7 Best Towns In Wyoming For A Two-Day Recharge
Half of Wyoming is federal land, which means a weekend here comes with room to spread out. The seven towns below each make an easy two-day base. Buffalo and Laramie put outlaw history and old hotels a block from your room. Cody runs a rodeo every summer night. Ten Sleep and Douglas stay quiet enough to actually unplug. And none of them ask you to fight a crowd to slow down.
Buffalo
Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch reportedly holed up around Buffalo, and the town has been trading on that outlaw reputation ever since. The Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum, set in Buffalo's 1909 Carnegie Library, now holds more than 40,000 artifacts of Johnson County and Bozeman Trail history, from Cheyenne-gifted rifles to Basque sheep wagons. It is a bigger collection than a town of this size has any business keeping.
Down on Main Street, the Occidental Hotel has been open since 1880, when it started life as a tent on the Bozeman Trail. Locals call it "the Ox." Its saloon still shows off the original tin ceilings, the antique back bar, and a few genuine bullet holes in the walls. When you want the quiet version of the region, the Bighorn National Forest and its campgrounds sit a short drive west of town.
Cody
Cody calls itself the "Rodeo Capital of the World," and it has the nightly proof to back it up. The Cody Nite Rodeo runs every evening through the summer, and the Cody Stampede Rodeo takes over the arena around the Fourth of July, a tradition that dates to 1919. The town carries the name of William F. Cody, the showman better known as Buffalo Bill, who helped found it in 1895.
His fingerprints are all over the place. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West packs five museums under one roof, covering firearms, Plains Indian art, and Western history. Buffalo Bill built the Irma Hotel downtown in 1902 and named it for his daughter, calling it "just the sweetest hotel that ever was." Its French-made cherrywood bar is still the most photographed thing in Cody. After dark, Sheridan Avenue puts on staged gunfights outside the Irma most summer evenings.
Douglas
For most of the year, Douglas is exactly the kind of quiet that a recharge weekend calls for. Then every August the Wyoming State Fair rolls into this town of about 6,500, and the fairgrounds fill up with livestock shows, carnival rides, and grandstand concerts. The rest of the calendar, it stays calm.
The North Platte River runs right through the middle of town, so anglers can wade in without much of a drive. West of downtown, Ayres Natural Bridge Park frames a rare natural rock span arching over LaPrele Creek. For a place to sleep, the Blue Buffalo Motel keeps rates low, and the century-old Hotel LaBonte offers mid-range rooms in a building on the National Register of Historic Places.
Evanston
The Evanston Roundhouse and Railyards Complex is the reason to stop here, a restored piece of the town's Union Pacific past that now hosts markets and community events under its original bays. Like a lot of towns in southwest Wyoming, Evanston grew up around the transcontinental railroad, and the roundhouse keeps that story visible.
Bear River State Park sits on the edge of town, where a herd of bison and elk graze along a walkable riverside trail. Golfers can play the Purple Sage Golf Course east of town, with the Uinta foothills for a backdrop. Chain hotels cover most lodging, though the Prairie Inn keeps budget rates about a half-mile from the state park.
Jackson
Four arches built entirely of shed elk antlers mark the corners of Jackson's Town Square, and they are the most photographed spot in town. The name trips people up. The town is Jackson. The wide flat valley cradling it is Jackson Hole. The two get used interchangeably, but only one is the actual town.
Jackson earns its reputation on the slopes in winter and on the trails the rest of the year, with a large network of paved pathways and mountain-bike singletrack fanning out from town. It also sits within an easy drive of Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, which is a big part of why the small downtown books up fast. The Virginian Lodge covers the budget end as a revamped motel. At the other extreme, The Cloudveil opened on the Town Square in 2021 with 100 rooms and a rooftop terrace facing Snow King.
Laramie
The Wyoming Territorial Prison once held Butch Cassidy, and today it is a museum you can walk through in an afternoon in Laramie. The town sits 7,200 feet up on a high plain, and with fewer than 33,000 residents it stays walkable despite being one of the state's larger places. Like Evanston, it started as a Union Pacific stop.
The University of Wyoming anchors downtown, and its Old Main building has stood since 1886. History buffs can book the Kuster Hotel in the Downtown Laramie Historic District, then visit the Wyoming House for Historic Women, which opened downtown in 2012 to honor the state's suffrage record. It is a fitting stop in the town where Louisa Swain cast the first ballot by a woman under the new law in 1870.
Ten Sleep
The name comes from a unit of travel time. Native travelers reckoned the spot as ten nights, or "ten sleeps," between major camps, with popular accounts placing the endpoints near Fort Laramie and Yellowstone. Fewer than 300 people live in Ten Sleep today, and the Ten Sleep Pioneer Museum keeps that frontier history on display. The town throws a Fourth of July rodeo and parade that has run since 1946.
What draws most visitors is the rock. Ten Sleep Canyon cuts into the western Bighorns just east of town along the Cloud Peak Skyway, and its limestone walls have made it one of the country's premier sport-climbing destinations. Summer road-trippers get the scenic drive. Winter brings snowmobilers to the surrounding forest. The Meadowlark Lake Lodge, about 20 miles east on Highway 16, rents cabins year-round near a mountain lake.
Which Town Fits Your Two Days
The choice comes down to what you want your weekend to sound like. Cody and Ten Sleep run on cowboy noise, one with a nightly rodeo and the other with a July parade that predates statehood memory. Buffalo and Laramie put outlaw history and old hotels within a walkable block or two. Evanston and Douglas keep things quietest, trading marquee attractions for a roundhouse, a river, and open calendars. Jackson is the splurge, with national-park access priced accordingly. All seven give you the one thing Wyoming has more of than almost anywhere else, which is space to stop moving for a couple of days.
