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When the world ends

When the world ends

we're all going to Wyoming!

Haley Haltom's avatar
Haley Haltom
Mar 12, 2025
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fun & cool books
fun & cool books
When the world ends
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Every winter for the past four years we’ve been driving from Denver to Park City, Utah, at least once a season. The majority of the drive takes you through southern Wyoming, about 6 of the 8ish hours, and we’ve become familiar with the wide-open, desolate landscape. You hit the two biggest towns, Cheyenne and Laramie, within your first hour in the state, and from then until Utah it’s almost nothin’—high desert hills and cliffs, the far-off craggy peaks of the Snowy Range, beat gas stations, and a trucker’s oasis called Little America with really good breakfast burritos.

Miles and miles of undeveloped land, interspersed with chemical plants and quarries whose presence you only notice if you’re doing the drive at night, midwinter when the sun sets around 4:30PM, their bright lights illuminating large swaths of steam and exhaust that break up the pitch black horizon jarringly. Some years there’s so much snow I-80 is closed for weeks, or there are winds gusting over 60MPH for days on end, upending the eighteen wheelers that make up the majority of drivers on this far-out route. Every time we’re on the drive I think about how this is where I would go if shit hit the fan, pack our camping gear in the car and drive through the sagebrush to a cliff with some shade and shelter and stick it out for a while.

Since this reality doesn’t seem so far off, with Trump sending us to a recession and AI coming for our jobs in the next 18-24 months, maybe it’s time you came up with a plan for the end of the world. These novels can serve as your blueprint.

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