Guernsey State Park
Guernsey Reservoir is also a remarkably intact 1930s designed landscape, where CCC-built roads, overlooks, trails, shelters, and a museum were composed to reveal the lake in sequence.
Places and wildlife — page 42
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Seminoe State Park
At Seminoe, a working North Platte reservoir meets near-vertical red-and-white strata, 2.7-billion-year-old mountain rock, and an active dune field in one unusually exposed landscape.
Boysen State Park
Boysen pairs a 20-mile Wind River reservoir with dispersed beaches and campgrounds, a 1951 power dam, and the southern gate of one of Wyoming’s clearest roadside geology lessons.
Buffalo Bill State Park
A 1910 engineering landmark, broad reservoir recreation, and exposed chapters of Wyoming geology meet along the Shoshone River west of Cody.
Keyhole State Park
Northeastern Wyoming’s largest reservoir spreads among ponderosa pine, blocky sandstone bays, ten campgrounds, and more than 150 million years of shoreline geology.
Glendo State Park
A 22,000-acre North Platte reservoir park combines nineteen campgrounds, six seasonal ramps, sandy coves, singletrack, and a 300-million-year rock record.
National Elk Refuge
Immediately beside Jackson, a 1912 refuge makes elk migration, winter survival, habitat limits, disease, and wildlife management unusually visible.
Devils Tower National Monument
Rising 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River, this extraordinary columned rock is simultaneously a sacred place, a geological puzzle, and America’s first national monument.
Grand Prismatic Spring
Yellowstone’s largest hot spring turns temperature into visible color—but the famous whole-spring view and the revealing close view begin at different parking lots.
Old Faithful
Old Faithful is not a natural clock: its next eruption is predicted from the duration of the last, making observation more interesting than simply arriving for a show.
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone
Yellowstone’s river drops 109 feet, then 308 feet, through a canyon whose yellows, reds, and whites record hot water altering volcanic rock long before the river exposed it.
Mammoth Hot Springs
Mammoth is Yellowstone’s great travertine laboratory: carbonate-rich hot water builds pale steps quickly, then shifts course and leaves yesterday’s active terrace dry.
Jenny Lake
Jenny Lake is both a destination and a trail junction: a glacially carved lake beneath Teewinot, Mount St. John, and the mouth of Cascade Canyon.
Vedauwoo Recreation Area
Vedauwoo turns 1.4-billion-year-old granite into rounded towers, squeeze-through corridors, off-width cracks, and a complete high-plains ecosystem at 8,200 feet.
Wind River Canyon
US-20/WY-789 threads the Wind River, railroad, and highway through an Owl Creek Mountain gorge where the exposed rock record runs back about 2.9 billion years.
Cascade Canyon Trail
From Jenny Lake, the route climbs past Hidden Falls and Inspiration Point before entering a broad glacial canyon beneath steep Teton walls.
Taggart Lake Trail
Taggart Lake offers a relatively moderate route through forest, moraine, and open views to a glacial lake beneath the Tetons.
Fairy Falls Trail
The trail crosses lodgepole forest to slender Fairy Falls, with an optional continuation toward Imperial Geyser.
Medicine Bow Peak Trail
Routes from Lake Marie and West Lake Marie climb talus and tundra to Medicine Bow Peak, with broad views across the Snowy Range.
Cirque of the Towers Trail
The Big Sandy approach leads into one of the Wind River Range’s most celebrated granite cirques, passing forests, lakes, and Jackass Pass.
Popo Agie Falls Trail
From Bruce’s Bridge in Sinks Canyon, this trail follows the Middle Fork Popo Agie through forest and granite toward a series of falls and cascades.
Cheyenne Botanic Gardens
The conservatory, themed gardens, community spaces, and children’s village show how plants can thrive under Cheyenne’s cold, wind, altitude, and short growing season.
Wyoming Toad
The Wyoming Toad is among North America’s rarest amphibians and is not a casual roadside find.
Wyoming Pocket Gopher
This species is identified more reliably through range, soil, skull, and genetic work than a fleeting glimpse.
Kendall Warm Springs Dace
Kendall Warm Springs Dace survives in one exceptionally small natural range. Its importance lies less in showy appearance than in adaptation to stable warm water and the extreme vulnerability created by having every wild individual in one system.
Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout
Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout connect lake, river, tributary, bear, bird, and human food webs.
Desert Yellowhead
Desert Yellowhead lives on pale, harsh soils where bare ground is part of the habitat rather than an empty walking surface.
Laramie Columbine
Laramie Columbine is smaller and less theatrical than many garden columbines. Pale flowers, short spurs, divided leaves, limestone crevices, and the restricted Laramie Range together support identification; any single trait is insufficient.
Wyoming Indian Paintbrush
The brilliant color belongs mostly to bracts, while the true flowers are smaller and tucked among them.
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
Experiment halls, a Cold War submarine, a planetarium, and rotating science exhibitions make OMSI a place to test ideas rather than merely read about them.
Portland Art Museum
Northwest and Native art provide a regional spine for collections that range across Asia, Europe, the Americas, photography, and contemporary practice.
High Desert Museum
Wildlife, living-history spaces, Indigenous perspectives, art, and ecology explain the High Desert as a connected human and natural system.
North American Aerospace Museum
The Spruce Goose anchors two immense halls where aircraft and spacecraft reveal engineering compromises, industrial scale, and the people behind flight.
Oregon Historical Society
Objects, archives, oral histories, and contested interpretation make Oregon history broader—and less comfortable—than a pioneer narrative.
Columbia River Maritime Museum
Shipwrecks, bar pilots, rescue crews, fishing fleets, trade, and a retired lightship explain why the Columbia River Bar is called the Graveyard of the Pacific.
Hallie Ford Museum of Art
A compact university museum pairs Pacific Northwest and Native art with historical collections and focused temporary exhibitions.
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
Asian collections, Northwest art, and changing exhibitions inhabit an Ellis Lawrence building whose courtyards and ornament are part of the visit.
Museum of Natural and Cultural History
Fossils, archaeology, Indigenous knowledge, and living cultural relationships connect Oregon’s deep time with its human present.
Tamástslikt Cultural Institute
Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla people tell their own histories—from homeland and treaty pressure to persistence, adaptation, and sovereignty.
Favell Museum
Native material culture and western art share close, object-dense galleries that reward careful attention to maker, material, and collecting history.
Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals
Crystals, meteorites, fossils, lapidary work, and a room organized by color turn mineral science into close visual comparison.
World Forestry Center Discovery Museum
Interactive exhibits frame forests as ecological, cultural, industrial, and climate systems—then place those choices beside Washington Park’s living trees.
Oregon Rail Heritage Center
Three city-owned locomotives, an active restoration shop, and volunteer expertise make Portland rail history mechanical, noisy, and alive.
Fort Clatsop
Fort Clatsop focuses the visit on the Lewis and the reconstructed fort is interpretation.
Pittock Mansion
A grand 1914 house turns Portland’s rise, domestic technology, and changing skyline into one tightly focused hilltop visit.
Timberline Lodge
Timberline Lodge focuses the visit on Depression-era public works and handmade furnishings.
Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site
Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site focuses the visit on Chinese immigrant life and herbalist Ing Hay.
Vista House at Crown Point
Vista House at Crown Point focuses the visit on an Arts and the octagonal interior.