Hot Springs Greater Learning Foundation

Thermopolis, Wyoming

Welcome to the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming

Wyoming's Big Horn Basin hides inside an oval of northwest Wyoming mountains, a depressed bowl of a valley split down the middle by the Wind River. If the river were not there, this high sagebrush plains would be desert.

The Basin may have been one of the first places inhabited in the central North American continent. Hot springs along the river keep it from freezing over in winter; and wildlife and birds abound year-round.

The town of Thermopolis sprang up around the mineral hot springs in 1897. The spectacular Wind River Canyon to the south -- part of the Wind River Reservation owned by Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes -- was a natural barrier not broken by railroad until 1908. This made it one of the last settled places in Wyoming.

The Basin is still the Wyoming about which people dream - wide open spaces, vast night skies of stars, intense sun, pungent sage on the wind. Wildlife here is still more abundant than people. It is not an easy place to live. But we are rooted in it and survive, sometimes in spite of it. We are shaped by our sense of place and would not have it any other way.