Few road trips are as quintessentially American as the drive west, a modern expression of the impulses that fueled conquering expeditions from Lewis and Clark right on through to the pioneers. Drive forward here to travel back—back to the wilderness, to the mythic West, to corny palaces and roadside shills, to history secured by the enshrining of the first national park, and to legacies still under debate, ranging from wolf reintroduction to Native American lands. The glimmering endpoint: Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

The trip begins in Chicago, passes through green and rolling Wisconsin, and irons out by western Minnesota, where I-90 makes a ruler-straight shot, unimpeded by topography. Corn and soybean fields recede as mammoth turbines harvest the winds that sweep down the plains north of Oklahoma. Town names get romantic just when the scenery stops trying: Blue Earth, Welcome, Valley Springs. At Sioux Falls, on the border of South Dakota, you officially enter the Tedium Zone.

Almost the entire length of South Dakota constitutes that somnolent section of the trip in which you will question this quest, resent your spouse’s idiotic Candy Crush compulsion when you can’t indulge yours, and referee a series of back-seat fights among the kids. You’ll be grateful for the volley of old-fashioned, ultracheesy attractions along this desolate stretch.

But hang on for the scalloped landscape of striated sandstone in bands of purple, orange, and gold, a warm but arid netherworld called the Badlands. Next on the horizon, the Black Hills burst from the prairie in dark spruces and towering ponderosa pines that inspired the Lakota to call them Paha Sapa—“hills that are black.” The trees give way to granite buttes stunningly bare—with the exception of the one carved into the busts of four presidents— and the assemblies of stony columns aptly named the Cathedral Spires for the sense of reverence they evoke. Needles Highway, which winds around and tunnels through some of those rock outcroppings, will refresh your enthusiasm for the road. Stay awhile to view herds ofpronghorn and bison and the prairie dog warrens ribboning Custer State Park.

The final push for famously remote Yellowstone National Park commences as you leave the interstate in Wyoming to cross the mountainous Bighorn National Forest and head to Cody, a town founded by bison-hunter-turned-showman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Fifty-two miles hence, Yellowstone feels less like the finish line than the gateway to another world: a 2.2-million-acre window into underground forces revealed in mud pots, spewing geysers, and the species interdependence found in the ecology of alpine plateaus.

Beyond Yellowstone’s centerpiece, Old Faithful, the rest of the park surprises with sheer variety, from the rangy Lamar Valley, where wolves recently staged a comeback, to the thunderous falls and chasm walls of the Yellowstone River, the chalky terrace formations created by Mammoth Hot Springs, and the mountain-ringed vistas of Yellowstone Lake. Amply worth the drive, all—as well as the one back home.

Where to Stop Along the Way