Big-City Casper
With about 60,000 residents, Casper is Wyoming’s second-largest city, but unlike the slightly larger Cheyenne, Casper is centrally located in the state. Casper boasts plenty of shopping, restaurants and hotel rooms — just shy of 2,700 — and the city plays host to many of the state’s major conventions and sports tournaments, including the annual College National Finals Rodeo every June.
“If you can call any city in Wyoming metropolitan, we are that,” said Darlene Matz, director of group services for the Casper Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We’re the big city.”
Although Casper is “not an Old West town,” it still delivers the Great Outdoors — along with Broadway plays, blues festivals and hot-air balloon celebrations. Hogadon Ski Area is just 11 miles south of town on Casper Mountain and offers groups discounted lift tickets and facility reservations. Casper Mountain Trails Center, next to Hogadon, includes 42 kilometers of cross-country ski trails as well as a 1.2-kilometer loop that is lighted for nighttime Nordic skiing; the center is also the future home of a biathlon training camp.
The North Platte River runs through town, and “you can go fishing outside your hotel room door,” Matz said half-jokingly. Groups can rent tubes or arrange rafting trips to float the river, which also has a Class 3 white-water park, or they can rent bikes to explore the 11-mile paved Platte River Trail that runs along the river’s banks.
While Casper itself doesn’t evoke that cowboy vibe, the city is home to museums and nearby historic sites that tell its pioneering history. The BLM-managed National Historic Trails Interpretive Center recounts the city’s role as an important convergence of where the Oregon, California, Mormon Pioneer and Pony Express trails all crossed the river. Visitors can feel what it was like to ford a river in an ox-pulled wagon — a similar exhibit gives guests the experience of riding on a stagecoach — or pull a Mormon handcart.
Fort Caspar Museum is a replica of the actual fort and trading post on the banks of the North Platte. The museum and rebuilt log fort evokes life during the height of the fort’s time as a key ferry crossing and includes a replica of the ferry that operated from 1847 to 1849. Groups can also arrange to have lunch or dinner on the fort’s lawn.
Another “extremely impressive” option for group tours is Casper College’s Tate Geological Museum, home to “Dee,” one of North America’s largest Columbian mammoths. But the most impressive option, Matz said, is for groups to join an active dinosaur dig, which is usually free.
A major upcoming event that groups may want to plan for now doesn’t happen for two years: a total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017. Experts say Casper will be the best place in the world to view it because of the city’s elevation, open skies and good chance of favorable weather. City officials are planning a four-day festival to celebrate the eclipse and expect 60,000 people to descend on the city.
Wild West in Cheyenne
Although Laramie is the college town and Casper is the “big city,” Cheyenne is “truly an authentic Western community,” said Jim Walter, director of sales and marketing for Visit Cheyenne.
“You say Cheyenne anywhere in the world, you get an image of the Old West,” he said. “We’ve been able to maintain that feel while providing all the modern amenities.”
The Western ambiance begins in downtown where the fully restored 1887 Union Pacific Depot houses a museum, a restaurant and a visitors center. The Cheyenne Street Railway Trolley, which just added a fourth 25-passenger trolley to its fleet, offers narrated history tours of the city and the West. But at any time of year, groups can opt for a ghost tour, and trolley guides are also available as step-on guides. Trolleys stop at the Wyoming State Museum, the Historic Governor’s Mansion and the Wyoming Capitol, as well as the Nelson Museum of the West and the Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum, which recently revamped its exhibits. The museum houses a collection of more than 150 horse-drawn carriages and wagons, many of which make appearances in Cheyenne Frontier Days parades.
Also downtown, guests can take free carriage rides or take home some Western flair from stores such as Just Dandy, Wyoming Home and The Wrangler, which is “hugely popular,” Walter said. After shopping, groups can grab a beer or do flight tastings at Cheyenne Brewing Company, housed in the historic depot, or Freedom’s Edge Brewing. Two more breweries are expected to open in the next couple of months. Self-guided walking tours of downtown also include information about the 1911 Historic Plains Hotel.
At Terry Bison Ranch, groups can touch and taste a bit of the Old West. The ranch sets up an engineer-led train tour that lasts about an hour; it is paired with a group lunch or dinner that can feature bison steaks and burgers. For the tours, visitors can buy “buffalo cakes” before boarding one of the ranch’s locomotives, and when the train pulls into the pasture, the bison run up to the passenger cars to eat treats out of guests’ hands.
Cheyenne Frontier Days is the city’s “main calling card,” Walter said. The 10-day rodeo and Western celebration features big-name musical acts, rodeo events, parades, pancake breakfasts, a carnival, Western-art shows, an Indian Village and the Old-Fashioned Melodrama at the Historic Atlas Theater. Although the “Daddy of ’em All” is Cheyenne’s busiest time of year, Frontier Days is a great time for groups to experience the city, Walter said. Visit Cheyenne usually tries to make sure a group does at least one session of the rodeo, a pancake breakfast at the downtown depot and a parade. Daily “Behind the Chutes” tours can show groups “a great overview of what they don’t usually see,” including the livestock areas and where the cowboys get ready, Walter said.
About 80 miles north of Cheyenne, two historic sites are must-stops to experience more of Wyoming’s pioneering spirit: Fort Laramie has more than three dozen buildings — some re-created, some restored — and Register Cliff is a 100-foot-tall sandstone outcropping that still bears the names of immigrants who carved their names on its face.
