Cody and the Canyon Road to the Absarokas
Cody sits at the mouth of the Shoshone River canyon, where the highway to Yellowstone runs west through the Wapiti Valley into the Absarokas.
The Buffalo Bill Cody Scenic Byway is 52 miles long, and nearly all of it points west. It leaves Cody on Sheridan Avenue, follows the Shoshone River through a cut in the rim rock, and runs directly at the Absaroka Range until it ends at Yellowstone National Park's East Entrance. Cody is not the last settlement on the route — Wapiti and Pahaska Tepee sit farther up the valley — but it is the only full town, and the canyon road west is why the town exists.
William F. Cody, then at the height of his Wild West fame, bought land on the Shoshone with business partners in 1895 and platted the town a year later. Their proposal was straightforward: Cody would be the eastern gateway to Yellowstone. The railroad reached it in 1901, and the first hotels went up on Sheridan Avenue. Fifty-two miles of mountain country still lay between the new town and the park gate; the road through it became the town's principal project and remains its principal reason for existing.
A town at the canyon mouth
Cody was laid out on sagebrush flats at about 5,000 feet, where the Shoshone River leaves its canyon and enters the Bighorn Basin. That position gave the town its purpose but not its water supply. The Shoshone Project, one of the first federal reclamation efforts, built a dam across the river a few miles upstream. Shoshone Dam, completed in 1910, was a concrete arch 325 feet high, the highest dam in the world at its completion, and its reservoir backed water up the canyon nearly to the foot of the mountains. Renamed Buffalo Bill Dam in 1946, it remains visible from the byway, which passes through the canyon below the dam a few miles west of downtown.
The canyon's south wall is Rattlesnake Mountain, a long, bare ridge that rises more than 8,600 feet above sea level, roughly 3,000 feet above the reservoir. The highway cuts between the dam and the mountain's lower slope, then opens into the Wapiti Valley, where the ground begins to climb in earnest toward the Absarokas.
The North Fork road
The road west of Cody is U.S. Routes 14, 16, and 20, signed together as the Buffalo Bill Cody Scenic Byway. It follows the North Fork of the Shoshone River for nearly its whole length, rising from about 5,000 feet in town to about 6,900 feet at the park gate. The Absaroka Range, a mass of volcanic rock laid down roughly 50 million years ago that forms the eastern wall of Yellowstone, fills the view ahead for much of the route.
The valley settlements are small. Wapiti, about 25 miles from Cody, is an unincorporated place with a post office, a store, and a scattering of guest ranches; the name comes from the Shawnee word for elk. Farther west, two miles short of the East Entrance, Pahaska Tepee marks the hunting lodge William F. Cody built in 1904. "Pahaska" is Lakota for "long hair," the name Buffalo Bill used among the Lakota. The lodge still stands and operates as a resort, the last outpost of the road before the park boundary.
Winter on the byway
In winter the road's character changes. Plows keep the highway open from Cody to Pahaska Tepee, where maintenance stops at the park boundary. The East Entrance Road beyond is groomed for snowmobiles and closed to wheeled vehicles. The road is not empty, though. Yellowstone's east side employs rangers and support staff, many of whom live in Cody and commute the full length of the byway year-round.
The canyon also functions as a winter range. Elk come down out of the high country, and bison from the Yellowstone herd cross the boundary into the Wapiti Valley. At the Buffalo Bill Reservoir, Wyoming's Game and Fish Department feeds bighorn sheep through the coldest months at a site visible from the highway. Trumpeter swans gather on the Shoshone River near town; the wintering flock is one of the larger ones in the lower 48 states.
When the snow clears, the same road delivers the town's summer traffic. The Cody Nite Rodeo runs nightly on the east side of town from June through August, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West fills its five museums under one roof, and outfitters in town book trips into the Shoshone National Forest and the Absarokas. The canyon road is not an amenity attached to Cody; it is the town's Main Street continued in another form, and the reason Cody is where it is.
