted themselves into pick-up trucks that said Howling Wolf Ranch on the side and drove in a slow way out of town.
Further east, Aladdin consisted of a petrol station/museum/general store/post office decorated with the sort of laconic wisdoms that are peculiar to the American West ("I started with nothing and I still have most of it" ; "Money isn't everything, although it sure keeps the kids in touch"), which set me thinking about the Wit of the West as a tour theme, and so it was that I almost daydreamed my way out of the Cowboy State without even seeing cowboys but, right on cue, there they were, driving a herd of horses up to their summer pastures in the Bighorn Mountains.
There was no drama about it, no big deal. Just men doing what men do, and as they swept past in a flurry of hooves and wet riding capes, one of them turned in the saddle and I swear he was the spitting image of Groucho Marx - the glasses, the moustache, the fat cigar - but it's best not to get your myths in a muddle, so without pondering the meaning of it too much I drove on into the Black Hills of South Dakota.