Casper, Wyo.

At a time of spiraling oil and gas prices, Casper occupies an enviable position: It's an energy boomtown, which helps explain why the mortgage crisis has only slightly bruised the city.

"We're doing extremely well," says Dennis Langdon, president of the Wyoming Multiple Listing Service. "We're the last frontier."

Casper's economy, based on coal, natural gas, oil and uranium, also produces soda ash, used in such things as pet food and toothpaste.

The second-largest city in Wyoming after Cheyenne, Casper, with about 50,000 people, has generally run countercyclical to the rest of the nation, says real estate agent Lisa Burridge. In the 1980s, for instance, when most of the country was thriving, Casper's economy and real estate market were suffering.

"That was largely due to the oil industry collapsing, and the housing market here was in the pits," Burridge says.

Since 2000, Casper's ...