From Jackson up the valley floor and through Yellowstone's geyser country to Cody: a refuge built by photographs, a mountain that fell into a river, a porch where wilderness law was argued, a lobby built in one winter, and the town Buffalo Bill laid out.
4 days · 341 miles · best in summer & fall
Jackson, WY → Cody, WY
The Tetons rise straight out of Jackson Hole with no foothills in front of them, and the first day of this trip stays down on the valley floor, where the homesteaders, the elk and the conservationists made their arguments about who the valley was for. Then it goes north into Yellowstone, through the geyser basins, to the hot springs at Mammoth and the canyon Thomas Moran painted, before crossing the Absaroka Range by Sylvan Pass and dropping down the Shoshone River to Cody. It was all Shoshone, Bannock, Crow and Blackfeet country first, summer ground for hunting and gathering, and on the plateau the Tukudika, the Sheepeaters, stayed the winter. The drives are short. Wildlife jams, boardwalks and parking lots will take more time than the miles.
The drive, day by day
Press play to run the whole route, drag to any mile, or jump straight to a day. Every stop links to its own page.
Day 1 · The Valley Floor
Setting out from Jackson, WY · first stop National Elk Refuge
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Day 1
The Valley Floor
58 mi · about 2.2 hrs driving · overnight in Jackson Lake
Start at the north edge of Jackson, where the National Elk Refuge spreads out beside the highway, set aside in 1912 after Stephen Leek's photographs of starving elk reached Congress. Drive north to Gros Ventre Junction and east through Kelly to the Gros Ventre Slide, where the face of Sheep Mountain fell into the river in 1925 and the lake it dammed broke out two years later. Come back by Antelope Flats to Mormon Row and its barns, a Latter-day Saint farm village whose ditches still run. At Moose, walk the grounds of the Murie Ranch, where the Wilderness Act was argued into being on a cabin porch. Then take the Teton Park Road north under the peaks to Jackson Lake.
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Day 2
Into the Geyser Country
96 mi · about 3 hrs driving · overnight in Old Faithful
Run south on US-89 for a few miles to the Cunningham Cabin, an 1888 homestead where a posse shot two men in 1893 and the valley chose not to talk about it. Then head north past Jackson Lake and into Yellowstone by the South Entrance, crossing the Continental Divide twice on the way to the Upper Geyser Basin. Stop at Midway Geyser Basin for Grand Prismatic Spring; the best view of its colored rings is from the overlook on the Fairy Falls Trail, and those colors are living microbes. End at Old Faithful, and spend the evening in the lobby of the Old Faithful Inn, seventy-six feet of lodgepole built in a single winter.
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Day 3
Hot Water, Two Ways
94 mi · about 3.1 hrs driving · overnight in Canyon Village
Drive north along the Firehole and Gibbon rivers to Norris Geyser Basin, the hottest and most changeable in the park, where acid water boils near the surface and Steamboat, the world's tallest active geyser, erupts on no schedule anyone can predict. Continue north to Mammoth Hot Springs, where hot water rising through limestone builds about two tons of travertine terraces a day, drying out in one place and starting in another. Come back through Norris and cross to Canyon for the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the yellow rock and the 308-foot Lower Falls that Thomas Moran sketched in 1871. See it from Artist Point late in the day.
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Day 4
Over Sylvan Pass to Cody
93 mi · about 2.6 hrs driving · overnight in Cody
Follow the Yellowstone River south through Hayden Valley, where bison graze close to the road, to Fishing Bridge and the north shore of Yellowstone Lake. Turn east over Sylvan Pass, out of the park, and down the North Fork of the Shoshone through Wapiti Valley's eroded volcanic rock. Below Buffalo Bill Dam the highway passes the pullout above Colter's Hell, the trappers' original hot springs, still steaming faintly. In Cody stop at Old Trail Town, Bob Edgar's collection of rescued log buildings, then spend the afternoon at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, five museums under one roof that began as a memorial the year Cody died.
The drives this trip follows
Each one is traced end to end on its own page, with every stop worth making along the way.
