vacation trip......suggestions please

by CJM , Wednesday, August 31, 2016, 23:32 (3008 days ago) @ bmize

Cody museum is worth a day or two - besides the guns it also has a considerable Western/Indian art collection. Devils Tower and the Custer battlefield are also possible side trips between the Black Hills and Cody. The medicine wheel was a great place to visit when I was a kid 45 years ago when it was just the wheel and the DEW radar dome on the top of a mountain. Now it's fenced off and the archaeological value removed by the Indians doing some leveling of the area and re-arranging the rocks to straighten the spokes and round out the rim. There is also Medicine Lodge Petroglyph State Park in the area that is a surprisingly nice place to spend an afternoon or more, try and setup for a picnic if you can even if it's just subway sandwiches (from Cody) and a 12 pack of drinks on ice. Be sure to keep hydrated, it's very dry in the fall even along the river (often 10% humidity or less) and you get very tired very fast if you don't keep hydrated and it's hard to notice how much water you are losing as your sweat evaporates before you notice you are sweating.

Thermopolis hot springs are worth a visit just to soak tired bodies in the pool and it also now has a fossil museum, LOTS of fossils in the area as it's mostly sedimentary rock that is all the correct age for dinosaurs. During the summer there are always some university digs happening that often allow volunteers to do the unskilled labor jobs. Take the road from Thermopolis south through Wind River canyon to Shoshone and plan on making a few stops on the parking pullouts. The rocks are all on a tilt with the newest layer being red Morrison sandstone formation (lots of dinosaur fossils in it) around Thermopolis on the north end, and the oldest being pre-Permian granite near the dam at the south end and most of the layers in between are identified with signs and info boards. The Wind River and the Big Horn River are the same river on either end of the canyon. This was one of the last places in the U.S. that they couldn't travel the length of the canyon to be sure it was the same river at each end, you'll see why when you get to the tunnels at the south end of the canyon. The tunnels are short but through buttresses of rock that are straight up and down from the river, without the tunnels there is just no place for a foot trail much less a road. Between Shoshone and Casper is Hells Half Acre, a tourist trap but that is where they filmed the movie "Starship Troopers" with all the weird rock formations.