Day 11 – Museum of the Rockies

Driving to Bozeman

While reading up on Yellowstone before we arrived, I noticed quite a bit of information  about the the Museum of the Rockies which houses a collection of the largest dinosaur remains in the United States.  Since we had several free days before our vacation was at an end, we decided to drive to Bozeman and see the museum. Bozeman is a hip college town and is regularly voted one of America’s best outdoor towns. The town is named after John Bozeman, who guided settlers here along what is now called the Bozeman trail.

We started out around 8:30am. Bozeman is about 89 miles from West Yellowstone on route 191.  The scenery was great.  We stopped quite a few times for Shawn to take photos.  I only took a few as there weren’t many turn outs to get out of the car.  It was a nice drive and not a lot of traffic.  The drive takes about 2 hours but we stopped quite a few times so we arrived around 11:30. 

We looked up a restaurant on my iPhone that was suppose to have a good variety of choices  and found John Bozeman’s Bistro which was number one on Yelps.  We found a parking spot on a side street and walked until we found someone to ask where it was located.  A nice gentleman helped us out and we discovered it was close by, just across the street. The food was all right – nothing special and over priced. We finished our lunch and went to look at the shops.  Lots of cute stores with interesting items for sale.  I bought a few gifts and a ceramic pot for myself. We got directions to the museum.  It wasn’t too hard to find.

Dinosaur Collection

The museum has become world-renowned as a dinosaur research facility because of the work of Dr. Jack Horner.  It has one of the largest and most important collections of dinosaur fossils in the world. Dr. Horner  served as the scientific advisor for all of the Jurassic Park films.

Tinsley House 1800s

After checking out all the dinosaur bones, we went to Tinsley House preserved by the Museum of the Rockies as a living history museum. The 100+ year old house was moved to its present site in 1989. The house provides an overview of homestead life in the 1800s.

We went inside the house and several people were dressed up in period costumes.  They gave us a short history about the Tinsely family and about the house. One of the gentlemen asked us where we were from and somehow I mentioned I was originally from Buffalo, New York.  He was from a town near Buffalo and had just come back from vacation.  We went up stairs and there was a woman spinning thread and another lady who was showing us all the different rooms.  It was very interesting and an added treat to our museum trip.

It was getting late so we drove back to West Yellowstone.  We got there around dinner time.  I went to the grocery store for a few more things and made dinner.  Then we talked about what we would do on our last day.  Shawn wanted to go to West Thumb to see the thermal activity on the Yellowstone River. So we had a plan for our last day.