Cody, WY
In the Bighorn Basin at 5,102ft MSL, named for William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody who founded the town of Cody in 1896 as a launching point for tourist trips into Yellowstone. The closest commercial field to Yellowstone's East Entrance (53 miles west). Class D, single 8,270ft runway 4/22. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West in downtown Cody — five museums in one building covering Plains Indians, firearms, western art, natural history, and Buffalo Bill himself — is one of the great museum complexes in the American West. Cody Stampede Rodeo runs every July; the field handles substantial corporate and air-charter traffic during stampede week.
William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody founded this town in 1896 and gave it his name, and it's still the truest Old West town in Wyoming — the eastern gateway to Yellowstone, with a nightly summer rodeo and the Irma Hotel he built in 1902 (named for his daughter). The crown jewel is the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a Smithsonian-affiliate complex of five museums under one roof: the Buffalo Bill Museum, the Whitney Western Art Museum, the Plains Indian Museum, the Draper Natural History Museum, and the Cody Firearms Museum (one of the most comprehensive collections of American firearms in existence). West of town the road to Yellowstone passes Buffalo Bill Dam — when completed in 1910 it was the tallest dam in the world.
Charles Kuralt called it "the most beautiful drive in America," and it earns the title: 68 miles of US-212 switchbacking from Red Lodge, Montana over the Beartooth Pass at 10,947 feet and down into the northeast corner of Yellowstone. The road climbs over 5,000 feet through lodgepole forest into raw alpine tundra, past glacial cirques, more than 20 peaks over 12,000 feet, and hundreds of alpine lakes, with a summer-only ski area near the top and snowbanks lingering into July. It's an engineering feat from 1936, open only roughly Memorial Day to mid-October — the high country is buried in snow the rest of the year. Serious high-altitude mountain terrain in every direction.
High on a windswept shoulder of Medicine Mountain at nearly 10,000 feet in the Bighorn range sits one of the most significant and best-preserved sacred sites of the Plains peoples: a wheel of stones about 80 feet across, with 28 spokes radiating from a central cairn to a rim of six more cairns. It was built sometime between 300 and 800 years ago, and its alignments mark the summer solstice sunrise and sunset and the rising points of certain stars. It's still an active sacred site — Crow, Cheyenne, Lakota, Arapaho, and Shoshone people leave offerings tied to the rope fence around it. The site is remote, reached by a high-altitude gravel road and a final walk in, and closed by snow much of the year.
The Yellowstone caldera is one of the largest active volcanic systems on Earth. The Upper Geyser Basin, containing Old Faithful and 150+ other geysers, appears from altitude as a white mineral-stained clearing in the forest with steam plumes visible from 50+ miles on cool mornings. The Grand Prismatic Spring (the largest hot spring in the US) shows its rainbow colors best from directly above. Yellowstone National Park has standard NPS overflight advisories.