A Night in the Wild West

This was our hotel in Cooke City. We arrived around 3pm in the afternoon, after the Beartooth pass ride. Its a very small town, here are some stats:

• 90 people live there
• You can only get 'through' the town between June and October. The rest of the year the Beartooth road is closed.
• It's 4 miles from the gate to Yellowstone
• The nearest traffic light is 110 miles away

Oh, and our hotel thought they had highspeed, however - not. My connection showed 1.0 mbps with a Signal Strength: VeryGood...yeah, right...

The local general store has all its original oak cabinetry and even the old tin bins.

So, we're out on the deck of our lodge when a lone buffalo wanders into town. We find out just in time to see him walk away. Later, we jumped on the bike....just to see if he was still walking up the road....here he was....

The story goes, the night before we get to town, there was apparently a herd of 200 buffalo that had passed through the main street (there's only 1) and headed up the road. We were disappointed we'd missed seeing, locals said they'd never seen that happen....then the next morning, Mike goes out around 6:30a to get coffee and look whats rolling into town...the whole herd was back....it was very cool! These things are HUGE!!

Mike ran back to the hotel and burst the door open, calling "The buffalo are back!"....keep in mind, for me it was 6:30AM - I sat up looked at him and said where's my pants?!

I told him he should have ran in saying "Tutunkwa, Tutunkwa" like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves...what? it might have got me up faster?!

Yellowstone, day 1 - up next!