Jackson, WY
Game meat restaurant — elk, bison, venison. The approach down the valley with the Tetons rising 7,000ft above the floor is one of the great visual experiences in aviation.
The only commercial airport located inside a US national park — Grand Teton National Park surrounds the field on three sides. Operationally one of the most demanding mountain airports in the lower 48: high terrain, density altitude routinely exceeds 9,000ft on warm afternoons, and weather rolls in from over the Tetons fast. Strict noise abatement protects the wildlife corridor. Skiing and Yellowstone tourism drive heavy seasonal traffic; the Snake River runs along the field's eastern boundary.
The Teton Range rises 7,000 feet directly out of Jackson Hole valley with no foothills — one of the steepest mountain fronts in North America. Grand Teton, the highest peak at 13,775 feet, was first summited in 1898; the range was named by French-Canadian trappers who called the three central peaks "les trois tétons" ("the three breasts"), a name that has not aged well but stuck. The Snake River runs along the eastern base of the range; from Jackson Hole Airport (KJAC, the only commercial airport inside a US national park) the entire range fills the western horizon. Glaciers — Teton, Schoolroom, Middle Teton, Falling Ice — still cling to the upper cirques despite a century of retreat.
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.
The first national park in the world (1872), 3,468 square miles straddling the Wyoming-Montana-Idaho border. Yellowstone sits over the Yellowstone hotspot — a magma plume that has produced three caldera-forming "supervolcano" eruptions in the last 2.1 million years, the most recent 640,000 years ago. The current caldera is 30 by 45 miles. Geothermal features result: 10,000+ hot springs, 500+ geysers (more than the rest of the world combined), Old Faithful erupting on a 90-minute cycle, the bright bacterial mats around Grand Prismatic Spring. The Yellowstone River carved the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone with its 308-foot Lower Falls. Bison herd is the largest in the country (~5,000), grizzlies have returned to ~1,000, the wolves reintroduced in 1995 are at ~100. Most-visited national park in the US most years. From the air, the Upper Geyser Basin reads as a white mineral-stained clearing in the forest, with steam plumes visible 50-plus miles out on cool mornings; Grand Prismatic Spring shows its rainbow banding best from directly overhead.
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.