Wyoming, our loneliest, least-populous state—has some of the grandest geology, wildest legends, and most poignant historical artifacts found between the coasts. Let Texas claim the cowboy—the real home on the range is here.

Day One: Cheyenne to Rawlins (180 miles)

Happy Jack Road westward out of wind-ripped Cheyenne leads into an enormous arena of rolling, boulder-strewn land. Cross the high plateau in the Medicine Bow National Forest and then head northwest on U.S. 30 toward Medicine Bow, where Owen Wister stepped off the Union Pacific, imagined himself to be The Virginian, and later went on to write the world’s first wildly popular western novel. The historic, tin-ceilinged Virginian Hotel, as blocky and unornamented as a Monopoly marker, has been serving thirsty cowboys since 1911.

Go a bit farther west, past Hanna, whose coal pits are reminiscent of a Jovian moonscape, until you reach Rawlins, where you can overnight at the Cottontree Inn.

Day Two: Rawlins to Cody (312 miles)

After a tour of the “Crossbar Hotel,” the old Wyoming State Penitentiary and Rawlins’s prime tourist attraction, head north on U.S. 287 toward Independence Rock. This is Oregon Trail country—the land that 350,000 West-seeking pioneers, Mormons, and goldbugs trafficked between 1841 and the 1860s. Independence Rock served as a stopover of sorts, with many of the journeyers climbing it to survey the terrain that lay ahead, leaving their names scratched into its face (some of the signatures are still visible).

The route to Cody—Wyoming 135 to U.S. 26 and U.S. 20, through the spectacular Wind River canyon, then Wyoming 120 for the final 80-odd miles—is blessed with beauty. South of Sand Draw on Route 135 is a panorama of such magnificence that it is comprehensible only in sections: the snowcapped Grand Tetons in the far distance; a desertlike bowl of red rock and rangeland far below; tortured, almost Arizonan canyons and mesas; the Wind River Range piercing a single enormous cloud. Suddenly, the road peels off and dives steeply down into the Wind River basin.

Day Three: Cody to Gillette via Shoshone Canyon (264 miles)

In Cody, you could easily spend a whole day at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. It’s actually four museums covering not only Cody the man but classic western art, the Plains Indians, and the guns that subdued the West.

Continuing west from Cody, you’ll hit Shoshone Canyon, which has been called the most spectacular 50 miles of driving in all of America. In winter, when the canyon’s closed, head east toward the Thunder Basin—“an unadulterated sweep of almost total emptiness . . . enormous stretches [with] an oceanic quality of purity and variety,” according to Nathaniel Burt’s superb guidebook Wyoming.

The Bighorn Mountains loom in the distance on eastbound U.S. Alternate 14. Turn onto U.S. 310 and U.S. 16, which takes you past Ten Sleep—so named by the Crow Indians because it took ten overnights to get there (from where no one knows, but the name stuck) and on to the jagged slash deep into the sediment of aeons-ago oceans known as Ten Sleep Canyon. You’ll emerge at the top of the Bighorns, at nearly 10,000 feet, amid seasonal snowfields and small white whirlwinds—even in seemingly warm spring months.

Day Four: Gillette to Cheyenne (400 miles)

Devils Tower, the vast crystallized monolith of volcanic magma immortalized in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is a site sacred to local Native Americans. The tower—only 867 feet high but so vertiginous that it might as well be a mile—is the solidified core of a volcano that remained, frozen in mid-eruption, after the rest of it eroded away. It’s a geologic phenomenon so enormous that if you go nowhere else in northeastern Wyoming, you must stop here. Route 14 to Wyoming 585 and then U.S. 85 south toward Cheyenne is a smooth ride through idyllic countryside.

Wyoming’s roads can seem eerily empty to some, but for anyone who wants to see a West that remains curiously free of commercialism, where you can turn your back on the highway and see the land exactly as it looked from the Oregon Trail, this is a driver’s delight.

Pit Stops

Cody

Parson’s Pillow B&B (307-587-2382; cruising-america.com/parsonspillow; doubles, $75–$95). Proud Cut Saloon (307-527-6905; entrées, $6–$19).

Gillette

Jost House Inn B&B (307-687-1240; www.newwaveis.com/users/josthousebb; doubles, $50). Prime Rib Restaurant & Steakhouse (307-682-2944; entrées, $15–$22).

Rawlins

Best Western Cottontree Inn (307-324-2737; cottontree.net; doubles, $69). Aspen House (307-324-4787; entrées, $13–$33).