Thumbs up to Northwest College being ranked No. 4 nationwide. WalletHub.com crunched data in four categories and 17 subcategories for 670 colleges, and NWC came out among the best. 

For many of us, that’s not a big surprise, but it definitely is good news. It’s likely the college’s high ranking will attract more students to attend the college. 

We’re proud of the progress the Northwest College community has made in recent years, and we know that students who attend Northwest will continue to get a quality education and residential life experience. 

Those students hale from the Big Horn Basin, from Wyoming, from neighboring states, other regions of the country and from the international community. They come to attend the quality classes, transfer and vocational programs offered at Northwest. 

But the college’s benefits extend beyond the campus and into the community as a whole through employment options, economic and workforce development, programs, concerts, exhibits, intercultural events and lifelong learning opportunities. 

We’re glad Northwest College is a vital part of our community.

Given the current leadership and faculty, we expect that will continue well into the future.

Thumbs up to the cooperative effort between the Cody Volunteer Fire Department, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the Shoshone National Forest that extinguished a fast-growing fire on Saturday. 

The Red Lakes Fire burned close to infrastructure that is vital to the public in all of Park County and beyond.

We’re thankful for the air support provided by the BLM and the Forest Service that halted the spread of the fire and ultimately helped extinguish the flames before they reached additional power poles, the Shoshone Municipal Pipeline Water Treatment Plant and several communications towers. 

We’re also grateful that no one was hurt and no private structures were damaged.

We hope the kids who allegedly started the blaze by playing with fire, as determined by the Park County Sheriff’s Office, and the person who launched a remote-controlled aircraft learned some important lessons. 

In the juveniles’ case, that lesson came at a high price: hard work by 39 firefighters, who had to take time away from jobs and family; the intermittent closure of the South Fork highway; a burned power pole and some very concerned neighbors. That price could have been much higher had the flames not been halted later the same day. 

As for launching the drone, that was an error in judgment that could have proved very costly as well. It could have resulted in the loss of air support if the helicopters and planes had been grounded because of sighting a drone. Worse still, if the drone remained airborne and was not sighted in time, it could have resulted in the loss of a plane and its crew. 

We’re thankful the person responded to a request to bring it down before any of those things happened.

Thumbs down to the “Cadillac tax,” the funding mechanism for the Affordable Care Act that, beginning in 2018, will penalize responsible employers for providing expensive health insurance policies. 

We are as convinced as anyone that something must be done to ensure that Americans who are working hard to support themselves and their families have access to affordable health care. 

Some of us have walked in the shoes of those who worry about how they will pay for the next ear infection, the next prescription, the next doctor visit, the next hospitalization or the next health crisis. It is a heavy load of anxiety to bear, and we deeply sympathize with those who live under that burden.

But, taxing employers who are doing the right thing — providing good health insurance so their employees don’t have those worries — is just wrong. It’s backward thinking and it’s demoralizing. We as Americans can, and should, do better than that.

Thumbs down to three crashes near Powell within an hour on Saturday, one of which was fatal. It’s summertime, and we feel more confident when roads are dry, and weather and visibility are good. But that confidence sometimes leads us to be careless. While driving, we all need to remain alert, avoid distractions such as cell phones, obey road signs and traffic laws, wear seat belts and helmets and drive carefully to ensure we — and the people on the roads with us — get to our destinations safely.