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Cody, Wyoming Attractions: What to Actually Do, With Current Prices

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the nightly rodeo, Old Trail Town, the dam in Shoshone Canyon, and the road to Yellowstone's East Gate. Hours, admission, and how many days each one really takes.

By Wyoming Trading Post Editors Updated October 13, 2026
Sheridan Avenue in downtown Cody, Wyoming at dusk, traffic on the main street between low brick storefronts, with the neon Irma Hotel sign on the right and the Cody Theatre marquee on the left.
Sheridan Avenue at dusk. The Irma, built by Buffalo Bill in 1902 and named for his daughter, is the neon on the right, and it still serves at the original cherrywood bar. , Photo by Cityofcody via Wikimedia Commons, 2024. CC0 1.0.

Cody has five attractions worth the drive and one of them takes two days on its own. The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is $24 for adults and general admission is good for two days across all five museums, which is not generosity so much as an accurate estimate of how long it takes. The Cody Nite Rodeo runs every night from June through August at 8 p.m. Old Trail Town is $15 and open May 15 to September 30. The Buffalo Bill Dam Visitor Center is free. And the East Entrance of Yellowstone, 53 miles west, is open May 1 through October 31.

Budget two full days for the town and a third if Yellowstone is part of the trip. Below is what each one costs, what hours it keeps, and how long it actually takes.

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West

720 Sheridan Ave, Cody, WY 82414. Five museums under one roof, and the Center’s own site says plainly that general admission tickets allow entry for two days.

Admission, as posted:

CategoryPrice
Adults$24
Seniors$23
Students with valid ID$22
Children 6 to 17$17
Children 5 and underFree
Active US militaryFree
Park County youth 17 and under, with one accompanying adultFree

Hours run by season:

  • May 1 to September 15: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily
  • September 16 to October 31: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily
  • November 1 to 30: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily
  • December 1 to February 28: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday through Sunday
  • March 1 to April 30: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily

Closed New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Since April 6, 2026 the Center adds a 3% fee to card payments.

The five collections cover the Buffalo Bill story, Western art including Remington and Russell, Plains Indian material culture, the natural history of the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in the Draper, and firearms in a collection that runs to thousands of pieces. It is a serious museum that happens to sit in a town of 10,000 people, and the two-day ticket is the single best value in Park County.

Practical advice: go at 8 a.m., when the summer doors open, and you get the galleries ahead of the midday crowd. If you have any interest at all in the man himself, our biography of Buffalo Bill Cody is worth reading before you walk in rather than after.

A fully outfitted period chuckwagon on display inside the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, with its hinged chuck box open showing tins, pans and a water keg, mounted against a red gallery wall.
A chuckwagon inside the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, chuck box open. This is the level of object the Center holds across five museums, and it is why the ticket runs two days. Photo by Burley Packwood via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Cody Nite Rodeo

Stampede Park, 519 West Yellowstone Ave. Nightly through June, July and August; gates open at 7:00 p.m. and the rodeo begins at 8:00 p.m.

Tickets are not tied to a date: you buy the quantity you need and redeem them on any one night. Prices are set each season and posted on the Cody Stampede Rodeo ticket page; group rates for ten or more and a military rate are available through the office at (307) 587-5155.

The Cody Stampede is the separate, larger event, running June 30 to July 4 in 2026, and Nite Rodeo tickets are not good on those nights. Buzzard Roost seating is not sold during the Stampede.

An 8 p.m. start in a mountain valley at 5,000 feet means the second half of the show happens after the temperature drops. A Pendleton wool blanket across your lap in the stands is standard equipment here, not a flourish, and a wool overshirt covers the same ground if you would rather not carry a blanket. The dress register at a small-town nightly rodeo is looser than at Cheyenne Frontier Days, and our Western dress code guide sorts out which is which.

A saddle bronc rider mid-buck at the Cody rodeo arena with the summer evening crowd in the stands behind him.
The Cody Nite Rodeo runs every evening of the summer, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a town this size to sustain. Bareback, saddle bronc, bull riding, roping, and barrel racing, at 8 p.m. Photo by Billy Hathorn via Wikimedia Commons, 2006. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Old Trail Town

1831 Demaris Drive, on the west edge of town. Open May 15 to September 30. Gates open at 8:00 a.m. daily with last entrance at 5:15 p.m. Phone (307) 587-5302.

Admission:

  • Adults: $15.00
  • Seniors 65 and over: $14.00
  • Youth 6 to 12: $8.00
  • Children under 6: free
  • Active military: free

This is a collection of real frontier buildings moved to one site rather than a reconstruction. The roster includes the Hole In The Wall Cabin associated with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Mud Spring Cabin used by Kid Curry and the Sundance Kid, Curley’s Cabin (Curley was the Crow scout with the Custer expedition), the Bonanza Post Office from 1885, a buffalo hunter’s cabin from 1880, the Coffin School from 1884, the Meeteetse blacksmith shop, a livery barn, a wagon barn, and the Museum of the Old West.

Two hours covers it. It is the counterweight to the polished version of the West you get everywhere else in town, and the buildings are the actual buildings.

The single street of Old Trail Town in Cody, Wyoming, a row of weathered log and board frontier buildings with period wagons parked in the sagebrush in front of them, light snow on the ground.
Old Trail Town in the off season. Real frontier buildings collected from across northern Wyoming and southern Montana and reassembled on one street, with the wagons parked where they were left. Photo by Paul Hermans via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Buffalo Bill Dam and Shoshone Canyon

Six miles west of town on the road to Yellowstone, US 14/16/20 tunnels through Shoshone Canyon and comes out at the Buffalo Bill Dam, wedged into a narrow rock slot.

The visitor center is free and open May 1 to September 30, weekdays 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and weekends 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. You can walk the full width of the dam crest, which puts you 280 feet above the river.

It costs nothing, takes forty minutes, and it is on the way to everything west of town. There is no reason to skip it.

Pale limestone cliffs rising in blocky towers above a scree slope of sagebrush and loose rock in Shoshone Canyon, Park County, Wyoming, under a hard blue sky.
Rock formation in Shoshone Canyon, west of Cody. This is the country the highway tunnels through on the way to the dam, and it explains the engineering: there was nowhere else to put a road except through the rock. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress (LCCN 2017685728). Public domain.

Heart Mountain

1539 Road 19, between Cody and Powell. The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center sits on the site of one of the ten camps where Japanese American citizens were incarcerated during the Second World War.

Hours run mid-May to mid-October, daily 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. For 2026 and 2027 the winter schedule is Wednesday through Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. from October 14 to January 6, Thursday through Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. from January 7 to March 30, and Wednesday through Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. from March 31 to May 11. Admission is $14 for adults, $12 for seniors (62 and over) and students, $10 for children 10 to 17, free under 10, and $10 per person for commercial groups.

It is a small, serious museum and it sits in deliberate tension with everything else on this list. We wrote about what happened at Heart Mountain at length. Allow ninety minutes and do not schedule anything cheerful immediately after.

The road to Yellowstone

The East Entrance is open May 1 through October 31, per the National Park Service, covering the run from the gate over Sylvan Pass to Fishing Bridge. Cody sits 53 miles east of the entrance on US 14/16/20, and the drive from town to the gate takes roughly an hour, with another hour from the gate to Lake Village.

That is a two-hour approach each way before you have looked at anything, which is the single most useful fact for anyone planning a Cody-based Yellowstone day. It works, but it is a long day and the return happens at dusk when the elk are on the road.

The other great drive out of Cody is the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, Wyoming 296, running northwest over the Absaroka front toward Cooke City and connecting to the Beartooth Highway. Allow half a day and see our roundup of Wyoming scenic byways for how it compares to the rest.

Two things belong in the vehicle for either drive. A pair of compact binoculars in the 8x32 to 10x42 range turns a distant brown smudge on a hillside into a grizzly or a bull elk, and it is the difference between saying you saw wildlife and actually seeing it. And if you are getting out of the car anywhere in the Absaroka country, bear spray carried on your belt rather than in a pack is the standard local practice; this is occupied grizzly habitat from the edge of town westward.

An insulated bottle is the other thing. Services between the East Entrance and Fishing Bridge are limited and seasonal.

How to sequence two days

Day one. Buffalo Bill Center of the West from 8 a.m. Break for lunch downtown on Sheridan Avenue. Back into the Center for the afternoon on the strength of the two-day ticket. Cody Nite Rodeo at 8 p.m.

Day two. Old Trail Town when the gates open at 8 a.m., then the Buffalo Bill Dam visitor center on the way west, then either the Chief Joseph Byway for the afternoon or the second half of the Center’s collections if the first day did not finish them. Heart Mountain instead, if the drive appeals less than the history.

A third day buys you Yellowstone, but plan it as a full day rather than an afternoon.

For the rest of the town, including where to eat and where to stay, see our local’s guide to Cody.

What to skip

The gunfight reenactment outside the Irma is free, brief, and fine. It is not a reason to arrange your evening. The souvenir shops on Sheridan Avenue sell the same mass-produced goods as every other Western tourist town. And a two-hour visit to the Buffalo Bill Center is a worse use of $24 than not going at all; if you cannot give it half a day, spend the money on the rodeo.

Further reading

  • Buffalo Bill Center of the West, for current exhibitions and the seasonal hours in the month you travel.
  • Cody Stampede Rodeo, for the Nite Rodeo calendar, current prices and special-event nights.
  • National Park Service Yellowstone road status, for East Entrance and Sylvan Pass conditions, which move with the weather at either end of the season.

Sources

  1. Buffalo Bill Center of the West, visitor information (admission and hours)
  2. Buffalo Bill Center of the West, plan your visit (general admission allows entry for two days)
  3. WyoHistory.org, Cody, Wyoming (53 miles to the east entrance)
  4. Cody Stampede Rodeo, tickets (Cody Nite Rodeo pricing)
  5. Cody Stampede Rodeo, Cody Nite Rodeo
  6. Old Trail Town, official site (season, hours, admission)
  7. Buffalo Bill Dam Visitor Center
  8. Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, visit information
  9. National Park Service, Yellowstone park roads (East Entrance season)