The Nation's Oldest Ranger Station
Near Cody, Wyoming
Along the North Fork road toward Yellowstone, tucked into the Shoshone National Forest, sits a small log building with an outsized place in American history. This is the Wapiti Ranger Station, and it is the oldest United States Forest Service ranger station in the country. It was built in nineteen oh three by W.
H. Pierce, the first administrator of the forest's Shoshone division, and it holds a second distinction as the first ranger station built anywhere with federal funding. The forest around it has its own claim to fame.
The Shoshone was the first national forest ever created in the United States, set aside in eighteen ninety one. The little station has been in continuous use ever since it went up, more than a century of rangers working out of the same walls. In nineteen sixty three it was named a National Historic Landmark, and in nineteen sixty six it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The original single story log structure now stands amid newer Forest Service buildings, set apart behind a rail fence, a humble birthplace for the entire idea of a working national forest ranger on the ground.
