When people from Cody, Wyoming, say that winter “blows the assholes away,” it’s both a lighthearted joke and a prayer. The town sits about an hour east of Yellowstone National Park, and for much of the year, it hosts droves of tourists, until they’re swept out by freezing winds that gust in from the mountains with near-hurricane force. “You can be blown off a trail, horse and all,” a meteorologist warned in the local paper.
Staying here long-term is considered proof of a person’s mettle, and the 9,000+ souls who call Cody home treat its wild, natural landscape like an oasis meant only for those who know. With fewer residents than nearby action-sports hubs Bozeman and Denver, this is where you come if you’re an outdoor enthusiast who wants to get away from outdoor enthusiasts.
When I, a journalist visiting from New York City and blending in not at all, first got to town, locals seemed most concerned about me outing their favorite fly-fishing hole—never mind the fact that my pop culture beat could not be further from “hot spots for hooking trophy trout.”
All of this is to say that when rapper Kanye West and his (now ex) wife, Kim Kardashian, purchased a multimillion-dollar property just over 10 miles from main street in September 2019, the emotions of Cody residents oscillated somewhere between pissed and pleased. “Apparently, they’ve already checked out Sunset School for their offspring,” one op-ed opined, adding that the name of one of the couple’s children was “pretentious.” A letter to the editor countered with, “The flip side of ‘don’t fence me in’ is ‘don’t gate me out,’” encouraging locals to keep an open mind. Facebook erupted in debate. For a while, Kanye was all anyone wanted to talk about—should Cody be defined by what it had been or what it could be?
Almost immediately, the entourage was everywhere. Their sightings were frequent and recounted breathlessly. Ye cruising around town in one of his matte black Ford Raptors, dropping hundreds of dollars at boot and candy stores, tucking into cowboy cuisine at the Cody Steakhouse. Ye flying in jets full of his famous friends to record music and dabble in the luxury of creative solitude. Ye introducing himself via one of his epic Sunday Service performances, with a full choir belting out songs of worship, in the garden of the Buffalo Bill museum complex, one of Cody’s main attractions.
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