National Museum of Wildlife Art

The building itself is worth the drive. Designed to look less like a museum than like a piece of the mountain, it is built of rough reddish Idaho quartzite and set low into the flank of East Gros Ventre Butte, so from a distance it reads as a natural outcrop or the ruin of an old fortress. The architects drew the idea from the ruins of Slains Castle on the coast of Scotland, and the fifty-thousand-square-foot result feels like it grew out of the ground rather than being dropped onto it.

The reason for the site is the view. The museum stands on a bluff looking out over the National Elk Refuge, the vast valley floor where thousands of elk winter each year. Galleries are hung so that big windows frame the real refuge beyond the paintings, and on a winter afternoon you can study a Rungius canvas of elk in the snow and then turn to the glass and watch the living herd doing exactly the same thing below you.

The collection is far broader than the Western landscapes you might expect. It reaches back roughly four and a half thousand years to ancient carved animals and runs forward to modern and contemporary work, so the story it tells is the whole long human habit of picturing wild creatures. Along the way it gathers famous names: John James Audubon's birds, Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol's endangered-species prints, and a deep bench of the great animal painters of the last two centuries.

Its centerpiece is Carl Rungius. Rungius, born in Germany and drawn to the American West at the turn of the twentieth century, is generally regarded as the first person on the continent to make a full career solely of painting wild game, and this museum holds more of his work than any other public collection. A dedicated Rungius gallery lets you follow a single master's eye for elk, moose, and mountain sheep across a lifetime, which is a rare thing to be able to do.

Do not leave without walking the outdoor sculpture trail, which for many visitors is the best part. A short footpath, roughly three-quarters of a mile, loops out from the museum across the open hillside and is studded with dozens of bronze animals at life size and larger: moose, bison, elk, bighorn sheep, and more, arranged by a noted landscape architect so that each one meets you against the backdrop of the Gros Ventre Range and the refuge.

It turns the usual museum experience inside out. Instead of animals framed on a wall, you walk among them in the open air, in the same light and weather as the real herds nearby, with the mountains behind. A sheltered little amphitheater near the entrance hosts summer programs, and the whole trail is an easy, rewarding stroll that even restless kids tend to enjoy.

The museum sits a couple of miles north of the town of Jackson on the road toward Grand Teton National Park, which makes it an easy stop coming or going from the parks. It keeps regular gallery hours and charges admission, so check ahead, and give yourself a good couple of hours to take in both the galleries and the sculpture trail without rushing.

Time your visit to the season if you can. Summer brings the fullest slate of programs and the sculpture trail at its greenest, but winter has its own magic here, when the elk refuge below fills with animals and the galleries and the glass tell the same story at once. Either way it is a genuinely national-caliber museum in an unexpected place, the kind of stop that quietly turns out to be a highlight of a Jackson Hole trip.

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