Wyoming

Wyoming is the least populous state in the union, and it wears that emptiness like a crown. Nowhere is its grandeur more concentrated than in the northwest, where Yellowstone and Grand Teton sit almost shoulder to shoulder. Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, is a landscape of geothermal wonder, its geysers erupting on schedule, its hot springs glowing in impossible colors, its herds of bison and elk moving across valleys that seem lifted from an older, wilder age. Just south, the Grand Teton range erupts straight from the valley floor with no foothills to soften the blow, a wall of granite spires mirrored in the lakes below.

At the foot of the Tetons, Jackson Hole serves as the region’s lively hub, a mountain town of antler arches, ski slopes, and dude-ranch romance where wilderness and comfort meet on Main Street. It makes a natural base for exploring both parks, whether by raft on the Snake River, by trail into the high country, or simply from a porch with the mountains filling the view.

The rest of Wyoming rolls out in vast, high-plains solitude, and its landmarks stand all the more starkly for it. Devils Tower rises abruptly from the northeastern grassland, a fluted volcanic monolith sacred to Native peoples and unmistakable on the horizon, while the state capital of Cheyenne keeps its frontier heritage alive in rodeo grounds and railroad history at the state’s southeastern corner.

To travel Wyoming is to reckon with scale and space. The distances are long, the towns are few, and the reward is a West that still feels genuinely wild, its wonders left largely to speak for themselves beneath that limitless sky.