An Overview at the Overlook (Part 2: Geography)

In our last post, we talked a lot about the geology of the Basin, but this week we’re shifting to the region’s human geography.

The Basin is about the size of New Jersey, but only ~30,000 people live here, and the vast majority live in the tourist town of Cody and the agricultural town of Powell.  The rest are spread out among a few tiny tiny towns, and on farms that hug the few small rivers because they rely on that water for irrigation.

Farms here typically raise corn, hay, including alfalfa, sugar beets, wheat, and sometimes safflower.  There are cattle here in places, but other than those few towns and irrigable land along the rivers, the Basin is pretty desolate and rugged.  It is harsh, dry land out there.  I’ve been told it takes about 100 acres to support 1 head of cattle for a year, and there are certainly areas that can’t support any cattle or much of anything else.  It’s rugged, harsh territory.

The only other thing that happens in the Basin is some oil and gas extraction.  We talked about how the Basin is a great bowl, but that’s the simplified version of geology.  In reality, a great deal of additional folding and faulting has occurred here, creating smaller mini folds throughout, some of which trapped hydrocarbons migrating from their deeper sources.  The Elk Basin Oilfield is the oldest continuously pumped oil field in the world, and we used to drive literally right through it on the way to our old Cretaceous sites.  Oil and gas production has been on the decline for years in the Basin, but they still make enough money to invest in new infrastructure all the time - it seems like every year out here there is a new pipeline, expansions to the refinery we passed by outside of Billings, and the brand-new natural gas plant there as well.

One thing that has always fascinated me is how geography, and especially geology, shape the course of human history.  Next week, in the final chapter of this series, we’ll talk about the fascinating human history of the region - from the very beginning, to the very recent.