Sheridan, WY
In northern Wyoming at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains, at 4,021ft MSL. Class D, single 6,801ft runway 14/32. The Bighorn front rises 8,000 feet in 15 miles to the west; Cloud Peak at 13,166 feet is the high point of the range and is visible from the airport on every clear day. Sheridan grew up as a railroad town serving the Powder River coal fields; Buffalo Bill Cody had ranching interests in the area in the 1880s and 1890s. The historic Sheridan Inn (1893) hosted Cody for over twenty years and remains in operation downtown. Eaton's Ranch outside Wolf, Wyoming — the original American dude ranch, opened 1879 — still operates 30 miles southwest of the field.
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.
On June 25-26, 1876, in the rolling grass hills above the Little Bighorn River, Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led the 7th Cavalry against the largest gathering of Plains Indians ever assembled — Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho under Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse — and was annihilated. Custer and over 260 of his men died; it was the Plains tribes' greatest victory, and it hastened their defeat as the army poured in afterward. The battlefield is preserved almost untouched: white marble markers stand scattered across the hillsides exactly where soldiers fell, and since 1999 red granite markers show where warriors died too — the first national monument to honor both sides of a battle. An Indian Memorial was added in 2003. The ground still reads as a battle map you can walk.
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.
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.