In summer, Yellowstone roads are crowded with people and cars. Crowds jam the boardwalks and visitor centers. But in the winter, few people go to Yellowstone. Most of the roads are usually silent and abandoned; bison walk on the roads and take little notice when people come by.
Except for the occasional lines of snowmobiles in controlled tour groups or the snow coaches that come by infrequently, bison and coyotes are more common than people. Yellowstone is a rare, quiet landscape where animals and rivers take priority over people. It is a gated community where the community is trumpeter swans, wolves, bison, bears, and fish.
Yellowstone lies high in the northern Rockies, in a remote corner of three states. Yellowstone’s torn remnant of a recent volcano seethes, steams, and boils. Its rivers cut through young ash, and hot water flows across the land from steaming springs, which heat large snow-bare areas where bison rest on the warm ground surrounded by deep snow in every direction. The snows fall with determination at 8,000 feet and stays piled for months until spring warmth melts the snow and swells the headwaters of three rivers.
We recently spent a week inside Yellowstone, skiing across its vast snowy landscape, avoiding bison, looking for wolves, watching otters play in the Yellowstone River, and marveling at the “thermal features” that appear seemingly randomly across the park. Looking down into a hole filled with boiling gray mud or watching superheated water surge out of a dark cave on the side of a hill, one can’t help but feel the volcanic eruption that created the contours of the land was recent and highly violent. The land is still recovering from tearing explosions 630,000 years ago that left it scarred, steaming, and unsettled.
Indeed, the park experiences almost five small daily earthquakes as the earth’s crust stretches and grinds over the caldera. We didn’t feel any tremors while we skied and slept, but the Yellowstone area has lots of seismic activity. In the last decade, there have been 54 earthquakes that people could feel, including a 4.8 quake in the Norris Geyser Basin in 2014. In 1959, a magnitude 7.3 quake hit just outside park boundaries, ruining roads, and displacing a 25-mile-long fault. One side of that fault rose up 40 feet in places. And that quake lengthened the time between eruptions at Old Faithful geyser.
Yellowstone can be boiling hot and deeply cold. Staff told me they have experienced nights fifty below zero in the park. In 2023, heavy snow covered the land, making the roads small canyons between high drifts of plowed snow. Animals got trapped in these road/canyons and we can wonder how many bison starved because they couldn’t get to grass below such deep snow. But this year, only modest snow has fallen, sufficient for cross-country skiing and enough to make looking for food difficult for the bison. They swing their big heads back and forth to expose the dry grass, creating a trench as they move along. Apparently, dry grass has minimal nutrition.
Our friend and NPS worker reported that two bison were trapped between the deep drifts in the staff housing area last winter and nearly starved to death before spring finally released them into the vast grasslands.
Aside from boiling and surging ponds and hissing places on the ground, Yellowstone offers wildlife unlike any you’d find on public land managed by multiple-use agencies. The National Park Service makes a significant effort to protect wildlife in the park. We saw many trumpeter swans on the rivers. This is a miracle because these huge birds were close to extinction in 1900 and remained rare until efforts to recover their numbers in Yellowstone succeeded. The trumpeters are the heaviest native bird in North America with an eight to ten feet wingspan. Their size can prevent them from quickly escaping a coyote or wolf, and we saw them sleeping on ice islands in the Yellowstone rivers to stay safe from these predators.
River otters enjoy the safety of Yellowstone National Park. We watched a group of five otters playing in the cold evening on the Yellowstone River near Elk Antler Creek. These otters would roil around in the slow waters, climb out onto the snow beside the river, and slide back into the water.
We saw plenty of snowmobiles in the park, many driven by staff such as law-enforcement rangers. A decade or so ago, Yellowstone was open to nearly unlimited snowmobiles, which made a racket and polluted the rivers with their oil-rich exhaust. A long campaign by conservationists resulted in two-stroke engines being banned and lower numbers of snowmobiles, most of which must be part of organized tours. Only four-stroke engine snowmobiles are allowed in the park which are much quieter machines than you hear in and around West Yellowstone, Montana, which is a Mecca for snowmobile recreation on national forest lands.
Finally, we couldn’t help but be impressed by the bison. The bison graze and sleep peacefully throughout the park. Yet they are regularly slaughtered when they leave the park because ranchers believe they carry brucellosis, a disease that can damage cattle that most often is spread by elk. Ranchers also don’t like bison eating grass on national forests because the ranchers believe that grass belongs in their cattle. Also, native groups slaughter bison outside the park as they did in 2023 when bison migrated out of Yellowstone to escape the deep snow and find forage. Eight tribes killed 1100 bison as the bison carried out their ancient practice of moving to lower elevations to escape the high-country snows inside Yellowstone.
In winters past, before the big modern human population arrived, bison moved to the low valleys in winter. Now those lowlands are filled with ranches and towns. Today there are barriers for the bison as they are unwelcome on most private land and ranchers don’t want them on national forest lands which belong to all Americans. Sadly, the National Park Service has cooperated with ranchers and their representatives in the Montana state government to help slaughter bison for many years near the park. The bison who suffer through the cold winter and deep snow in the park are safe from the guns outside the park.
I can only hope that Yellowstone’s National Park Service management stays well-funded and supported by the public and politicians for decades to come. Yellowstone is one of the most significant public wild areas in the United States. Let’s hope it stays that way for many generations.
