Images of Hot Springs State Park – Central Wyoming, taken in June 2018.

Hot Springs State Park located in Thermopolis Wyoming is a square mile of land originally purchased by the federal government from the Shoshone Indians and ultimately passed to the state of Wyoming. The park includes prairie land as well as the largest mineral hot springs in the world and several spas which have been licensed by the state.

Thermopolis was to be an overnight stop for me on my way to Hardin Montana near Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. I had no plans here except to rest up for another full day of driving. When I pulled in to the RV park where I had made my reservation I was thinking that I wouldn’t even unhook the Subaru from my RV so that I would have less to do the next morning. That idea changed because my pull-thru site wasn’t long enough to accommodate my plan. Out of the blue I asked the man at the desk if there was anything in the area that I just shouldn’t miss and he told me about the town’s hot springs. The car needed to be unhooked anyway so I might as well embark on an exploration of this local attraction.

What an incredible surprise! This tiny park was the site of an extraordinary hot spring with the colorful Rainbow Terraces as its centerpiece. The Big Spring was up to 30 feet deep and had 2.1 million gallons flowing from it per day and a second smaller spring, White Sulphur Spring, was…well, white with a strong sulphur odor (I bet you didn’t see that coming!). Throw in a park road through a flowering prairie surrounded by rolling hills with some bison grazing nearby and my ‘overnight stop’ was an amazing unplanned adventure!