Laramie, Wyoming: A high-plains college town where Norwegians shrug off chill
A Norwegian holidaying on Italy’s Lake Como chews over UW memories, from ski-slope glögg to history-test clues. The Cowboy town takes a certain sort to brave unique environs (photos by David Scott).
His jacket unzipped, the Norwegian nonchalantly hops over a patch of black ice, peering back to a Union Pacific train thundering through starlight.
It’s minus 20 in Laramie, Wyoming.
Mercifully, the Datsun Kingcab starts, but a first stab at reverse meets resistance. Bitter midnight cold has congealed its gearbox, turning grease closer to glue. No stranger to teeth-chattering chill, the Nordic figure patiently stands on Second Street, digging for a snus while waiting for the driver to get it in gear.
“Let’s get-it-a-goin’ “ goes my plea.
“What’s that?”
True to an aesthetic, he is wearing a Setesdal sweater, with its abstractly patterned silver clasp, a nod to Norse art. His fashion repertoire lacks a stocking cap.
“Nothing, “ I say. “Just talking to myself.”
“What do you say to a Frisco Burger?”
“I’ll eat to that.”
Ståle Bråthen and I were graduate students in University of Wyoming’s International Studies program, exploring Laramie by night while attending history and political science classes by day.
During our first semester in December 1992, a Christmas present came our way. A Swede, who had arranged to fly home early to Europe, tipped off his fellow Scandinavian with the revelation a final exam on Balkan history might include a particular essay question, a clue made privy to me.
We aced the test, on the Ottomans to Magyars. Our respective essays would read at bottom: “Very good,” with a capital V.
Ståle and I rejoiced and, with exams out of the way, settled on the First Street scene, trudging across a Rockwellian townscape broken bad, where ice cycles cling to four-wheel-drive wheel wells like dirtied daggers, in the city where, a few years later, a college kid was tied naked to a fence post.
Pistol-whipped, he would die.
Laramie, named after a French fur-trapper, does have a tamer side.
Pickups here have gun racks, propped up by cowboys as well as the suit-and-tie crowd, on the look out for coyotes or nothing at all.
Lots of U.S. cities have rigs outfitted with rifles. They, though, are not Laramie, part of a state where U.S. women had the earliest right to vote, teenagers were the last in the 50 states to legally drink when age 19, and where antelope graze a couple Josh Allen football throws from big-time college-sports venues. Laramie, too, belongs to a large state with the fewest folks of any in the union.
This is Wyoming, no country for wussy old men, where the atmosphere leaves a transplant breathless. At 7,200 feet above sea-level, Laramie is the highest college town in America. Here, toasty dorm-room cramming mixes with moonlight cross-country skiing, over prairie and through aspen.
Every college kid needs fresh air. In the Snowy Range outside Laramie, sliding wildly down slopes defined a rite called the Norwegian Olympics, started years before the far-north country became a winter sports juggernaut.
Today, Ståle and I would reminisce about the annual amateur event and our Laramie days, when careers and family had yet to take shape. We chose Colico, along the shores of Lake Como in north Italy, as a reunion point, gingerly testing glacial waters, in contrast to our let-it-fly comport in the Rockies three decades ago.
“Just get your body in,” he said from shallow water, offering encouragement. “You’ll warm up in a second.”
The owner of a lake-side cabin in Norway, he is well acquainted with navigating cool water.
Bråthen, 53, is a school principal in Vikersund, where he lives with his wife, Inger Lise, and two sons. The two are vacationing across north Italy this month.
He grew up in a town that hosts world cup ski-jumping. The sport’s longest ever ski-fly, 253.5 meters, was made on the ramp that towers over a community where Bråthen waves daily to locals from his vehicle, once a roofless military jeep.
He sees to classroom order, but his duties extend beyond school. Eleven years ago, as a volunteer firefighter, he assisted in patrolling the waters of adjoining Lake Tyrifjorden, fishing out the body of a victim who died off Utöya island. Anders Breivik was responsible for the deaths of 77 on July 22, 2011.
Today, two were killed and 21 injured in an Oslo terrorist attack.
Thirty years ago, Laramie’s Norwegian Olympics masked any angst for a day among its Nordic community of UW scholarship skiers, regularly enrolled students and assorted others, some fueled by glögg, a spicy hot Nordic wine specialty.
Heaving kegs and leaping from ropes swinging high above snow trails were two of several diversions, but ski-jumping crowned the games, held annually until recent times by Laramie’s once-thriving Norwegian community. About 40 Norwegians were enrolled at Wyoming in 1992, Bråthen said.
Although minuscule in comparison with Vikersund’s, the jump’s difficulty took down most, either tipsy or too challenged by its tricky take-off. A brave few flew on cross-country skis.
Bråthen joined the camaraderie shared by hundreds, Americans included.
“For me it was just a big party in the mountains,” he said, sampling a glass of Cotta 21, an Italian microbrew, in the tiny stone-crafted village of Caino, perched high above Lake Como, mere miles from Switzerland.
He and Vikersund childhood friend Martin Kaggestad attended Wyoming together for a semester. Kaggestad came to Laramie on a scholarship as a cross-country skier then moved on when the Cowboy ski teams were cut in 1992.
Now a business development manager in Oslo, he assimilated smoothly within Laramie from the get-go.
“I found Laramie easy to adapt to,” said Kaggestad, 51. “I recall being homesick only the first couple of days, and I believe the high number of Norwegians made it a lot easier to get settled. I liked the laid-back atmosphere in Laramie, and we had more fun than we probably should have had.
“From a skier’s perspective, I have to add that I never got comfortable with the altitude.“
Kaggestad transferred to the University of Vermont and was part of a team that won the NCAA national championship in 1994.
Like Bråthen, he warmed quickly to Laramie’s weather, out of nature.
“The weather was no issue for me at all. I didn’t find it particularly cold and I thought the climate was pleasant. I am Norwegian.”
As for memories of the bygone Norwegian Olympics?
“I recall it being crazy fun.”
Bråthen, on a school principal’s early bird clock, turned in at 10 p.m. after a day’s fun in Italy. He sometimes dreams of Laramie, where pronghorns run freely on high-plains prairie, blocks from the dorms. Toward First Street, freight trains rumble on.
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Big-Horns: Near Sheridan and Buffalo is breath-taking country, with fewer tourists, big-game animals that roam freely, and cooler temperatures than much of the US in summer. So much to see in Wyoming. Stay the winter and you’ve got to harden up, but that’s part of the game.
Wyoming is an unknown country to me, just like Norway. I did have a great-great-great-uncle, Gideon Mecklem, who homesteaded in Big Horn County beginning in about 1896. Another great essay!