Wyoming Beyond Yellowstone

Yellowstone has Old Faithful, bison jams and some of the strangest landscapes in America. Grand Teton has a mountain skyline recognizable before you even see the sign announcing you've entered the park.

They have earned their reputations.

But Wyoming is a very big place.

Beyond the park entrances are old mining towns, ranches stretching toward impossibly distant horizons, wildflowers scattered through gray-green sagebrush, and buttes striped with oranges, reds and browns. There are forests of lodgepole pine, hillsides filled with quaking aspens, ice cream served in heroic proportions at a mercantile in the middle of nowhere, and one of America's great mountain wildernesses hiding in surprisingly plain sight.

Yellowstone may be the reason you know Wyoming. It shouldn't be the only Wyoming you know.

The mountains in the middle

The Wind River Range stretches for roughly 100 miles through western Wyoming, its highest peaks rising above 13,000 feet. Gannett Peak, the highest point in Wyoming, is several hundred feet taller than Grand Teton.

Yet the Winds remain remarkably unknown.

There is no highway through the heart of the range. Roads skirt the edges, and the mountains appear and disappear as you travel around them: above forests, across ranchland or suddenly filling a gap in the horizon.

To enter the real wilderness, you have to get out of your car and walk.

Our bicycle route encircles the range, so the Winds become a recurring presence rather than a destination to check off a list. They appear, disappear and then turn up again somewhere farther down the road.

Gold towns that didn't quite disappear

South Pass City tells another Wyoming story.

Gold brought miners here in the 1860s, creating a boomtown near the historic South Pass crossing of the Continental Divide. The boom didn't last, but many of the old buildings remain, tucked beneath the mountains and far removed from the bustle of Wyoming's famous parks.

Nearby Atlantic City grew from the same gold rush and never completely disappeared. A tiny community still lives among remnants of its mining past.

Neither place needs reenactments or a gift shop the size of a supermarket to be interesting. You wander around, poke your head into the past and wonder what possessed somebody to decide this was where they were going to strike it rich.

Then you get back on the bike.

There is always ice cream

Farson sits at a highway junction surrounded by the immense open landscapes of southwest Wyoming.

More importantly, it has the Farson Mercantile.

For cyclists, a place famous for enormous servings of ice cream requires remarkably little additional explanation.

By the time you reach places like Farson, you've already watched Wyoming change around you. A road can begin among lodgepole pines, descend through stands of aspen into green ranchland, and eventually emerge into open country where sagebrush stretches toward colorful, eroded buttes.

That's not the empty space between attractions.

That's the ride.

And somewhere in all that space, there's ice cream.

Suddenly the important questions aren't about mileage or mountains. They're about flavor, cone or cup, and exactly what the folks in Farson consider a reasonable definition of "one scoop."

Ribs under the aspens

Not every memorable travel experience needs a monument or national park attached to it.

Sometimes you've spent the day riding through ranch country, forests and small Wyoming towns. The bikes are put away. Quaking aspen leaves flutter overhead. Somebody puts ribs on the table and there are local craft beers within reach.

That's dinner.

Six months later, it may be one of the moments you remember most clearly.

Travel has room for both Old Faithful and ribs under the aspens.

There's a lot of Wyoming beyond Yellowstone

None of this is an argument for skipping Yellowstone or Grand Teton. If you've never stood beside a Yellowstone geyser basin or watched morning light reach the Tetons, go.

Just don't mistake Wyoming's most famous places for Wyoming itself.

There are old gold towns, working ranches and tiny communities. There are lodgepole forests, aspen-covered hills, green ranchlands, sagebrush plains and colorful buttes. The landscape doesn't simply surround the places you've come to see. It changes mile by mile as you ride through it.

There is ice cream in Farson. There are ribs and beer waiting beneath the aspens. And somewhere along the way, the Wind Rivers will probably appear on the horizon again.

This is the Wyoming we wanted you to experience when we created Cycling the Real Wyoming. The bicycle gives us a particularly good way to move through it, slowly enough that the miles between the stops become as much a part of the journey as the stops themselves.

Yellowstone may put Wyoming on the map.

Beyond it, there's an awful lot more Wyoming to discover.