Cody is home to one of the country’s supreme cultural attractions—the five museum complex of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Its third of a million square feet of exhibition space certainly makes it one of America’s largest museum complexes. The Whitney Gallery of Western Art presents an outstanding collection of masterworks of the American West, including original paintings, sculptures and prints from the early 19th century to the present. The Cody Firearms Museum houses the world’s largest and most important assemblage of American arms, as well as European arms dating to the 16th century. The Plains Indian Museum ranks as one of the nation’s finest Native American collections. The museum presents a varied tapestry of Plains Indian art and artifacts displayed in realistic settings. The Buffalo Bill Museum contains a wealth of material related to the life of Buffalo Bill Cody. The newest member of the museum group, The Draper Museum of Natural History, is a state of the art natural history museum that explores human interaction with the natural world associated with the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Highly interactive, it’s a hit with youth and adults alike.

• The Buffalo Bill Museum examines both the personal and public lives of W.F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody, and seeks to interpret his story in the context of the history and myth of the American West.
• The Whitney Gallery of Western Art presents an outstanding collection of masterworks of the American West. Original paintings, sculptures and prints trace artistic interpretations of the West from the early 19th century to today.
• The Plains Indian Museum features one of the country's largest and finest collections of Plains Indian art and artifacts. Explore the cultural histories, artistry and living traditions of Plains Indian peoples, including the Arapaho, Crow, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Blackfeet, Sioux, Gros Ventre, Shoshone and Pawnee.
• The Cody Firearms Museum contains the world's most comprehensive assemblage of American arms, as well as European arms dating to the 16th century.
• The Draper Museum of Natural History integrates the humanities with natural sciences to interpret the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and adjacent intermountain basins.
• The Harold McCracken Research Library advances the understanding, appreciation and study of the American West.

The Shoshone River is a northern Wyoming river whose headwaters are in Yellowstone National Park, and is a heavily traveled corridor for people visiting Yellowstone Park via the east entrance of Yellowstone. The Shoshone River here has been rated among the top ten freestone trout fisheries in the Rocky Mountains. Teddy Roosevelt once called the North Fork corridor the most scenic 50 miles of land in America. Cities it runs near or through are Cody, Powell, and Byron It ends when it runs into the Big Horn River near Lovell, Wyoming.

South Fork of the Shoshone River starts high in the southern end of the Absaroka mountain range in the Shoshone National Forest and it carves a beautiful swath between these beautiful peaks the line the South Fork of the Shoshone River. Visitors to the upper South Fork valley in the winter stand a good chance of observing bighorn sheep on their wintering grounds. This river is managed as a wild fishery with predominant emphasis on Yellowstone cutthroat (upper reaches). The lower reaches are an excellent brown trout fishery though access is limited due to private lands.

Visitors to the upper South Fork valley in the winter stand a good chance of observing bighorn sheep on their wintering grounds. This river is managed as a wild fishery with predominant emphasis on Yellowstone cutthroat (upper reaches). The lower reaches are an excellent brown trout fishery though access is limited due to private lands.

Galloping across the high desert foothills with manes and tails flying and hooves kicking up dust, there is nothing more iconic in the American West than a wild horse making tracks through wild habitat. The mustang is a part of the picture in the minds eye of many as they picture the west. The McCullough Peaks Wild Horse Herd Management Area (HMA) is located 12 to 27 miles east of Cody (70 miles east of Yellowstone National Park) and encompasses 109,814 acres of land, including the McCullough Peaks Wilderness Study Area. The climate is typical of a cold desert with annual precipitation averaging five to nine inches. Stock reservoirs and intermittent streams fed by winter snows and spring runoff provide adequate water for the HMA. Topography is highly variable, ranging from mostly flat to slightly rolling foothills carved by drainages, to colorful badlands and desert mountains featuring steep slopes, cliffs and canyons.

Heart Mountain

Heart Mountain is an 8,123-foot peak just north of Cody in the U.S. state of Wyoming, sticking up from the floor of the Bighorn Basin. The mountain is composed of limestone and dolomite of Ordovician through Mississippian age (about 500 to 350 million years old), but it rests on the Willwood Formation, rocks that are only about 55 million years old—rock on the summit of Heart Mountain is thus almost 300 million years older than the rocks at the base. For over one hundred years geologists have tried to understand how these older rocks came to rest on much younger strata.