JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2025,
OUR 29TH YEAR

People come to Cody, WY, to taste the west, to visit nearby Yellowstone National Park, to maybe learn about Buffalo Bill Cody.

I got to play with wood ... and also guns.

First, the wood.

John Gallis loves wood, especially walnut and juniper. He talks of camping trips where he would carve spoons and just randomly give them to other campers. And now he has a shop in Cody, By Western Hands, where he holds woodworking clinics that he calls Spooning by John. What he sells in his shop is furniture ... chairs, tables, sideboards and more. He likes to say his style combines the simplicity of Shaker with the flowing curves of art nouveau. Yep, that works as a description of his pieces.

I’ve done a few woodworking clinics over the years and when I got home from this trip and looked at my collection, I realized it always seems to be a spoon and a spatula.

So yes, that’s what we made. And yes, you’re supposed to actually use them (John says they won’t mark up your teflon pans like other kitchen tools. Though in my case like all my others, they will become art displays in my home).

My spoon and spatula started out as a block of wood. I wanted no part of the band saw so John made rough cuts of them for each of us out of fiddleback maple which has this neat grain.

While I didn’t want to use the band saw, I had no problem with the band sander. This took care of the heavy sanding. Then by hand, we worked our way down progressively to finer sandpapers until we were using one that was almost as smooth as writing paper.

From here, we dipped the spoon and spatula in maloof oil which is like tung oil ... basically a combo of varnish and oil. And since I don’t plan to cook with these, just add them to my art collection ... when I got home, I applied a coat of Watco Medium Walnut stain and followed that with tung oil.

John’s spoon-making class is $75, runs from 10am - 3:30 and includes lunch.

As for the guns ... considering that I am petrified of guns, it is truly surprising that I am such a good shot. This isn’t a one-off. I’ve fired at targets (none of them living and moving, thank GOD) at several ranges over the years.

There was my time writing a story about Royal Canadian Mountie cadets when I became one for a week. And a firing range south of my home near Seattle. A few others I can’t recall. And this one in Cody.

In Cody, it’s the Cody Firearms Experience. You shoot at an indoor 40-yard range where they offer quite a menu of guns you can try. It’s an almost bewildering assortment including handguns, ancient muskets, cowboy rifles, mafia machine guns. You name it and among their nearly 60 guns, they probably have it.

I went for a colt 1873 single action revolver and the Winchester 1873 rifle that is always associated with Buffalo Bill Cody.

If a gun is calibrated correctly or I know how to correct for it, I can hit the target. But after my second round, I couldn’t find my second bullet hole. Then the range safety office pointed out, “See how the bullet hole is just a bit bigger now?"

I had hit virtually the exact same spot ... twice.

But no, I’ve never tried shooting moving targets. I’m sure that is much, much harder.

	A handgun which includes multiple other weapons, made notorious by the French underworld figures of the early 1900s known as Les Apaches. Note it also has a knife.

Another thing surprised me. I took a decibel reading of the shooting and expected it to be off the charts. But it wasn’t. (And yes, we wore both ear and eye protection). The reading was in the high 80s and low 90s. Redline zone where you risk ear damage is 106+.

The range has serious sound suppression in the walls and ceiling, I was told. Plus there are fans that blow a constant 3mph that help carry the sound and smoke forward ... meaning away from people and towards the target.

During this trip, I REALLY wanted to try a bison ribeye steak. A friend called the restaurant to confirm they had bison. But when we arrived, the waiter told us they had actually run out of bison ribeye two days previously.

So I ordered a bison burger. And no, it’s not “buffalo” ... buffaloes are in Africa and Asia ... Yellowstone Park has 4,800 bison. And that number, is truly a mind boggling drop from the 60 million in the 1800s.

So what did my bison burger (minus the lettuce, tomato and ketchup) taste like?
Well, like a regular beef burger. Mostly. But there was this ... other faint tang. Not gamey really but something extra.

Meanwhile, Cody has an impressive choice of places to eat food and drink beer involving some interesting history that has nothing to do with the park or bison.

Turns out this is where Ernest Hemingway wrote Death in the Afternoon, about bullfighting. Apparently, he was holed up in Room 18 of Cody’s Chamberlin Inn.

And if you want to truly go the tourist trap route, you can order a drink called Death in the Afternoon. It’s a cocktail of absinthe and champagne and when you boil down the flowery local description of it ... it’s basically licorice flavored champagne.

No, I didn’t try it. I am decidedly NOT a fan of either licorice or champagne, though I would have made the sacrifice if the opportunity had come up.

A place I DID try and love was Big Chill ice cream shop, where I indulged in one of their caramel choices. This is home made ice cream ... rich, great flavor, truly addictive.

Meanwhile, here are a few final bits of true local weirdness:

At the Cody Firearms Museum in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, there is (I am not kidding) a coffee grinder gun. It’s a single shot carbine that was modified with a hand crank coffee grinder in the butt stock and a hole at the bottom where you add the coffee.

On display, there’s also a cane gun (think ‘30s era Mafia), and a ‘space gun.’ You usually need oxygen to shoot a gun but during the US/Russia space race, someone thought it would be a good idea to have a gun that could shoot on the airless moon. They tested it underwater.

INFO
The list of what you can do in Cody and nearby is seemingly endless.

* There’s Yellowstone National Park, a 50 mile drive, where if you want to do it justice, you should stay at least one night in the park. Make reservations at least a year ahead: https://www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm
* For Cody: https://codyyellowstone.org/
In summer: biking, fishing, golf, horseback riding, jeep trips, climbing, kayaking, hang gliding, rafting, zipline, caving
In winter: ice climbing, ice fishing, nordic skiing, hunting, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, sledding, ice skating