Yellowstone visit offers wildlife, while Cody has taste of Wild West

CODY, Wyo. -- You know western Wyoming and dumb luck are both on your side when your daughter spies three mule deer in a Yellowstone meadow. Then a moose midriver. Then bison, fox and marmot, trumpeter swans, a wayward seagull and a grizzly family, mama bear and two cubs, romping across the high slopes, safely distant but still riveting.

You hear the word "rodeo" used as a verb. Then you attend one in Cody, about 50 miles east of Yellowstone, and see not only bucking broncs, bull-riding, barrel-racing and calf-roping but also a stunt rider who circles the ring while standing astride two galloping horses.

You look up from lunch at Buffalo Bill's old hotel and find that Miss Rodeo Wyoming is seated at the counter, right between Miss Cody Stampede and Miss Rodeo America, all chowing down in their spangled blouses and sashes.

Old Faithful, which generally rests for 90 minutes between eruptions, starts spouting the moment you step up.

The Old Faithful Inn, whose dinner tables often are booked months in advance, has space for you the moment you step up. (It helps to step up at 10 minutes before 5 p.m.)

On a foray into Yellowstone's Mammoth Hot Springs area, you discover an appalling array of tasteless lawn ornaments at the home reserved for the Yellowstone concessionaire's top executive. Then they move, and you realize the elk are real. All 10 of them. They can't resist the grass and shade, the camera-happy tourists can't resist the elk and the rangers are forever struggling to keep the beasts with antlers separated from the beasts without.

By now, you've realized this isn't a multiple-choice test. It's more a reminder: Even when fully besieged by the summering masses, Yellowstone National Park remains a wildlife parade, a geothermal freak show, an essential rite of North American tourism, a lot of fun. And a side trip to Cody can fit about as nicely as cornbread alongside a slab of ribs.

In early July, my family and I spent five days in tiny Cody and massive Yellowstone, whose 3,472 square miles cover much of northwestern Wyoming, spilling over into southern Montana and eastern Idaho.

The park, which became the first national park in the world when it opened in 1872, had nearly 3.3 million visitors in 2009.

That was a record, but with so many Americans reconsidering foreign travel, packing up cars and heading for the parks, it might soon be broken. Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash says June was the busiest ever at the park: 694,841 visitors in 30 days. For at least a few nights of our visit, every one of the more than 2,000 hotel rooms and cabins in the park was booked.

If you enter the park from the south, the drama starts right away, with the steep slopes down to the Lewis River, the racing water and the ridgelines crowded with charred trees remaining from the fires of 1988. An estimated 36 percent of the park burned during that dry summer, and legions of skeletal lodgepole pines endure, dead sticks standing. But two decades of regrowth have brought along another generation, shorter and greener.

We didn't expect much from Old Faithful. But when the geyser immediately leaped into action, about 100 feet high and surrounded by perhaps 1,000 expectant visitors, there was no time for letdown. We took in the spectacle and sulfurous scent for perhaps five minutes, then marched right along to the Upper Geyser Basin, following boardwalks past scores of geothermal features, from eerily colored pools to mini-mountains spouting towers of spray.

Until you get here, it may be impossible to appreciate all the ways that water rises, falls, rushes, rests, is cooked, is chilled, is channeled and is flung in Yellowstone. There are more than 300 geysers and almost as many waterfalls, including the roaring wonders known as the Upper Falls and Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

It might be perverse to think too hard about man-made objects in such a place, but we spent more time admiring architecture than we expected to, beginning with the Old Faithful Inn, a century-old marvel with a six-story lobby, steeply pitched roof and 500-ton stone fireplace and chimney. This is where the semi-rustic, lodgepole-pine-intensive genre of "parkitecture" was born, and once you're inside, it's difficult to leave.

Under its spell, we found our way to two other woodsy wonders: the Roosevelt Lodge, which is north of the park's most heavily trafficked areas (and served me a memorable elk empanada) and the Lake Lodge, which faces Yellowstone Lake and offers cafeteria food under soaring pine ceilings.

Of course we could have stayed longer and seen more of Yellowstone, but Cody was calling. Cody, the town founded in the 1890s by the great Western showman Buffalo Bill. Set on the windswept plains just east of the mountains, Cody (elevation 5,095 feet; population, about 8,800) sits along the northern fork of the Shoshone River. To reach it from Yellowstone, you drive along the river as it rushes beneath the dramatic slopes and buttes of the Wapiti Valley.

Cody trades on its Old West roots, but it hasn't been infiltrated by galleries and fancy restaurants in the manner of Aspen, Colo.; Ketchum, Idaho; or western Wyoming's own glamour capital, Jackson Hole, about 50 miles south of Yellowstone. I liked that about Cody. I especially liked the Nite Rodeo.

There was no way I was going to miss the Buffalo Bill Historical Center.

The center is not one museum; it's a complex of five. One explores Buffalo Bill's history as a global Wild West Show impresario and maker of frontier myths. The others cover the art, natural history, Native American cultures and weaponry of the West, and there's nothing small-town about them.

They tell compelling stories with striking and extensive collections, including plenty of paintings by Thomas Moran, Charles Russell and Frederic Remington in the art space, and a circular natural-history exhibition space (completed in 2002) that leads visitors on a spiral journey through the flora and fauna found at different altitudes

With time for lunch in the cafe and a stroll through the sculpture garden, the center itself will likely fill most of your day.

--Yellowstone National Park, www.nps.gov/yell.

--Wyoming Tourism, www.wyomingtourism.org.

--Cody Chamber of Commerce, www.codychamber.org/visit- cody.cfm.

--Xanterra, Yellowstone's main concessionaire, www.travel yellowstone.com.