Cody KOA

The Great Outdoor

The most obvious choice for enjoying the outdoors when you’re in Cody is Yellowstone National Park. It has gushing geysers, rainbow-colored hot springs, and herds of bison to spot - and those are just the things on the well-trodden tourist trail. It also has some of the best hiking and backpacking routes in the state, allowing you to disappear into the wilderness for days or even weeks at a time if that’s what you’re looking for.Yellowstone gets quite crowded during the summer though, and you may want to look elsewhere if you’d prefer to experience the splendor of nature without a thousand other tourists. In that case, head over to Bighorn Canyon just east of Cody. It is, perhaps, one of the most underrated natural tourist attractions in the country, with magnificent rock walls flanking the gorgeous Bighorn Lake that is popular with boaters, kayakers, and anglers. The town of Kane is the closest settlement to the lake, but you won’t find anyone there to sell you the necessities, as it’s actually a ghost town. It’s well worth checking out, but if you need to buy something, the town of Lovell is a good option about 20 minutes' drive from the lake.For something closer to town, you might enjoy hiking in the nearby national forest, which doesn’t have the entry fees of Yellowstone, but still offers some beautiful mountain vistas. There are also excellent trails just a few miles from town, like the Bluebird Trail off Highway 16. It’s quite popular with locals and is a great example of the basin topology, the vast expanses of grassland carved up by fast-moving rivers that are prevalent throughout Wyoming.

Exploring the City

Undoubtedly the biggest attraction in Cody is the Buffalo Bill Center of the West Museum. It’s actually a large complex consisting of five museums: the Buffalo Bill Museum, Whitney Western Art Museum, Draper Natural History Museum, Plains Indian Museum, and Cody Museum of Firearms. You could easily spend an entire day here when you get an RV rental near Cody; if you only visit one museum focused on the Old West, this should be the one.If you’re short on time when renting an RV here, there’s also the Cody Heritage Museum and the Cody Dug Up Gun Museum just down the road from the Buffalo Bill Center. These two offer a more condensed version of many of the exhibits that you’d see at the center, including exhibits that run through the entire history of Cody from cowboys to oil drilling to the tourism hotspot that it is today.You’ll never go hungry when you get a campervan rental in Cody either; there’s a wealth of great restaurants packed into this small town. While it has the obvious steakhouses, bison burgers, and diners with cowboy flair, there are also quite a few ethnic restaurants serving everything from Mexican to Thai food. Being so close to Yellowstone, the town caters to an eclectic mix of tourists.