Binge drinking, he said, is a way for young people to prove themselves in the West.

"You get validation by saying, 'Boy did I get hammered,"' Boerner said.

Here in Park County, where the sheriff has four deputies to patrol an area much larger than Connecticut, parents can be as much a problem as their children, Steward said.

"We'll bust a party where every kid is drinking, call the parents, and they're mad at us for getting them out of bed," he said.

The recent surveys show that girls, starting in middle school, are much more likely to drink than they used to be. In part that is because of flavored drinks that hide the taste of alcohol, so-called alcopops, according to people who track drinking among the young.

"People who want to get wasted but don't like the taste of beer, they're drinking something like Mike's Hard Lemonade," said Sienna White, a sophomore at Cody High School who said she does not drink.

Sienna estimated that half the students at her school drank. "Living in a cowboy town," she said, "it's really hard to find a party without drinking."

But Sienna and other students are part of a program at the school where students pledge not to drink or take drugs. The program has had a fair amount of success drawing athletes and cheerleaders, offering positive role models, school officials say.

Steward, however, is skeptical. Like other adults who now preach against what they once practiced, the sheriff remembers his own high school days of beer.

"Obviously we've all been there," said Steward, who went to Cody High School 20 years ago, and said 60 to 65 percent of his fellow students drank. "The problem, then and now, was that there was nothing to do in Cody after a certain time."