Looking to relocate to Wyoming

[Adam Merritt]

Well, as the title says, my family and I are looking to move to Wyoming from Texas. I grew up in a small southern town in Texas and my wife grew up on a farm in Ohio. We are looking to buy some farmland, move to the country, and build a shop so I have more room than my current garage setup! Anyways, the draw to Wyoming is two fold, low taxes and cheaper land. We don't have any particular area in mind yet. We are looking for 40-200 acres to build our new home. We have a few preferences, but my only hard requirement is access to high speed internet. I must have it for my job, as I plan to telecommute, but otherwise we are pretty open. So, I ask you guys, anyone have suggestions or advice?

[Adam Herman]

I lived in rock springs for 5 years and have been all over the state working in the oil industry. There is a lot of land and a lot of isolation. You will probably have to stick to the major corridors to find a good connection. When you say "farmland" you may be thinking about the green land in Ohio or TX, but in Wyoming you will be looking at desert steppe with lots of dirt and some sage brush depending on the area of course. I really love the area along the Colorado border south of Laramie and in the Medicine bow national forest. Star valley on the Idaho border is also great. Make sure you are ready for the wind and the cold in the winter. Do not look at the land that is extremely cheap near Waumsutter, table rock, Rawlins. it is all part of the red desert and you are likely to not have roads, power, cell service or any access to water. I can answer questions on specific areas if you would like.

[Malcolm McLeod]

I spent a couple of summer-time weeks in the area about 10yrs ago. Everybody I was with (Texans all) raved about the gorgeous weather. We had left >100* with 40%RH, and found ~75*, no humidity, and clear blue skies! Someone commented, "Man, would I love to live here!"

Our host just nodded, smiled, and said, "A lot of Texans say that. ...They usually move home in the spring."

Just some friendly advice, look at all aspects of living your dream. (While working in AK, a native said the biggest mistake people there make is marrying an 'outsider' - who can't stand the AK winters.)

[Kurt Kintner]

I have relatives outside of Cheyenne.... They have acreage on the plains, on the dustiest dirt road I've ever seen ....
No trees in sight, high winds all the time, frigid winters, tons of snow.... Not for me ...

[Jim Becker]

Adam, you're going to have to be very diligent in your land search relative to the HSI requirement. Outside of more urban areas, especially in that part of the country, you're likely going to be limited to either cellular or satellite service which are usually capped services, too, in case you need to do a lot of file transfer. Cellular may even be a challenge, depending on location.

[Harold Balzonia]

The high speed internet condition will limit your choices out there... I have satellite internet and it is flawless (no data caps anymore) but it will slow down or even disappear in thunderstorm or snowy weather.

it doesn't really snow much in Wyoming though... does it?

🤔

[Mark Blatter]

Worked in many areas of Wyoming when I lived in Montana. Many areas are beautiful, but but but, as others have said, you have to visit them during all seasons. The southern region can blow like an gulf coast hurricane, only at temps around 0 and lots of drifting snow. Cheyenne routinely gets closed in during the winter due to blowing and drifting snow. Both interstates get shut down, for a week or more some years. If you ever wanted to fly a kite, a 50 lb one using a 1/2" rope, Cheyenne is the place to do it.

[Kev Williams]

This may or may not be of significance to you, but the average elevation in Wyoming is 6,700 feet- That's up there-- that high up it gets cold, hard to breathe, and you'll be amazed at how much power whatever you're driving loses...

But you can hit golf balls farther... ;)

[Matt Meiser]

As a 10-year telecommuter...absolutely do not buy anything without rock solid high speed internet. Satellite, 4G, etc will not cut it. Satellite latency will be an issue and satellite and 4G, caps will be an issue. There are other wireless services and their reliability will be heavily dependent on the (likely small business) ownership. Even rural DSL can be horrendously unreliable as it may be using 60-70 year old wire infrastructure. Seriously. Someone from Frontier told me the section of cable they replaced once to fix mine at my old place had a date code in the early 1950's.

[Greg R Bradley]

I'm trying to reconcile "farmland" and Wyoming used to describe the same place. With the lowlands being 6,000+ ft elevation, spring comes late and fall early. Even the milder climate areas can freeze almost any day of the year. There are basically no crops grown anywhere in the state.

The pretty areas are VERY expensive and have massive congestion from tourists during the brief summer. The affordable areas have serious disadvantages like no water, constant wind, bitter cold, etc.
I should also mention that they hate Texans even more than Californians.
I love the Star Valley and Jackson County but you can't really live there unless you are really rich and buy a vacation place to use part of the year.

[Rick Potter]

Not sure of 'farmland' either. most is 'ranch land'. I have a relative there that bought 40 acres or so, and his biggest problem is water. He owns shares in the water collective, but getting it is always a battle. The old timers were used to using his share, and don't want to give it up. He has cattle, but when he doesn't get his share of the water it is very dicey.

Cattle raising is sure a different thing, depending on where you live. Another relative has 300 acres, plus 1,000 more under lease in Nebraska. He says it takes 11 acres to raise one cow in Nebraska, and 11 cows per acre in Illinois.

[Harold Wright]

I spent 3 years in Cheyenne 58-61 courtesy of the USAF. There were 2 seasons, winter & Frontier Week.

[Adam Merritt]

First thanks for all the replies! I should clarify when I said farmland, I'm not looking to actually farm. We are looking to have a few horses to ride, and a couple of cows (2 dairy, 1-2 for beef). I am an Infrastructure/Solutions Architect by trade, so I completely understand the limits and potentials of internet circuits. I won't consider a 4G or Satellite service as my primary connection. Ideally, I'd like to pay and have fiber run to my place, but I need to make sure the local ISP will allow that. I have a lead on a few possibilities, but that is a preference (what I have now) versus a requirement. We spend a good bit of time in Ohio as well, but do understand this will be colder. We have been looking at a few places in the northeast, around Sundance, maybe as far in as Gillette.

[Adam Merritt]

As a 10-year telecommuter...absolutely do not buy anything without rock solid high speed internet. Satellite, 4G, etc will not cut it. Satellite latency will be an issue and satellite and 4G, caps will be an issue. There are other wireless services and their reliability will be heavily dependent on the (likely small business) ownership. Even rural DSL can be horrendously unreliable as it may be using 60-70 year old wire infrastructure. Seriously. Someone from Frontier told me the section of cable they replaced once to fix mine at my old place had a date code in the early 1950's.

You are spot on. That is why it is the number one requirement. I could use one of our XenDesktops to help negate the bandwidth/lag, but it is far from ideal. Whatever I do will likely be a large drop in speed. I have fiber to my garage with 150/150 service right now. I talked with one ranch developer and they have a few owners who have fiber ran in to the property, so I'm following up on that lead. One of the local ISPs said they would run fiber anywhere you want, as long as you're willing to pay, but I haven't found anywhere suitable in their service area. I have a feeling this will be a long search, but I have no reason to rush.

[Adam Merritt]

I have satellite internet and it is flawless (no data caps anymore)

Who are you using? Just out of curiosity, as I didn't know any of them provided unlimited service.

[Gary Muto]

I'm trying to reconcile "farmland" and Wyoming used to describe the same place. With the lowlands being 6,000+ ft elevation, spring comes late and fall early. Even the milder climate areas can freeze almost any day of the year. There are basically no crops grown anywhere in the state.

The pretty areas are VERY expensive and have massive congestion from tourists during the brief summer. The affordable areas have serious disadvantages like no water, constant wind, bitter cold, etc.
I should also mention that they hate Texans even more than Californians.
I love the Star Valley and Jackson County but you can't really live there unless you are really rich and buy a vacation place to use part of the year.

Well Put Greg. We moved from the Great Lakes Area (Western NY and Detroit) to Colorado Springs. We are further south but at 7500 feet elevation we have constant wind, snow until mid to late May and very little rain. We have warm sunny days all year but we can experience freezing temps in September. We gave up on growing vegetables since the success rate is so low. This is reasonable ranch territory and probably not the best of that either.

[Matt Meiser]

The problem with satellite is latency on the order of 600ms just from simple physics. Imagine moving your mouse in a remote session and waiting nearly a second to see it move. Not sure if this has changed, but any SSL data couldn't be compressed too, which means speeds there are dramatically slower--this would include almost all of a telecommuter's traffic.

[Harold Balzonia]

Who are you using? Just out of curiosity, as I didn't know any of them provided unlimited service.


I was one of the early adopters of Exede satellite. They had a limited time deal if you committed to them for a certain number of years. I was glad to do it. It's been great. I don't play computer games or do anything where latency would be an issue but I understand it might be for people who need instant feedback. Gamers and stock traders have some complaints I understand...

[Jim Becker]

The problem with satellite is latency on the order of 600ms just from simple physics. Imagine moving your mouse in a remote session and waiting nearly a second to see it move. Not sure if this has changed, but any SSL data couldn't be compressed too, which means speeds there are dramatically slower--this would include almost all of a telecommuter's traffic.
I agree that this will be an issue with most folks in the tech industries for remote working and it's not just about lag of the rodent. Business today is very interactive and collaboration/team engagement is at the heart of daily work activities. That includes not just audio calls, but video and content sharing. High latency doesn't help with that and any jitter (variability in latency) can really make things unworkable "real fast".

I know that if I move anywhere, I'll be loath to give up my current 150/150 symmetrical access which likely will head to nearly gigabit speed in a few months. (full disclosure...I'm in the telecom business a sell industry leading collaboration/team engagement solutions)

[Matt Meiser]

Yeah, voip would be out of the question. We've been having latency issues with GotoMeeting for some meetings I've been in the last couple days that result in people talking over each other and that's with everyone on good connections. We do a ton of screen sharing for collaboration with both clients and internal collaboration and it was a real issue when I was on a slow connection.

Where I'm at today I can only get 150x25 from Comcast, "50+" from Charter or 16 from Ma Bell. I use 4G for failover and only get like 12 in the (rare) event we have a Comcast outage.

[Adam Merritt]

I agree that this will be an issue with most folks in the tech industries for remote working and it's not just about lag of the rodent. Business today is very interactive and collaboration/team engagement is at the heart of daily work activities. That includes not just audio calls, but video and content sharing. High latency doesn't help with that and any jitter (variability in latency) can really make things unworkable "real fast".

I know that if I move anywhere, I'll be loath to give up my current 150/150 symmetrical access which likely will head to nearly gigabit speed in a few months. (full disclosure...I'm in the telecom business a sell industry leading collaboration/team engagement solutions)

I know just what you mean. We use Skype for Business and I am in/on meetings all day. I work over 4G without a problem in Ohio when we travel to my in-laws. They are Amish, so I literally work with a 12v car battery, inverter, and tethered cell phone, but I wouldn't want that for my main connection. I have a UniFi USG that offers backup WAN, which would likely be used with a 4G solution where ever I end up. Like you, I don't look forward to giving up my 150/150, but I could do it for the right land. :)

[Matt Meiser]

From my experience, 4G is a dream compared to the DSL I had for a while at my previous house and have used at a few different rural places I've been. It seems they oversell the number of customers they sign up for the local hub (forget the real name) and during peak use the backhaul connection back to civilization gets saturated. Then you also have the wire infrastructure issues I mentioned. Even the brand new fiber that got installed to my old house (a project that took something like 4 years to come to fruition from the first phone call I got saying it was going to happen) had some reliability issues. The guy that bought the house from us said the cable company ended up hanging out at their house for a week straight watching things to troubleshoot what sounded like a bad connection somewhere in the 10 miles of fiber that were constructed to reach our "neighborhood".

My next move, which could come in as soon as 4-1/2 years, high speed internet quality will be very high on the list. I've only kind of jokingly told my wife cities with Google Fiber are high on my list.

[Chris Padilla]

I'm from Colorado. There is a reason Wyoming is the least populated state! :) "A great place to visit but...."

You might consider moving there closer to a major city and try it out before building a house. Only then will you know if it is THE place for you.

Don't get me wrong, Wyoming has some stunning vistas but the winters there make a native Coloradoan shutter.

Chicago may be known as The Windy City but it has nothing on Cheyenne (which is actually the windiest major'ish city in the continental US).

[Jim Becker]

We use Skype for Business and I am in/on meetings all day.
SfB is one of the most sensitive collaboration solutions relative to network going, unfortunately, because Microsoft doesn't build in a lot of things that would let it adapt to conditions well. Even voice only is, um...challenging. (Some of the large system integrators I work with drank the koolaid and rolled it out -- when they are hosting meetings, it's downright painful!) The stuff I sell and that Chris's employer (my primary competitor) sells are quantum leaps ahead...but that's not really relative if you don't have them available. Regardless, you're going to want the best Internet access you can come up with if you're going to be doing the virtual office dance going forward and I hope you can come up with a location that gives you that plus the other things you want to have, too.

[Greg R Bradley]

The major internet backbone goes from Denver to Cheyenne, then west to Laramie to SLC. A minor backbone goes from Casper north to Billings. At the extreme NE corner of WY, you are in a wasteland for internet access. This could be a problem. Huge hole NE Wyoming, SE Montana, SW North Dakota, SW South Dakota.

The corner you are considering gets you out of the I80 wind corridor at the expense of even more extreme winter cold and the wackos that descend on Sturgis, SD each summer.

Hard to find anywhere that excess people haven't screwed up yet.

[Mark Blatter]

Hard to find anywhere that excess people haven't screwed up yet.

There are still some great places remaining, but if people haven't screwed them up yet, it also means that options like high speed internet, great hospitals, and other similar amenities are not available. You don't get the high life, without the downside too.

[Brian Brown]

Ok, I see everyone has mentioned the downsides to living in Wyoming. Cold. snow, elevation, desolation. loneliness, etc. I love the Jackson and Star Valley areas. Jackson is prohibitively expensive unless you're Harrison Ford, and can be very snobbish. Star Valley is less pricey, (I didn't say cheap) but very beautiful, and close to the most beautiful places in Wyoming and Idaho. This may seem odd, but If I had the chance, I would live in Alta Wyoming. For Wyoming"ites", You can't get there from here. While you are technically in Wyoming, you really live in Idaho. You are at the west side base of the Grand Teton, with excellent skiing, snowmobiling, and hiking. most days you get to share your yard with the moose, deer and elk in the neighborhood. The one road leading out has to go through Idaho. You can shop for groceries in Driggs ID, or Jackson WY. Idaho has 6% sales tax, but if you figure the gas to drive to Jackson, and the increased cost of everything there, it is cheaper to pay the 6%. Idaho is currently trying to repeal the sales tax on groceries, but I really feel that it is just politicians buying votes. If you have lot's of shopping to do you can go to Idaho Falls, about 80 minutes of gorgeous driving (watch out for Moose and deer in the road). IF is where Jackson/Star valley residents come for "non small town shopping". IF is about 55,000 pop, with the county at about 110,000 pop and about 220,000 within 50 mile radius. So most shopping opportunities are here. HD, Lowes, many chain restaurants, the mall basics, and so on. Sadly we have no Woodcraft or Rockler, but we do have a good hardwood retailer if you are not a turner. For turners, we are not too far from Craft Supplies USA. While you are in IF you can stop by and say hi. If you want a farm, Driggs area was initially a farming area, but Alta is a bit small for anything but a hobby farm. Driggs farming is mostly wheat, cattle, alfalfa, and seed potatoes, because it has a short growing season. If I haven't painted a pretty enough picture of the area, let me know, and I'll take another shot at it. Here are some Pics. The fall colors are taken from the east border of Alta. Sorry, two pics got loaded twice, and I can't delete them. Mods, feel free to blast the attachments.
361970361971361972http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=361974&stc=1&thumb=1&d=1497303198

361969361977