A weekend in Wyoming does not have to mean fighting the summer crowds at the entrance gates to Yellowstone. The eight towns here all sit below 50,000 residents, and each one packs enough into a short visit to justify the drive. In Jackson, the Teton Range rises straight off the valley floor with no foothills to soften the view. In Thermopolis, a bathhouse has stayed free to the public since an 1896 treaty with the Shoshone and Arapaho. Cody keeps five museums under one roof, and Buffalo still rents rooms in a hotel where Butch Cassidy once watched the sheriff’s office from his window. Pick one, and three days is enough to see it properly.
Buffalo
The Occidental Hotel opened on Main Street in 1880, and its guest list ran from Calamity Jane and Theodore Roosevelt to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who rode in from their Hole-in-the-Wall hideout to the south. Owen Wister set part of “The Virginian” here, and the saloon still holds its original back bar. Buffalo sits between open prairie and the Bighorn Mountains in Johnson County, with a population under 10,000. The Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum, housed in a former Carnegie library, holds a collection covering Native American history, frontier settlement, and ranching. The Bighorn National Forest lies a short drive up into the mountains, with hiking, fishing, and camping among the wildflower meadows and lakes.