51 Interstate 25 Service Road East, Cheyenne, 307-634-4171,
Rates: Cabins $79.95 per night, ($175 during Frontier Days). 13 bunkhouse rooms $58.95 per night (same Frontier Days) sleep two to a room. RV sites are $31.95 nightly ($33.95 Frontier Days) and $175 per week. Parking lot.
Stay here if you’re: on your way to or from Cheyenne, have an RV and need a place to park it for the night, are traveling with 25 of your closest friends, or love the smell of bison manure in the morning.
It’s close to: the fireworks sales tents at the exit. Cheyenne is 15 minutes.
The rooms are: cabins in need of a good spring cleaning, and here it is July. We pulled the curtains open to look out the filthy windows and could hardly breathe, there was so much visible gunk coming off them in a cloud; the dining table sported a slick of dirt. The cabins offer no cookware or utensils, so if you are planning to cook here, bring it all. They do have nice back porches that look out over the pastures, so in the distance you can see the bison, camels and horses. It’s nice to sit out there when the heat subsides, at least until the wind changes, and then it becomes pretty fragrant.
They put all of the money into: the gift shop, a clean, inviting and charmingly rustic building that is well-stocked with scented soaps, cowboy hats and kitschy souvenir items designed to help you have someone else think you’ve just experienced an authentic part of the West.
The bottom line: If you’ve never seen a bison and this is going to be your only chance ever, well, by all means, pay $11 to get on an open-air train to chug out a quarter mile to have them slop some food in a trough to call them over. They have a few camels, too, and if that doesn’t say Wild West, what does? The restaurant serves decent, reasonably priced food, with much of it in little plastic cups, but if there’s a wedding, as during our stay, you will be forced to choose between sitting on the hot patio or in what feels like a plywood lean-to. On our first visit, we didn’t know the soup and salad promised with the meal meant we had to go to a salad bar in another room — a fact our server, oops, shared with us as she set our entrees down with a muttered, “sorry about that, you can still go over.”
Kyle Wagner
