Best I can tell ... two. Yep, still two.

I asked a spokesman for the Wyoming governor's office whether any escalators might have been constructed in the state since 2008; he wasn't sure, but thought the newly-constructed airport in Jackson Hole might be a contender. The airport is single-level, though, it turns out—no escalators necessary.

And there seems to be no escalator elsewhere in Jackson, either. "I'm not aware of any," said Andy Heffron of the city's Chamber of Commerce. "I don't even think the hospital has an escalator," another Chamber representative said. It's "just stairs and elevators, that kind of thing."

But maybe the city of Sheridan has one? "I'm not aware of any escalators in the city," Sue Goodman in the City Planning Office told me. "Just elevators."

But what about Cheyenne, the state's capital and its most populous city? No again. "We haven't had one for quite a long while, as a matter of fact," Dick Mason, in the city's Building Office, explained. There used to be an escalator in an old J.C. Penney building, he said ... but the escalator was demolished along with the building itself. (Fellow former escalator-havers of Wyoming include Pink Garter Plaza, a mall-style complex in Jackson, and the Casper/Natrona County International Airport.) Today, for the most part, if you need to get up a level and can't or don't want to use stairs, elevators are the way to go.

And that makes sense. Escalators may be magical machines, the stuff of literature and comedy and epic, epic poetry; they are also, often, less practical than their fellow vertical people-movers. "There are code issues involved with escalators, which make them somewhat less popular," Mason noted. "The code does not want openings between adjacent floors that are unprotected." Say there's a fire: stairways offer people enclosed ways to escape buildings, while escalators generally don't. If you're an engineer thinking about the best ways to move people between floors, escalators often lose the contest. Plus, escalators tend to be more expensive to install and maintain than their counterparts.

Whereas "elevators," Mason said, "are pretty much foolproof."

The dearth of escalators in Wyoming could also have to do with the particularities of the state's buildings themselves. "I think a lot of it has to do with some of the buildings being older," Sue Goodman said—and older buildings with multiple stories tend to rely on stairways and elevators for their inter-floor transport. Two of the most common settings for escalators are malls and larger airports, and places like Sheridan have neither: their stores tend to be standalone structures. Plus, "in the Great Out West, I think land is probably cheaper," Goodman said. So rather than build up, "we spread out."

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