Year 2 Days 267 and 268 Buffalo Bill State Park

Yesterday, we left the Little Big Horn and headed west toward Yellowstone. Our goal was the Buffalo Bill State Park just west of Cody, Wyoming. It is on the route that takes you to the eastern entrance of Yellowstone National Park. We had tried to make a reservation at one of the campgrounds inside of Yellowstone but discovered that all but one campground closes after Labor Day. The one campground that is still open had been booked full for over a month. Thus, the closest campground we were able to get into was Buffalo Bill State Park, which is still an hour’s drive from Yellowstone.

The drive to our new park was easy but took 4 hours with a stop to refuel LeuC. When we arrived, we discovered that I had made a mistake in making this reservation over a month ago. I had it down that our reservation was to start on the 24th but in reality, it was to start on the 25th. Ugh!

While all of the camping sites that had electricity were full, the park still had sites available to dry dock. Whew! We happily snagged a beautiful site and settled in for the day. Since it was supposed to get down to near freezing during the night, I prepped the diesel heater option that we have and ended up running that overnight. It kept us nice and warm and only uses a gallon of diesel overnight.

Our views of Buffalo Bill Reservoir, the mountains surrounding it and our campsite were fantastic as you can see below.

Today, we moved over to our reserved site once it was open. Now plugged into 50-amp power, we can run our heat pumps during the day to keep warm and rely on our diesel heater only during the night. It is important to run the diesel heater whenever the air temperature can get down to freezing to prevent the heat exchanger on the diesel heater from freezing and bursting delicate tubing. Being plugged into power also means that we can keep the house batteries fully charged without running our generator. With two refrigerators, a dishwasher and a washer and drier, we can be just as hungry for electricity as a house.

After moving into our new site, I drove back down the road a few miles to explore the Buffalo Bill Dam and its visitor’s center. I had read that the dam was built in 1909 and when it opened, it was the tallest dam in the world. It cost about a million dollars to build which, over a hundred years ago, was quite a sum. Now, it is just a drop in the bucket.

I took a number of photos while there and will let them show you what I saw.