Buffalo, WY

From Thermopolis, Mary Lou really wanted to avoid the mountains, but Nicole wasn't going to wuss out from seeing the Bighorns. Everyone she asked said that the low road, the highway to Casper, was damn boring. Nicole won, and drove East on Rte 16. When we reached Tensleep, at the edge of Bighorn National Forest, we both went silent. The road seemed to be descending into the start of a canyon, even as the canyon walls rose higher and higher. But the Tensleep River, swollen with winter runoff and running parallel with the road, seemed to be rushing upward!

"Nicole," Mary Lou said, "That river is flowing upwards. Isn't it? That can't be right, but. . . Is it?" It was wild! We thought we had driven into those magnetic hills we had heard about on Discovery Channel. Spots on the planet where gravity doesn't work, they say. The river was defying gravity. And then, as we went deeper into the canyon, it looked and felt as if we were headed downward, but the RV engine was revving to climb. Surreal.

We kept stopping to scan the mountains for bighorn sheep, but we never did spot any. We drove through the Powder River Pass (9665 ft) and down into Buffalo, WY. It was late evening, and we were pretty tired, but we knew there was a famous watering hole in Buffalo - The Occidental Hotel.

"The Historic Occidental Hotel, established in 1880, in Buffalo, Wyoming has hosted many notorious guests over the years including Butch Cassidy and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill, Tom Horn, Teddy Roosevelt, President Herbert Hoover and Ernest Hemingway. The Virginian Restaurant at the Occidental Hotel is named after the famous novel "The Virginian" by Owen Wister who also spent a fair amount of time there. Colorful cowboys, lawmen and drifters were regular customers. Today, the hotel has been accurately and beautifully restored to its original grandeur. All rooms and suites are furnished with antiques and decorated in elegant period style. Many original features remain such as the embossed tin ceilings and several antique chairs along with the 23 bullet holes in the saloon. The 25-foot back bar in the saloon was brought in by wagon over a hundred years ago. True West Magazine recognized this gem by recently naming The Occidental Hotel “The Best Hotel in the West”. National Geographic Traveler included the Occidental Hotel in the top 129 Hotels to visit in North America 2009."

We agreed that we would stop in for one beer, just to see it. We left the Occidental two days later.