Buffalo WY Sign / Bighorn Mountains Scenic View (Redux)

Leaving Devils Tower I checked weather for Yellowstone and it’s too cold to tent camp with my current gear (lows in 10’s/20’s).  Threw out a last minute request on Couchsurfing.com and was answered by a guy in Cody, WY which is only an hour drive to the park for tomorrow. Much of the drive is relatively flat, until…wait, are those mountains on the horizon?!

Faint view on horizon of Bighorn Mountains in far distance driving on I-90W into Wyoming

Pulled off I-90W just before Buffalo, Wyoming at a historical marker sign detailing it’s history of settlement and western expansion. Population is a robust 4,400 citizens, quite the prairie metropolis. These lands were stolen from Native peoples including but not limited to the Shoshone, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota(Sioux), Crow, and Ute before the U.S. Government forcibly relocated many of them to what is now the Wind River Indian Reservation.

Historical sign at roadside pullout on I-90 outside of Buffalo, Wyoming

This is my first time traveling west of the Mississippi and west of the Missouri. These are the first mountains of this scale I have ever seen. I remember my reaction being something like “this doesn’t seem real.” Awe. Disbelief. I suddenly felt very small in the scheme of the universe. Beautiful.

View of Bighorn Mountains from roadside pullout on I-90 outside of Buffalo, Wyoming

Author’s note: I am revisiting old posts from my 2016 road trip because I posted all of them from my cell phone and some of them are a bit of a mess. Main reason is to properly edit photos rather than just having what came out of my phone camera, and to include higher res photos from my mirrorless camera that never got published. Additionally some of the locations on the Geomap are wrong or often have multiple locations in a single post. OG text should be captured in a summary field when available.