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On the Trail of Sheriff Walter Longmire
Reluctant Hero of the Small Screen
The iconic Longmire series has recently returned to Netflix in its six-season entirety. When I first watched it a few years after it ran in prime time (2012–2017), I was living in Missoula, Montana. The show’s stark landscape of flat-topped Georgia O’Keefe-style pedernals and fields of cholla cactus looked nothing like the land around me — or my nearest neighbor to the south. Set in the fictional town of Durant, located between the north-central Wyoming towns of Sheridan and Cody, there ought to be a whole lot more pine trees, for starters …
Author Craig Johnson, consultant on the series, based his Walter Longmire Mysteries on the town of Buffalo, Wyoming, which snuggles up against the base of the Bighorns. But when his best-seller books made it to the small screen, the filming took place almost entirely in New Mexico. Now that I’ve moved to the Land of Enchantment (entirely by coincidence) I’m enjoying following in the footsteps of Sheriff Longmire and his crew of tough-as-nails crime solvers. But I occasionally cringe at the extremely obvious clues that the series is clearly filmed in New Mexico — clues that I somehow missed in my initial viewing of the Longmire series. High, beamed ceilings, flat-roofed adobe homes, gnarled cottonwoods, and dusty desert scrub in blues and grays tell the…
