Another Visit to Cody

I was back in Cody, Wyoming, this past weekend to visit my mother, Arleen. The last time I had been up there was last July with Pat. As always, it does not take long to be reminded that one is no longer in California!

On our visits to Cody, a good deal of the time is spent either in favorite local eating establishments – Our Place, the Proud Cut Saloon and the Irma Restaurant – or riding around the countryside with Mom and her good friend, Robert Eddy, looking for interesting flora and fauna. June is a bit too early in the year for the flora (especially wildflowers), but the fauna is always out in force.

We made two long drives on this trip. On Saturday we headed west from Cody up through the East Gate of Yellowstone National Park, over Sylvan Pass (still a lot of snow there even in June) then down to Yellowstone Lake. From there we went north through the Hayden Valley, past Yellowstone Falls and on to Tower Junction, where we turned east and passed through the Lamar Valley though Cooke City and along the Chief Joseph Highway and through Dead Indian Pass on the way back to Cody. We were able to see many buffalo and some pronghorn in the Park, as well an incredibly cute family of foxes playing by the side of the road just outside of Cooke City.

On Sunday we headed in the opposite direction to the Bighorn Mountains – an area with which Mom and Robert are very familiar but to which I had never been. We drove northeast from Cody through Powell and Lovell, crossed the Bighorn River and then climbed into the mountains and up above the tree line. At Burgess Junction we turned south and then west – descending over Granite Pass and through Shell Canyon. We stopped at the waterfall at the bottom of the canyon pictured below - the rocks there are bedrock which is over 2.5 billion years old. Then it was back out onto the plains and through Greybull back to Cody. We saw a number of moose high in the Bighorns – who knew they liked to be so high up - just west of Burgess Junction and again near Tie Flume south of the Junction. In addition to the below photos, see this video of a group loping along.




Then there was the Cody cuisine - a breakfast and lunch at Our Place, a diner on the way out of Cody on the way to Yellowstone where coffee is 25 cents and is refilled constantly, some Rocky Mountain oysters and local brews (we tried some Snake River ale this time to supplement the normal Moose Drool) at the Proud Cut Saloon, and a buffalo steak at Buffalo Bill Cody’s Irma Hotel restaurant.



It was certainly good to see Mom and Robert again.

I am looking forward to the next visit.