Start from 22 curated places around Thermopolis, WY, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Black Bear Cafe
Family-run breakfast-and-lunch counter that locals fill before noon, known for plate-sized pancakes and breakfast burritos in genuinely large portions. The kind of unfussy small-town diner where the coffee keeps coming.
Storyteller and Jackrabbit Java
A bookstore and coffee bar on Broadway that roasts its own single-origin beans on-site, with a wall of national coffee-review scores to back it up. Browse the shelves with a Super (dark coffee plus an espresso shot) and a baked good.
Trails & outdoors
Spirit Trail
An easy, mostly flat path through Hot Springs State Park that links the terraces, the Swinging Bridge, and the riverbank. The walk locals use for an evening stroll, with the mineral terraces and steam on one side and the Bighorn River on the other.
Monument Hill
A short steep climb off the Spirit Trail to a hilltop crowded with small rock cairns. The monuments were built over a century by people who came to heal in the springs and left a stone at the top to mark their recovery.
Things to do
Wyoming Dinosaur Center
A working dinosaur museum and active dig in one, with life-size mounts, a prep lab you can watch through glass, and summer dig sites just outside. The Dig for a Day program puts visitors of any age in the field with the paleontologists.
Star Plunge
An old-school mineral-water water park inside the state park, with indoor and outdoor pools, hot tubs, a steam vapor cave, and one of the longest water slides around. Unpretentious and a little retro, and a hit with kids burning off energy.
Landmarks & sights
Hot Springs State Park
Wyoming's first state park, built around the world's largest mineral hot spring and free to enter. Rainbow-colored mineral terraces, a free state bath house with indoor and outdoor soaking pools kept around body temperature, and a small bison herd grazing the upper rangeland.
Big Spring
The source that feeds the whole park, pushing out millions of gallons of 128-degree mineral water a day into a steaming turquoise pool. Walkways trace the edge where the water spills over the travertine terraces toward the river.