Beer, Llamas, and Hot Springs: Wyoming’s Weirdest Perfect Weekend

November 14, 2025 - An IPA hits differently at 7,000 feet. As I sat at Snowy Mountain Brewery in Saratoga, Wyoming, actual cowboys leaned against a bar where pistols served as armrests on the stools. Not replicas. Real pistols, mounted and varnished into the wood like frontier fossils. 

The brewmaster’s pale ale is so good I’ve ordered a second before finishing the first, and through the window, I can see the Snowy Range turning pink in alpine glow.

Three hours north of Cheyenne, Carbon County feels like the Wyoming that Jackson Hole left behind somewhere around 1985. No private jets. No $40 wagyu burgers. Just hot springs that actually heal you, llamas that carry your gear into the wilderness, and a brewery housed in a resort that might be the most accidentally perfect weekend destination I’ve stumbled across in a while.

I had flown into Wyoming where the high desert opens up like a held breath finally released. Pronghorn and deer scattered across scrubland. The Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests rose ahead, dark and serious. By the time I reached Saratoga Hot Springs Resort from Cheyenne, my shoulders had migrated somewhere near my ears from too many flights, too many rental cars, too much news.

The private hot spring tucked beneath a canvas teepee fixed that in about 20 minutes.

The water emerges from the earth at 104 degrees, naturally heated by geothermal forces that have been working this magic since long before Wyoming was a state. I sank in as cottonwoods rustled overhead and steam rose into the impossibly blue sky. 

Later, I’d learn that Dr. Mike Jansen, an orthopedic surgeon, bought this historic resort in 2008 and discovered a dormant three-barrel brewery sitting in a corner. The equipment was Ferrari-grade, but nobody had ever fired it up. So Jansen did what any reasonable person would do. He went back to school, earned a master’s in brewing, and built a state-of-the-art brewery to wake that sleeping beauty.

The result is Snowy Mountain Brewery, holding the third-oldest brewery license in Wyoming. It’s not just the beer that’s special, though the beer is excellent. It’s that the whole operation feels like a love letter to a Wyoming that still exists if you know where to look.

Llamas and High Country History

“This area is perfect for llamas,” said Austin Griffith, co-founder of the 307 Llama Company, told me the next morning as we saddled up toothy llamas named Jerry and Colonel Buoy for a trek to Mirror Lake. He and his business partner Anthony are both from the flatlands of Kansas and Oklahoma, former guest ranch employees who realized the closest place to rent llamas was Fort Collins or Casper, two or three hours away.

“We started looking into llamas for ourselves, just as pack animals,” Austin said while Jerry tried to eat everything within a three-foot radius. “We do a lot of hunting, fishing, backpacking. Then we pitched it to Brush Creek Guest Ranch. They said ‘Let’s try it.’ That first year, we got 10 llamas.”

Now they’re booking solid through September’s archery elk season. It takes about three llamas to pack out a big bull, he said. Otherwise you’re shouldering 80 pounds of meat yourself, which could take days from five miles back in the woods.

But on this morning, Jerry and Colonel Buoy were just carrying my water bottle and jacket as we headed up toward Mirror Lake in the Medicine Bow National Forest. The trail climbed through stands of lodgepole pine and opened into meadows where wildflowers still bloomed in late summer. The llamas stopped constantly to graze.

Fair enough. If I were a llama, I’d eat constantly too.

What struck me wasn’t just how calm they were (infinitely calmer than horses or mules), but how they turned every hiker we passed into a photographer. People couldn’t help themselves. Jerry, with his pronounced underbite and total indifference to human affection, became an accidental celebrity.

 “He cares for nothing but eating,” I told one couple from Illinois who stopped to take pictures. 

“You and me both, Jerry,” the woman said.

Back in Saratoga that evening, I soaked again, this time at Hobo Pool, the free public hot springs where locals and tourists mingle democratically in 104-degree mineral water. The pool has been here since 1888, built by the town as a bathhouse for travelers. No reservations. No entrance fee. Just warm water and Wyoming sky and the radical notion that healing shouldn’t require wealth.

A just released Snowy Mountain Brewery pumpkin ale waited for me back at the resort. 

Frontier Prisons and the Governor’s New Shoes

The next day took me east to Rawlins, where the Wyoming Frontier Prison rises like something out of Gotham. The Gothic stone fortress housed inmates until 1981. I learned Rawlins’ most famous outlaw was George Parrott, better known as Big Nose George, an outlaw whose criminal career ended with his lynching in 1881. 

What happened next gets darker. The town doctor performed an autopsy, kept parts of George’s skull, and made a pair of shoes from his skin. They’re on display at the Carbon County Museum, along with the outlaw’s death mask, a grotesque reminder that the Old West was often more horrifying than romantic.

The museum sits in the same building as the Union Pacific Depot, itself a testament to how the railroad shaped this region. Inside are artifacts from Carbon County’s coal mining days, ranching history, and enough frontier memorabilia to occupy an hour easily. But it was Big Nose George’s story (and those shoes) that lingered.

That night, I ended up at Lazy River Cantina in Saratoga, where actual working cowboys bellied up to the bar fresh from pushing cattle into high country for the summer. Not costume cowboys. Not dude ranch employees. Guys whose jeans carried authentic dirt and whose hands looked like they’d been doing hard work for decades. I ordered a burger and a beer and listened to them talk about badger holes and grazing permits and which trails were still passable after the winter snowpack.

This is the Wyoming that tourists driving to Jackson Hole pass right through. The authentic, backwoods country that doesn’t have luxury spas or Michelin ambitions, but instead has a sense of place that hasn’t been curated for visitors. It simply exists, and you’re welcome to experience it if you show up with the right attitude.

On my last morning, I hiked the Silver Lake Trail as dawn broke over the Snowy Range. The trail climbed through forest before opening into alpine terrain where the lake reflected surrounding peaks with mirror precision. At this elevation, the air felt thin and clean, like breathing at the edge of something vast and indifferent. A marmot watched me from a boulder pile. Somewhere higher up, pikas chirped their territorial warnings.

When I returned to Snowy Mountain Brewery for one final IPA before the drive back, Richard Zielke, the brewmaster from Wisconsin, told me about starting the canning line and about new can designs featuring different artwork meant to showcase not just the beer but Saratoga itself. Each can would include a QR code leading to information about the resort and the region’s tourism opportunities.

Sitting there with my pale ale, pistol armrests under my elbows, I thought about the weekend’s strange alchemy. The hot springs that unknotted muscles I didn’t realize were tense. The llamas that made hiking feel less like an endurance sport and more like meditation with pack animals. The frontier history dark enough to remind you that the Old West killed people as often as it freed them. 

And Snowy Mountain was the brewery that somehow tied it all together, a place where you could drink excellent beer surrounded by actual Wyoming rather than the theme park version.

This is the weird, perfect weekend that exists just three hours from Denver, in a corner of Wyoming that tourism somehow overlooked. No reservations needed at the hot springs. No Instagram crowds on the trails. Just warm water, cold beer, and llamas who’ll carry your gear while you remember what it feels like to slow down.

The pale ale really does hit different at 7,000 feet. Especially when you’re sitting at a bar, watching the sun set over mountains where wolves still howl and cowboys still work cattle into high country each summer. 

Jackson Hole can keep its private jets. I’ll take this Wyoming, the one that’s still real.