Clear Creek Crossing

Buffalo (population 4,500) is the gateway town to the Bighorn Mountains — a place that has stayed honestly itself in an era when most western towns either disappeared or got rebuilt for tourists. The Occidental Hotel still stands on Main Street, the same hotel where Owen Wister wrote The Virginian and where Butch Cassidy reportedly drank. The Jim Gatchell Museum, two blocks away, holds one of the finest small-town western collections in America. This is where Walt Longmire eats lunch in Craig Johnson's novels, and the show's annual Longmire Days festival in July fills the town for a weekend of storytelling, signings, and cowboy poetry.

From Clear Creek Crossing, the Clear Creek Trail System runs over 20 miles through Buffalo and into the surrounding country — accessible directly from the property. Walk a mile downstream and you're in town. Walk a mile upstream and you're in cottonwood bottoms with mule deer and the occasional moose. Behind the cabin, BLM public land opens up for off-trail wandering, wildlife viewing, and dark-sky stargazing — Buffalo sits far enough from any major city that the Milky Way is a regular evening feature.

The bigger geography is the Bighorn National Forest — 1.1 million acres of high country starting twelve miles west of town. Crazy Woman Canyon (a 13-mile scenic drive that locals consider a rite of passage) cuts a dramatic gorge through the mountains. The Cloud Peak Skyway tops out at 13,171 feet on the way to Cloud Peak itself, the tallest mountain in the range. Lake DeSmet — 4,000 acres of cold, deep water — sits ten minutes north for boating, kayaking, and walleye fishing. Fort Phil Kearny, a reconstructed 1860s fort with summer stargazing events and history programs, is twenty minutes south.

Fly fishing is a religion here. Clear Creek itself holds rainbow and brown trout right in front of the cabin. The Tongue River, North Fork of the Powder, and the alpine lakes of the Cloud Peak Wilderness are all within an hour. Buffalo Golf Club (established 1934, with mountain views from every hole) is a five-minute drive. The Buffalo Bicycle Tour, the Bighorn Trail Run, and Longmire Days anchor the summer calendar — and Sheridan, with its larger airport and downtown, is thirty-five minutes north via I-90 if you want a city day.

What you won't find in Buffalo: chain restaurants on every corner, traffic, attitude, or the manufactured-western feel that sometimes creeps into other Wyoming gateway towns. What you will find: a working downtown, a county library that still hosts author talks, three coffee shops where the regulars know each other, and a creek running through the middle of it all. Ready to make Buffalo your basecamp? Clear Creek Crossing puts you right on the creek, minutes from all of it.