Residents of Wyoming at Home on Range : Lifestyles: Those who live in the nation’s least populous state exhibit a true frontier spirit--and a healthy respect for the weather.

People who live in Wyoming have a wholesome respect for weather.

Writer Thomas J. Abercrombie has observed frosty morning cattle roundups and demon avalanches, and he remembers the story of a Basque sheepherder who nearly died in an October blizzard.

“It was the dogs that saved me,” recalled 50-year-old Sebastian Legarretaechevarria.

The herder was breaking camp on Crooks Mountain, bringing in 1,700 sheep, when the storm hit. “Everything went white,” he said. “I couldn’t find my way back to my wagon. It was the only time in my life I ever got lost.”

Legarretaechevarria spent two days stumbling in the drifts before breaking through an icy creek up to his waist. Unable to move his legs, he crawled under the shelter of a pine tree.

“For three more days I stayed under that tree, half crazy with cold,” he said. “I dreamed about thick steaks and mushroom sauce. Finally, I prayed to God to take me to him.”

The sheriff’s rescue team found him, severely injured by frostbite, 15 miles from his wagon.

Tears welled in Legarretaechevarria’s eyes as he hugged Pinto, one of two dogs with the herder when the disaster struck. “They stayed with me,” he told Abercrombie. “We huddled together to keep warm. I wouldn’t sell these dogs for a million bucks.”

Wyoming, whose main highway has been closed by snow in every month but July and August, is the nation’s least populous state. Residents number fewer than half a million. The largest city, capital Cheyenne, is home to 50,000.

“God is still architect here. His cathedral mountains and awesome, endless prairies dwarf all human refinements,” Abercrombie writes.

Another October blizzard found Abercrombie on horseback, helping Greg and Barbara Gardner, managers of De Ranch, gather in a herd of Angus and white-faced Hereford cattle from their 6,500-foot-high summer pasture.

Abercrombie peeled two cows off his side of the hill, then pulled up to scan the blinding whiteness. Top hand Charlie Needham found a cow Abercrombie had missed, hidden in the brush and camouflaged by an inch of snow on her back.

“I can hardly see 50 feet,” Abercrombie writes. “I scrape hoarfrost off my mustache and rub my hands together. My feet feel frozen to the stirrups. With a crunch of hoofs and the creak of leather, Charlie reins up beside me and spanks the snow off his chaps.

“ ‘Smell that perfume?’ he smiles. ‘Is there anything sweeter than fresh snow on the sage?’ ” Abercrombie was amazed that Needham was enjoying this.

“People say that living in Wyoming gives them a sense of freedom,” he writes. “In my winter journey around this untamed state, I saw them earn it. Anyone worried that the American character is becoming too homogenized can take heart. The frontier spirit is alive and well.”

The name Wyoming comes from a Delaware Indian word, first given to Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley. It means “big river flats,” and it suits this state, which straddles the Continental Divide with a series of dry basin floors.

“Here, where the sky is half a man’s world, you can take true measure of yourself and have the time to do so,” Abercrombie writes.

Wyoming was nicknamed the Equality State for its progressive treatment of women. Most notably, in 1869 the Wyoming Territorial Legislature became the first governing body in the world to grant women the right to vote and to hold public office.

Wyoming leads the country in coal production. Half of its tax revenue flows from more than 13,000 oil and gas wells. Natural-gas wellheads and pipeline stations dot the sagebrush in the state’s center. People have hit gas while drilling water wells. Some can light a blue flame at their kitchen faucets.

A boom-and-bust history has peppered Wyoming with abandoned settlements. On a two-lane highway heading toward the Nebraska border, a sign welcomes passers-through to Lost Springs, population nine.

Most of the state’s 5 million annual visitors head for the northwest corner to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and to Jackson Hole.

“Ringed by mountains, the Western-chic town of Jackson sits on the southern edge of the valley called Jackson Hole,” Abercrombie writes. On a busy summer day, 60,000 tourists pack its boutiques, restaurants, art galleries and ski shops.

Skiers cause the town’s winter gridlock. At the top of Rendezvous Mountain, some 400 inches of snowfall makes for good powder on the longest vertical run in the United States--4,139 feet.