The Snowy Range road climbing between snowbanks and spruce toward the peaks of the Medicine Bow Mountains in late spring
Tony Webster / CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Wyoming · Region

Cheyenne, Laramie & the Snowy Range

The Union Pacific's summit and the Ames pyramid, Laramie's first women jurors and first woman voter, and the territorial prison that held Butch Cassidy.

5 places to explore

Cheyenne carries the name of a people whose hunting ground this was, along with the Arapaho and the Lakota. The Union Pacific reached it by the end of 1867 and Laramie the next year, climbing between them over Sherman Summit at 8,247 feet, the highest point on the first transcontinental railroad. There in 1882 the railroad finished a granite pyramid designed by Henry Hobson Richardson in memory of Oakes and Oliver Ames, the brothers who had financed and run it; Oakes had been censured by Congress in 1873 over the Crédit Mobilier fraud. The railroad later moved its tracks south, and the town of Sherman beside the monument died.

Laramie put the suffrage law of 1869 to work first. In March 1870 six women were called to a grand jury there, the first time in history women had served on one, and on September 6, 1870, Louisa Swain, seventy years old, cast the first documented vote by a woman in Wyoming. The territorial penitentiary, finished in 1872 on the west side of the Laramie River, took in its most famous prisoner on July 15, 1894: George Cassidy, serving time for horse theft, who was pardoned eighteen months later. In 1901 the prisoners were moved west to the new state penitentiary at Rawlins, which held inmates until 1981; both prisons are open to visitors now.

What to See in Cheyenne, Laramie & the Snowy Range

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Rounded granite boulders of Vedauwoo stacked among pines and grass under a blue sky with scattered clouds

Vedauwoo

Laramie

Knobs of 1.4-billion-year-old granite between Laramie and Cheyenne, rough as sandpaper and famous among climbers for its wide cracks.

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Natural Areas

The pale quartzite face of Medicine Bow Peak rising above Lake Marie, spruce trees on the shore

Medicine Bow Peak

Centennial

The Snowy Range's quartzite high point, where United Air Lines Flight 409 struck the east face in 1955 and killed all sixty-six aboard.

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Historic Sites

A small white frame building at Fort Fred Steele beside a line of green trees on the North Platte, banded grey bluffs rising behind

Fort Fred Steele State Historic Site

Sinclair

A fort built in 1868 to guard the Union Pacific's North Platte crossing, which became the collecting yard for railroad ties floated down the river.

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Towns & Gateways

A roper on horseback chasing a calf out of the chute in a cloud of dust at Cheyenne Frontier Days, a flagman and the grandstand behind

Cheyenne Frontier Days

Cheyenne

A railroad agent's excursion scheme for a town with no crop to celebrate, which became a six-hour show in 1897 and the Daddy of 'em All.

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Architecture

A black-and-white survey photograph of the Wyoming State Capitol in Cheyenne, its sandstone wings and domed tower seen from the southeast

Wyoming State Capitol

Cheyenne

A sandstone capitol set to face the Union Pacific depot down one long street, its copper dome gilded in 1900 when the copper tarnished.

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Stories from Cheyenne, Laramie & the Snowy Range

Geology

The Bone Rush at Como Bluff

Two railroad men found giant bones weathering out of a ridge beside the Union Pacific in 1877. Como Bluff became the richest dinosaur ground yet known and the main battlefield of Marsh and Cope's Bone Wars.

4 min read

Cheyenne, Laramie & the Snowy Range rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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