Casper, WY
Best breakfast in Wyoming. Casper sits at the base of Casper Mountain with the Oregon Trail running through.
Casper was a major stop on the Oregon Trail — wagon ruts are still visible from the air south of town. The National Historic Trails Interpretive Center tells the story of 400,000 emigrants who passed through.
Visible ruts carved by 400,000 Oregon Trail emigrants between 1841 and 1869. The wagon wheels wore grooves into the sandstone that are still 2-4 feet deep after 180 years. From low altitude south of Casper, the ruts appear as parallel dark lines cutting across the sagebrush prairie. Martin's Cove, where the Willie and Martin handcart companies were trapped by early snow in 1856, is nearby.
A 867-foot column of igneous rock rising from the Belle Fourche River valley in northeastern Wyoming. The first national monument in the United States, designated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Geologists still debate the formation — most likely a volcanic neck or laccolith intrusion that solidified underground roughly 50 million years ago, then was exposed by erosion of the surrounding sedimentary rock. The vertical columnar jointing makes the tower look striated, like organ pipes. The Northern Plains tribes — Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho — have multiple sacred stories about the tower; the Lakota name Mato Tipila means "Bear Lodge." Devils Tower's pop-culture moment came in 1977 when Steven Spielberg used it as the alien landing site in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The tower is also a destination for crack-climbing — about 5,000 ascents a year by 220 different routes.
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.
Seventeen miles from Rushmore, a far larger figure is slowly emerging from Thunderhead Mountain. In 1948, Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear invited sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski to carve a memorial to Crazy Horse — the Oglala Lakota leader who fought at the Little Bighorn — so that, in Standing Bear's words, the white man would know "the red man has great heroes too." Ziolkowski worked it largely alone, then with his family, until his death in 1982; his descendants continue. The completed face alone is 87 feet tall — taller than all four Rushmore heads. When finished, the full figure of Crazy Horse astride his horse, arm outstretched, will be the largest sculpture on Earth, 563 feet high. It takes no federal money, by the family's choice — which also means it will never close in a government shutdown, and may not be finished for generations.