The Mountain West is a region that I almost feel like I’m making up, but when we asked people in Utah, Idaho and Montana where they thought they were regionally, this is what they said. Wikipedia does acknowledge it as the Rocky Mountain region basically, but it also includes the South West, which is definitely different, though similar in some positive ways. We are going to include most of Idaho, Montana, Northern Utah, Colorado, Northern Nevada and Wyoming in this region which is characterized by mountains and low humidity.
Some of it is what is called high desert. This was one of our favorite regions as it was also just epic. We are not people who throw around words like epic, but it looked fantastic. The mountains are amazing. Even the flat parts were exotic and strange and beautiful. Idaho was the most surprisingly gorgeous place. The canyons, rivers and lakes were some of the most beautiful in the country. This region was also full of people who were extremely open and friendly. It was very easy to talk to them. It might be a little colder than we want, but if we change our minds about a hot desert, we may consider some of these high desert mountain states.
Here’s the video:
The main pest in this region was not from the forest, but rather thrived due to cattle ranching. All the cows did result in a higher amount of flies in this region than we noticed in any other, which was a bit of an annoyance.
Our favorite city in this region is a bit harder to say, so we are going to give it to Southern Idaho generally. If we were to think about moving there, we would have to do more research about how much tech is there, but it is a beautiful state full of friendly people and a low cost of living. It has few natural disasters but an abundance of some of the most beautiful places in the entire country. If anyone does have tech industry info, please let us know. Many thanks!
Runner up goes to the Provo/Salt Lake City area, which is the most obviously viable due to having a reasonable amount of tech and in addition to the good costs of living it shares with Idaho. People there were extraordinarily friendly as well, and though it wasn’t quite as beautiful as Idaho, almost nowhere is (seriously – everyone should be going on vacation to Idaho – you are all missing out terribly if you haven’t been to Idaho yet). The Great Salt Lake still has a haunting and strange beauty all its own and it seems like a great area to live in.
As we aren’t Mormon, that is a bit of downside to both Northern Utah and Southern Idaho, as both are heavily LDS, but they still seemed like great places to live.
Honorable mention goes to Bozeman and Helena, Montana. They are probably a bit small for us, but I was still extremely impressed with how much and how well they had built something in such a remote location and by how epic their mountains were. Montana more than lived up to its name.
