Scenery that takes your breath away, fly-fishing in pocket waters, hiking and picnics in a place that’s pristine and breathtaking. That’s Crazy Woman Canyon, one of Johnson County’s most popular attractions.
It’s a popular outdoors recreation spot for Wyomingites, and also attracts about 1,000 or so tourists looking for a day trip in Johnson County, whether on their way to Yellowstone or enjoying some other Cowboy State attraction.
This year, as in many other years, Johnson County has been marketing its cozy canyon like crazy.
Now locals are learning that just ahead of the busy tourism season that its most popular canyon is going to be closed all summer for bridge replacements and safety upgrades.
The canyon is already shuttered by an annual closure that runs March 1 through June 20, but this year it’ll remain closed after that, the U.S. Forest Service reports.
It’s unfortunate timing, Johnson County Tourism Association Marketing Director Toby Carrig said, even as he acknowledged the importance of the overall projects.
“Bridge replacements are kind of an important thing to do,” he said. “And they’ve got three bridges in the canyon that I think they’re working on replacing and upgrading to make it safer to ride through there.”
That means Crazy Woman Canyon will be closed until at least September, Carrig said.
“I don’t think they have an exact date,” he added. “It’s based on construction and weather and those kinds of things. But I think the goal is to get the work done by some point in September.”
Carrig said the canyon generally attracts about 1,000 out-of-state visitors every year, and it’s often a prominent part of the county’s marketing campaign.
“It’s also something people search for in our organic searches that breaks in the top 10 of things that point people to our website,” Carrig said. “So, we do some paid digital media to promote it.”
Not The Only Thing To Do
While it’s a setback that could cause some tourists to rework some of their travel plans, Carrig believes Johnson County still has plenty of other under-rated adventures that can catch and hold the attention of tourists.
Among the roads less traveled but worth a day trip is Dry Creek Petrified Forest, about 13 miles east of Buffalo. Today, the area is sagebrush country set off by red hills and blue sky. But once during the Eocene period tens of millions of years ago, it was a jungle-like swamp with towering, 100-foot-tall Metasequoia trees.
Remnants of these mighty giants remain as petrified tree stumps, their 60 million-year-old rings still visible.
A 0.8-mile interpretive loop trail winds through what remains of a petrified swamp forest that would have been reminiscent of the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia in terms of grandeur.
The denizens of the swamp would have included turtles and giant crocodiles, as well as a prehistoric fish species that still lives today in some rivers and streams: the gar. Their long snouts, full of sharp teeth, are the bane of any fisherman unlucky enough to catch one.
Lines on a caught gar tend to become so tangled around those teeth, there’s no choice but to cut them loose and start a completely new rig from scratch.
Interpretive signs tell about the early vegetation of this area, which would have included a lot of ferns, some of which are still preserved as fossils in the nearby hillsides. The signs also explain how red scoria was formed as a result of long-burning coal seam fires.
Trees petrify through a slow change in chemical composition over millions of years. What happens is mineralized water replaces the organic material in a stump that’s buried in a low-oxygen environment. Without oxygen, decomposition doesn’t happen as quickly, giving the mineralized water a chance to completely replace all of the organic material. That preserves the original wood patterns, and it’s why the tree rings remain visible in these beautiful specimens.
Based on the number of rings, scientists estimate the petrified trees at Dry Creek were between 800 to 1,000 years old at the time their petrification began.
There Is Another
If it’s a canyon you must visit to soothe the Crazy Woman itch, there is another.
Outlaw Canyon about 20 miles southwest of Kaycee offers challenging terrain and hiking in a rather infamous place. That’s because it sits near the Hole in the Wall, the legendary hideout of choice for outlaws back when Butch Cassidy was stomping around Wyoming robbing trains.
Hole in the Wall, despite what the Robert Redford movie “The Sundance Kid” suggests, actually wasn’t Cassidy’s preferred hideout. He was more often in Brown’s Hole. But he and his associates were known to have visited the Hole in the Wall a time or two.
“There’s plenty of other places around the county that you can pair into a half-day or one-day trip as well,” Carrig said.
Lake DeSmet, for example, or the scenic Tie Hack Reservoir, nestled among dense lodgepole pine forests way up in the mountains of the Bighorn National Forest. For history hikers, there’s also the Bozeman Trail, which includes sites like Phil Kearny State Historic Site, as well as the Fetterman and Wagon Box battle sites.
Johnson County also has a number of notable events coming up this summer.
The final Chris LeDoux Days in Kaycee, which includes a rodeo and lots of music, and the ever-popular Longmire Days, which celebrates Wyoming’s New York Times bestselling author Craig Johnson’s “Longmire” series.
Buffalo transforms into the fictional Durant in the equally fictional Absaroka County for the weekend. There’s a parade, tea with Louanne Stephens (who plays Walt Longmire’s office manager Ruby), autograph sessions and author chats with Johnson, as well as a skeet shoot and more.
The Wyoming Sheep and Wool Festival is set for July at the Johnson County Fairgrounds, and there’s a Johnson County War Tour in August.
Those are just a few of the many things that Carrig believes will help soften the closure of the popular Crazy Woman Canyon for the 2025 season.
“At this point in the year, you kind of hope that the advertising you’ve done has already planted that seed for folks and they’re making their plans,” he said. “We do market year-round digitally, and we’ll have some new materials this year that we put out in terms of print publications. So, we hope all of these efforts will pay off. We always like to project cautious growth, and I think, hopefully, that’s what we’ll get again this year.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
