Bighorn Basin

The Bighorn Basin is a wide, flat area in north-central Wyoming in the United States. It is surrounded by several mountain ranges: the Absaroka Range to the west, the Pryor Mountains to the north, the Bighorn Mountains to the east, and the Owl Creek Mountains and Bridger Mountains to the south. Rivers flow through the basin, with the Bighorn River entering from the south as the Wind River before becoming the Bighorn River.

The area is dry, with only a little rain each year. Some of the bigger towns here are Cody, Thermopolis, Worland, and Powell. Farmers grow many crops such as sugar beets, beans, sunflowers, and grains using water from canals. The basin is also an important path for animals like elk, pronghorn, and mule deer as they move between different places.

History

The Bighorn Basin was explored by John Colter in 1807. Near Cody, he found warm springs that became known as "Colter's Hell". Later, Jim Bridger created a trail in 1864 to connect places to the south with Montana.

Around the year 1900, ranchers began settling in the area. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody founded the town of Cody and helped build a large dam to bring water to the land. During World War II, a place for people of Japanese heritage to stay was set up in the western part of the basin. It was called the Heart Mountain Relocation Center and operated until 1945.

Geology

The Bighorn Basin is a special area filled with layers of rock that tell stories from very old times, from the Cambrian to the Miocene periods. People have found lots of oil here since the early 1900s, more than 1,400,000,000 barrels (220,000,000 m³). The main place oil is found is in a rock layer called the Pennsylvanian Tensleep Formation. Other important places for oil include the Mississippian Madison Limestone, the Permian Phosphoria Formation, and the Cretaceous Frontier Sandstone.

Some uranium has also been taken from the northern part of the basin near the Bighorn Mountains.

The eastern part of the basin is famous for its many old bones, especially from dinosaurs found in the Cloverly Formation from the Cretaceous period.

The layers of dirt and rock from the Willwood and Fort Union Formations show how the climate changed a long time ago during something called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Studies of old soil here tell us that the area became drier during this time, with periods of wet and dry weather. These changes also affected the plants and animals that lived there.

Communities

The Bighorn Basin has many small towns and communities. Some of the places you can find here include:

• Basin
• Burlington
• Byron
• Cody
• Cowley
• Deaver
• Frannie
• Greybull
• Hyattville
• Lovell
• Manderson
• Otto
• Powell
• Shell
• Ten Sleep
• Thermopolis
• Worland

Notable Features

The Bighorn Basin has some special places. One is the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite, where you can see footprints left by dinosaurs long ago. Another is the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, a beautiful spot for outdoor activities.