Shop
 Explore 

What's up with Wyoming? Video explains why it's 'empty' compared to twin neighbor Colorado

The states are almost identical in size, shape and geographical features, but Wyoming has 580,000 residents to Colorado's 5.8 million.

wyoming and colorado on a map

RealLifeLore/YouTube

Wyoming and Colorado have vastly different populations despite being geographically similar.

Most states in the U.S. have oddly shaped boundaries, largely formed by meandering waterways and coastal irregularities. But two states stand out for their seemingly defiant rectangularness—Wyoming and Colorado.

These almost-twin states share a border, are almost exactly the same size (Colorado is just 1.06 times larger than Wyoming), boast basically the same shape and have the Rocky Mountains eating into a sizeable chunk of them. (Wyoming's share of mountains is a bit larger than Colorado's, but its topography isn't nearly different enough than Colorado's to account for how many fewer people it has.)

Wyoming's population as of 2022 was estimated to be just over 580,000, while Colorado's was estimated to be just over 5.8 million. Almost exactly a 10-fold difference between the two very similar states.

So…why?

Water resources? A logical guess, but nope. Both states contain the headwaters of multiple major rivers, and according to RealLifeLore, Wyoming actually has a slight edge over Colorado due to the way its freshwater is legally allocated.

What makes Wyoming the least populous U.S. state despite being the country's 10th largest state by area has to do with the Gold Rush, agriculture, World War II, federal lands, the rise of the telecom industry, educational institutions, airplanes and more. It's a historical Tale of Two States that illustrates how twins with different upbringings can share many similarities but also end up with two very different life stories.

Watch the folks at RealLifeLore explain the population discrepancy between Wyoming and Colorado:

The one correction some people in the comments of the video offered up was that referring to the "mild" climate in Wyoming seems a bit misleading. Several people mentioned that the winter weather in Wyoming is harsher than in Colorado, which may account for fewer people wanting to live there. (However, considering the fact that there are more densely populated places in the world with exceptionally punishing winters, weather doesn't fully explain it, either.)

It'll be interesting to see in another hundred years or so if these states' population trends change, but for now, Wyoming remains the least populous and most naturally undisturbed state. So if you're big on the outdoors and not so big on people, the Equality State (Side fun fact: Wyoming was the first state to give women the right to vote.) might just be the place for you. If you love the mountains but also people, Colorado may be more your speed.

This article originally appeared on 5.10.23

From Your Site Articles

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Fox 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul|YouTube

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

Keep ReadingShow less

switched at dog daycare

Woman 'kidnaps' her baby to teach lazy husband a scary lesson

Did she go too far?

via Kroshka_Nastya/Freepik

A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less

Mom has the perfect response to teen son who refuses to do 'girl' chores

What exactly are "girl" chores, anyway?

via Krampus Production/Pexels

A boy doing the dishes.

A 41-year-old mom with 3 boys, 12-year-old twins, and a 10-year-old, pays them $10 daily to do their chores. However, their pay is deducted $10 if they miss a day. The boys have to do their tasks 5 days a week, although it doesn’t matter which days they choose to work.

“This system has worked swimmingly for us since it started, the boys have always complied with completing their chores,” the mom wrote on Reddit.

Her 12-year-old son was getting ready to play Fortnite with a friend and told him he’d be ready in 15 minutes once he finished his chores. When the boys started playing the game, he told the friend he was in charge of dusting and sweeping the stairs, to which the friend responded, “It’s a good thing my parents don’t make me do girl chores.”

After learning what the friend said, the mom told her son that chores are genderless.

Keep ReadingShow less

Women do better when they have a group of strong female friends, study finds

We're stronger together.

Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

Women do better when they have female friends.

Madeleine Albright once said, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." It turns out that might actually be a hell on Earth, because women just do better when they have other women to rely on, and there's research that backs it up.

A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that women who have a strong circle of friends are more likely to get executive positions with higher pay. "Women who were in the top quartile of centrality and had a female-dominated inner circle of 1-3 women landed leadership positions that were 2.5 times higher in authority and pay than those of their female peers lacking this combination," Brian Uzzi writes in the Harvard Business Review.

Part of the reason why women with strong women backing them up are more successful is because they can turn to their tribe for advice. Women have to face different challenges than men, such as unconscious bias, and being able to turn to other women who have had similar experiences can help you navigate a difficult situation. It's like having a road map for your goals.

Keep ReadingShow less

Voice recordings of people who were enslaved offer incredible first-person accounts of U.S. history

"The results of these digitally enhanced recordings are arresting, almost unbelievable. The idea of hearing the voices of actual slaves from the plantations of the Old South is as powerful—as startling, really—as if you could hear Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee speak." - Ted Koppel

Library of Congress

When we think about the era of American slavery, many of us tend to think of it as the far distant past. While slavery doesn't exist as a formal institution today, there are people living who knew formerly enslaved black Americans first-hand. In the wide arc of history, the legal enslavement of people on U.S. soil is a recent occurrence—so recent, in fact, that we have voice recordings of interviews with people who lived it.

Keep ReadingShow less