Wyoming, Cody - Tuesday, July 17, 2018 - Buffalo Bill Center and Yellowstone

There has to be a story behind this.  It is sitting out in the middle of a large pasture field not far from the campground.

We went back for our second day at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.  We checked out the outside areas first.

Our first museum of the day was the Plains Indians Museum.  We’ve been to so many exhibits of Indian artifacts lately that I didn’t take too many pictures here.  We’ve come a long way from the days of this beaded cradleboard. 

This is a Crow shield and cover.  The painting on the tanned deer hide cover depicts a bear emerging from a cave and meeting a volley of bullets.  Four shields are known to exist with this same design.  If the design on a shield was particularly powerful the shields might be copied or traded.

This decorated Crow warrior shirt signified that the man who wore it was important among his people.

More bead work.  This entire vest front (including the white part) is made of beads.

The Draper Natural History Museum is our last museum.  This area has a lot of interactive things for kids to do.  The two story floor plan is circular and mimics starting at the top of a mountain and going down.  The displays depict the animals and plants native to each area as you go down the mountain.

The first display of wolves is an example of the taxidermy talents of Jack Putnam.  He was taxidermist and curator of natural history at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for 25 years.

I was interested in this explanation of bentonite.  We saw gypsum and bentonite mines after we crossed the Big Horn Mountains.  I am familiar with gypsum but bentonite is new to me.

Chuck wagons amaze me, this one is particularly nice.  It was used during cattle drives and roundups on the Muddy Creek Ranch near Hardin, MT until 1967.

After we left the museum we took the Buffalo Bill Scenic Byway to Yellowstone’s East Gate.  We have been over part of this road as we traveled between Cody and the campground.  It is promoted as one of the most beautiful drives in America, I have to agree.  Here are some of my favorite pictures.

Buffalo Bill Reservoir Lake.

On beyond the reservoir

Entering Yellowstone, snow on the mountains.  Once again we are able to use our senior access pass to get into a national park for free.

Lots of winding roads

Water coming down the side of the mountain

Mountains covered with lodgepole pines.  These pines cover 60% of the park.

Many of the pines are dead or down.  The information I can find on fires in the park shows that the last major fires were in 1988.  I suppose the dead trees could be from those.

But other area are covered with beautiful wildflowers.

This was our first look at Yellowstone Lake.

Yellowstone Lake is America’s largest high altitude lake (above 7,000 ft.).  It is 20 miles long by 14 miles wide with 141 miles of shoreline.  The average depth is 140 ft.  At the deepest it is 410 ft.  Many of the area's 1000 to 3000 annual earthquakes occur under Yellowstone Lake causing events which continue to reshape the water’s edge.

We stopped at a small beach area.  The water felt at least lukewarm.  The average water surface temperature in the summer is supposed to be 60 degrees.

Clouds over the lake.

We stopped for lunch at the Yellowstone Lake Hotel.

This was our view during lunch.  There were a couple of moths that wanted to spoil my picture.  We noted that the hotel apparently doesn’t have air conditioning because the windows were cranked open allowing in a cool breeze from across the lake. 

The hotel dates back to 1891 and has been designated a National Historic Landmark.  It is the oldest operating hotel in a national park.

How would you like to be chauffeured around in this beauty?

As we are leaving the hotel we can see a storm coming in.

I think this is an elk cow.  The picture is fuzzy because I shot it through Greg’s side window as we passed.

We stopped at the Continental Divide pull off to stretch our legs. 

There is a beautiful lily pond here.

This robin was enjoying the view also.

Our big stop for the day was Old Faithful Geyser.  It was first documented in 1870.  It erupts every 40 to 126 minutes and goes for 1.5 to 5 minutes.  The water and steam shoot from 106 to 184 feet.  The crowd here was ridiculous, we finally found a parking space that was probably meant for one of the cabin renters.

This was Old Faithful as we walked up.

No more than five seconds later this is how it looked.

As we drove on through the park we spotted these buffalo alongside the road.

We stopped to view Gibbon Falls.  This is looking downstream from the falls.

Gibbon Falls is 84’ high.

This old bull buffalo was just wandering around by himself.

This view leaving Yellowstone of the Yellowstone Lake at Fisherman’s Bridge is one of my favorites.

This bull buffalo seemed to be checking out the progress of the day’s road construction near the east entrance.

Wyoming, Cody - Monday, July 16, 2018 - Buffalo Bill Dam and Cody

Great scenery heading to the Buffalo Bill Dam.

Most of the reservoir is clean and clear.

Next to the dam needs some clean up.  They have to bring in a crane with a bucket on it to scoop out the wood.

Looking downstream from the dam.  A little boy with the family who was viewing the dam at the same time we were said it was “hot down there”.  His dad didn’t get it, the little boy saw the mist coming off the water and thought it was steam or smoke.

Scenery around the dam.

Dam facts:  350 feet tall, 106 feet thick at the base.  No reinforcing bar is in the original structure.  One quarter of the total mass of the dam is “plum rock” a rose colored granite stone placed in concrete.

The Shoshone Dam began in 1905 and was completed in 1910 at a cost of nearly one million dollars.  At the time it was the world’s highest concrete arch dam.  It was renamed in 1946 to Buffalo Bill Dam in honor of Buffalo Bill Cody’s support for water reclamation.

Buffalo Bill ranched in the area where the reservoir is now located.  He realized the need for irrigation and the need to store spring runoff but such a project was beyond his means.  He and others relinquished land rights to the federal government for the Reclamation Services Shoshone Project on the Shoshone River.

Today part of the Shoshone Project irrigates 93,000 acres of crops – grass seed, dry edible beans, vegetables and specialty crops, malt barley, alfalfa hay and sugar beets.

The visitor center at the dam.

This is one of the tunnels we went through on our way to the campground.  In 1957 a project was started to construct 3 tunnels about 4000 feet in length to improve the highway grade near the Buffalo Bill Dan and reservoir.  All work was through solid granite. 

Down below is part of the original road to Yellowstone.  It was narrow (12 feet wide in some areas) and it had grades as steep as 22%.  The steepest grade we have been on was 10% in Palo Alto Canyon in Texas, that one scared the daylights out of me, I couldn’t handle 22%.  One way traffic was required and rock slides were a serious threat.  Because of the steep grades, the Wyoming Highway Department often stationed a tractor and operator at the lower end of Shoshone Canyon to assist commercial vehicles and passenger cars with travel trailers.

On our way to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West we spotted the local hospital which doesn’t look like a hospital at all from the outside.

The Buffalo Bill Center is five museums in one.  Our senior admission was $18.50 each but you can come back a second day on that same ticket.  There is so much on exhibit so much information to absorb it is almost overwhelming.  I’m very appreciative of the things that have been donated to the museum for the public to enjoy, but I have to wonder where did people keep all of these things before they donated them?  

The first museum we visited was the Cody Firearms Museum.

If you are a gun enthusiast, you will be in heaven here.

Nice wildlife exhibits in addition to guns.

My favorites were the miniature guns.

The next museum was the Whitney Western Art Museum.  I love this bronze tumbleweed by Bale Creek Allen.  He selected a tumbleweed to cast in bronze.  Once it was cast, he sorted the 100’s of little branches, then welded each piece back together one branch at a time.

A 6’ x 9’ oil painting of Custer’s last stand painted in 1899.  The detail in this is amazing.

One of the displays outside the museum, Buffalo Bill – The Scout, as seen from the windows of the Western Art Museum.

The last museum we are visiting today, we are getting tired and hungry, is the Buffalo Bill Museum.  These bison depicted on the Kansas prairie look very real.

Louisa Cody was Bill Cody’s wife.  This is her sewing box and notions.  The sewing machine is so tiny.

Buffalo Bill’s hand tooled saddle made in 1893.

This gun was owned by John Hart who was the original Lone Ranger between 1952 and 1954.  The engraving was done by Ben Shostle of Muncie, IN.

The Irma Hotel in downtown Cody was another endeavor of Buffalo Bill.  The hotel was named after Cody’s youngest daughter and was completed in 1902 at the cost of $80,000.  In its day the Irma hotel was the fashionable place for royalty, business and political leaders to stay in the manner to which they were accustomed.  This wheel of fortune was used in the bar room of the hotel.

There is a campfire cooking demonstration going on most of the day.  He demonstrates how to make biscuits and beans over a campfire.

We decided to have lunch at the Irma Hotel.  

Lunch on the porch enabled us to see the comings and goings of downtown Cody.  The burger and onion rings we split for lunch were very good.  But, I have a feeling the service has gone done from when the hotel was in its heyday.

Browsing through some of the stores in town we found that beads for making your own jewelry were in abundance.

Or you could buy your things already covered with sparkle.