'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

In many parts of the United States when you call 911, you're lucky if anyone shows up within an hour. It's a couple hours to get to a Wal-Mart or a store. It's difficult to get anyone to drive 40 minutes outside the nearest town and navigate unmarked dirt roads to do basic plumbing or home repairs.

As a result, people have to learn to repair things, make things, use a gun, do first aid, lay shingles, hang drywall, pour concrete, solder pipe, weld, change oil, replace an alternator, lay PVC pipe, etc.

People in the community learn emergency medicine and how to manage a structure or brush fire by volunteering with the local volunteer fire/EMS, because that's the only show in town.

Roads wash out in the rainy season, so 4x4 is an absolute necessity. People learn to gauge sand you can drive through in 2x4, sand you can drive through in 4x4 and sand you just can't drive through by eyeballing it.

I grew up in a very remote part of the California desert and everyone was like that. It's just what you have to do to get by because you keep finding yourself in situations where you need to call on these types of skills, and if you're living out there you have a lot of free time without interruption or distraction to learn the skills. Lots of people moved out from the city, and over the years they picked up a lot of those skills and became extremely self-sufficient.

> However, "openness to experience" is much higher, and the most pronounced personality trait in mountain dwellers.

> "Openness is a strong predictor of residential mobility," said Götz. "A willingness to move your life in pursuit of goals such as economic affluence and personal freedom drove many original North American frontier settlers."

> those who left their early mountain home are still consistently less agreeable, conscientious and extravert, although no such effects were observed for neuroticism and openness.

I have difficulty reconciling these statements.

- mountain dwellers have higher openness to experience

- openness to experience is a predictor for residential mobility

- but the people who move away from mountain regions _don't_ have higher openness to experience (but stay disagreeable, unconscientious and introverted)?

I would have expected the selection bias to show up in the other direction: I would expect the people who stay put to have lower openness to experience, and the people who move to have higher openness to experience.

> They describe the effect of mountain areas on personality as "small but robust"

The article doesn't quantify anything, so I'm more prone to believe it's hyped noise than anything real. But this phrase is a strong indicator that any attempt to use the findings in widespread policy will have bad results.

Utah is not West Coast. As rosseloh said, it's the West. (And I agree - I draw the line at Denver.)

I don't agree with "Midwest" where people place it on the east side, though. Take Pittsburgh, for instance. Look at a map, people. It's not "west", and it's not even "mid". It's East. "Mid" starts at Chicago.

(Pittsburgh was once midwest, but it's not 1870 any more.)

You could say anything between the Great Divide and the Eastern divide is "midwest" and nobody would look at you funny.

https://www.theadventurecompany.com/continental-divide-in-co...