Guernsey State Park

During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps employed young men on public conservation projects across the country, and Guernsey became one of their showpieces. The park was among the early cooperative efforts joining the National Park Service, the CCC, and the federal reclamation program on one site.

Working largely by hand with local stone and heavy timber, the crews built in a rugged, rustic style meant to blend into the landscape. Their shelters, walls, culverts, roads, and overlooks feel grown from the bluffs themselves, and much of it stands sound and beautiful nearly a century later.

The most beloved of the CCC structures is the Castle, a large stone picnic shelter set dramatically on a point above the reservoir, with arched openings framing the water and hills. It looks like a medieval ruin dropped into Wyoming, and it is a favorite spot to take in the view.

The Guernsey State Park Museum is even more celebrated, honored as a National Historic Landmark for its craftsmanship and its interpretation of the CCC's work and the region's natural history. Its stone-and-timber building is itself an exhibit, and the overlook at Brimmer Point nearby offers one of the great views over the North Platte valley.

Guernsey Reservoir, formed by a dam on the North Platte, is the recreational heart of the park, with boating, fishing, swimming beaches, and campgrounds along its shores. The water is drawn down at times for irrigation and river management, which shapes the season on the lake.

The North Platte itself has always been a lifeline through this dry country, for wildlife, for Native peoples, and later for the wagon trains that followed its valley west. The park's overlooks tie the modern reservoir to that long story of the river as a road and a resource.

Just outside the park lie two of the most vivid remnants of the overland migration: the Oregon Trail Ruts, where iron wagon wheels and hooves cut grooves several feet deep into a sandstone ridge, and Register Cliff, where emigrants carved their names as they passed. This country was long the homeland of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and other Plains tribes before the wagons came.

In the park itself, mule deer, wild turkeys, and a variety of birds move through the pine and juniper bluffs, and raptors ride the winds above the river. Summer is the busy, warm season on the water, fall is crisp and quiet, and winter brings cold and snow to the stone shelters standing empty above the reservoir.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.