Jurassic Park

And he did. It took six years, but exactly a week before Christmas 2005, Cook gave Spring Creek away: 4,700 acres of dinosaur-rich, prehistoric river delta valued at $8 million. The unlikely beneficiary was the University of Pittsburgh, a big school in an Eastern industrial city, with no reputation for dinosaurs.

The story of how this happened is serendipitous at first but logical in the end -- the natural outgrowth of an unlikely friendship between Cook and the two educators who had the sense to play straight with him. As those who know Cook will quickly point out, if you do that, he'll play straight with you.

BUT IN 1999, Cook was not much of a philanthropist. His ranch began about 25 miles north of Laramie and encompassed roughly 200 square miles of postcard horizons about 7,000 feet above sea level. In Wyoming terms, the ranch was on the lower end of "big."

Rainfall on the high plains is too sporadic for trees, but in a wet year, the grass comes up to a man's knees and the ranch can support up to 8,000 cattle. In a desert year, the grass is tufted and dotted with sagebrush except where the Laramie River irrigates it. In a desert year -- like this year -- Cook grazes 5,000 cattle and will ship them in late summer or early autumn to Nebraska, where he feeds them out and sells them. Then he retreats to Wyoming for the long, deadly cold winter. In the spring he buys a new herd, and the cycle begins again.

To hear him tell it, Cook was a reluctant cattleman. True, he was born and raised to ranching on what he called a "small cow-and-calf deal" near Shreveport, La., but he wasn't fond of the calling, and when he went to college "I swore I'd never be around another cow as long as I lived."

He majored in physical education in Louisiana, got a master's degree in management and counseling and was about to start on a doctorate in clinical psychology. But at that point he decided that academia wouldn't do, so he moved with his wife, Carol, to Wheatland, Wyo., about 50 miles east of today's Cook ranch. That was 1975.

"I was tired of the heat and humidity down South; I knew there had to be a better place," Cook said. "And there weren't that many people in Wyoming. That appealed to me."

Cook worked for a year as a high school guidance counselor, and when the Basin Electric Power Cooperative built a plant in Wheatland, he was hired to run its human resources department. On the side, he started to work as an outfitter, taking visitors on hunting trips, a sideline that continued for 20 years -- long after he needed the work. He credits this avocation with giving him an appreciation of Wyoming's high country, a kinship that, even today, he doesn't fully understand: "Either you have it, or you don't," he said. "I've become a steward of the land."

He didn't even have land, at first. But as he settled into Wyoming, "I started to buy and sell smaller pieces of property and run cattle on leased land," he said. His high school resolve was fading, and when land prices plunged during the farm crisis of the 1980s, he began to buy much bigger pieces of property, putting them together and stocking them with cattle.

He was good at it, but that came as no surprise: "You can't 'learn' the cattle business," he said. "It's too much to know. It's got all kinds of hooks and claws that can trip you up. You have to be born to it."

In 1999, Cook was, by any measure, a rich man. He had rebuilt his fences, cleared off the junk, fixed up the irrigation system for the meadow where he grew his hay and was living in a stunning mountainside ranch house with 120 degrees of picture windows overlooking the Laramie River valley.

"It took a lot of hard work and a lot of capital," he said, but he had sculpted a spectacular piece of property, and he knew it.