Our site at Terry Bison Ranch turned out to be worse than we expected despite their expensive and colorful advertisement in the Good Sam Campground Directory touting the abundant wonderfulness of the place. The ad may be attractive but it is merely an ad and turns out to be something less than accurate. We probably should have figured something was awry when we noted that the Terry Bison Ranch consists of 28,000 acres but the owners have elected to put the RV park, the campground, the restaurant, the general store, the shower and restroom facilities, the laundry, the child amusement areas and the stock pens right next to the northbound lanes of I-25. The views from the RV park consists of prairie that extends to the horizon uninterrupted by anything other than the park’s alleged amenities, large hideous billboards along I-25 and a bit of the stock pens.
The access roads at this alleged resort have big potholes and muddy spots that are liberally distributed among the poorly graded recycled gravel covering. I think the recycled road covering is composed of broken asphalt, sharp gravel aggregate with a bison poop binder.
The individual camping spaces are almost directly atop one another and after our neighbor pulled in, we could have easily slapped his face as he exited his trailer without leaving our trailer. The RV spaces closely resemble a Wal-Mart parking lot except Wal-Mart does not have acres of unmowed dead grass and the paving is worse here but the lighting is about the same; treated poles with ugly exposed streetlights giving the place a nice penal institution ambience. Additionally, there are quite a few trailers in spaces here that look like the residents have elected to live here and have brought all of their belongings with them including multiple rusty dead propane cylinders, bicycles that should be classified as unicycles since they lack the proper number of wheels, old lawn mowers, many colorful torn plastic tarps, shade structures without fabric covers or shade, ceramic pots that formerly held plants, myriad useless twisted fencing components and many broken trash receptacles that have blown over in the stiff winds that pervade this country. We could tell the cans had blown over when full because there are plenty of bottle caps, cigarette butts, used Q-Tips and various product wrappers well distributed throughout the dead grass and on the windward side of the grubby unpainted cabins that line the east side of the RV area. Many folks with dogs have left their animal’s droppings in the tent areas so others can enjoy them until they desiccate and blow away in the stiff breezes.
As the evening wore on, we noticed a clearly audible roar coming from nearby I-25 and, just when we thought it couldn’t possibly get any louder, a long freight train came by that made the ground tremble. Due to the relentless background racket, the only way it could be any less restful at night was if they moved the campground 100 feet west directly onto I-25’s divider, right next to the Union Pacific’s multiple tracks. Traffic, both trucks and freight trains, aggressively continue their activities throughout the night at a sound pressure level that makes slumber difficult except for the hearing impaired.
The guy who owns the place fancies himself as an engineer and he has made some very primitive-looking kiddie rides with exposed operating mechanisms without the pesky, nanny-state guards to keep fingers, legs and hair from becoming entangled in the wheels, sprockets and gears of Wyoming commerce. Nobody seemed to be taking advantage of these child mashers and I soon found out why; a ride on the Barrel-O-Death or the Whirl-and-Hurl is $4 a pass with probably a surcharge for amputations of those troublemaking limbs children have. A pony ride for the kiddies is $8.
You can be treated to a one-hour ride on one of the resort’s four-wheelers through the surrounding bison ranch for $30. The owner/engineer has created his very own train out of repurposed farm equipment and truck parts that scuttles about the ranch and one can take a dinner trip of two hours for a mere $95. We did spot some bison here but we walked to the spot where we could see them which is an oversight on the owner’s part because he missed out on charging us for the privilege of seeing some bison on a bison ranch. They also offer trail rides on horses of an hour or two for $80 a head as long as you are more than 8 years old and weigh less than 250 pounds.
We did not have the honor of using the restrooms or showers because we read some frightening news about the restroom cleanliness and maintenance on the internet after we arrived. When Peggy and I took a walk through this sylvan wonderland, I noticed some turds strewn about that made me believe that others may have found the restrooms disgusting as they had elected to crap on the dead grass instead of encountering the frightening hazards of public restrooms or showers that have not suffered the burden of occasional maintenance.
We had part-time access to the internet because they offer part-time wi-fi that seems to only fail once you have tried to repeatedly establish a connection and temporarily succeeded. Our dreadful phone was only rarely able to see the park’s wi-fi network but, strangely, our HP computer was able to stream video from wi-fi with only periodic rebuffering. Sometimes the streaming video would attempt to rebuffer and would fail so we would have to re-establish the connection before the video would successfully run for a while.
There is a restaurant here called Senator’s Steakhouse where patrons can get a $15 bison burger, a half-pound bison sirloin for $32, chili and cornbread for a mere $15, a $20 chicken fried steak and the full meals only have a $5 uptick if you want soup and salad. We chose to refrain from eating in this steakhouse because, again from the internet, we read about some Air Force personnel who came here to enjoy a serviceman’s discount and left with the trots that even Imodium couldn’t cure. They elaborated voluminously about the cloud of flies swarming the soup and salad bar which may have contributed to their choosing the meal without the $5 salad bar add-on.
My conclusions about this place are as follows: go anywhere else because camping, amusement and dining prospects here are bleak. This place is ugly. In order to not be completely negative, I can state that they do have propane sales here and service was quite prompt although I found out after getting my cylinder filled that the price for propane was the highest I have encountered in my 15 months of travel.