Out of the wind in Cody, Wyoming
Wednesday and Thursday we got pushed back down the mountains on the Beartooth Highway into Yellowstone — with its 11,000-foot pass — by the first real snowstorm of the season. And got pretty wet in the process.
Dried off some in Red Lodge, Montana, yesterday and took advantage of a break in the weather to ride into Cody, Wyoming — where it was raining pretty hard again by the time we arrived in the early evening.
Stayed in a hotel last night to dry off, hoping to reach Yellowstone today via the east entrance. But learned this morning the whole park got hit by snow last night and, sadly, motorcycle travel there is now out of the question.
So Plan C is to ride down to Thermopolis, which boasts a world-class dinosaur and fossil museum, but we’ll have to wait until the prairie winds here die down some. Fifty-mph gusts nearly blew Harley over on his side in our first attempt out of town, so once again we turned around.
Happy to be temporarily indoors and out of the wind right now in Cody — where a biker at a little diner just told me: “Get a hotel room, man. You can’t ride in this.”
Travels with Harley 
If you’re lucky you’ll be trapped longer in Cody and have to while away the hours in the most-excellent Buffalo Bill Museum there: the firearms collection alone is worth the price of admission. And don’t pass up a soak in the Hot Springs in Thermopolis. (If that downtown taxidermy shop is open, walk in there: it too is quite museum like).
Update: Just read online in the Casper (Wyoming) Tribune that wind gusts today in excess of 80 mph “blew over” 12 big tractor-trailer rigs that were traveling on southeast Wyoming highways. Yikes! Glad Harley and I took cover.
Stay safe! We stay in Montana every July on the Boulder River on the other side of the Beartooth/Absorka range from Yellowstone. My husband fly fishes and I take photographs and write — The river was high and fast when we were there. Heard from friends there was 60 feet of snow in the Beartooth pass last winter, I believe on the same route you were trying to get through. Sounds like they’re in for another snowy winter in Montana after a long series of dry warm winters.