Crowdless Yellowstone park opening has visitors taking advantage
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — For Matt Gibbens, visiting Yellowstone National Park via the East Entrance when it opened late last month was a “no brainer.”
“I just knew that I would see something I’d never seen before: Yellowstone at its purest,” he said.
He wasn’t disappointed. Gibbens was standing at the Lower Falls overlook at Artist’s Point, and the usually crowded viewpoint was nearly empty. He told his girlfriend he normally has to circle the large parking lot a few times just to find a place to park.
The oldest national park in the United States closed to tourists nine weeks ago due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The East Entrance, near Cody, Wyoming, was one of two access points to the park that opened May 18. The other, the South Entrance, is located just outside Jackson, Wyo. The three other entrances to the park, all located in Montana, were closed. Last week Montana Gov. Steve Bullock said the earliest he would allow the entrances in his state to open would be June 1, much to the disappointment of some business people in those three gateway communities.
Some tourists, like Gibbens, were willing to make the drive to see the park during these unusual times. Others, like John Mills, just happened to be in the area and took advantage of the opportunity.
Mills left Ann Arbor, Mich., in his Tesla electric car to go on a cross-country birding trip while his software company was closed due to the coronavirus.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing bears and wolves,” he said.
Five buddies who left Chicago four days earlier also just happened to luck into Yellowstone’s opening day. John Reilly, Winston Jones, Alek Rasutis, Brian Davis and Tyler Morales were crammed into one vehicle on their journey to the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Despite their close contact with each other, they were taking “extreme precautions” to avoid getting or spreading COVID-19, Reilly said, including wearing masks and using hand sanitizer.
In the first two hours about 200 visitors had rolled through, excited to see the park’s wildlife, waterfalls and thermal features that in the past have drawn around 4 million tourists a year.
Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly and his staff have devised a reopening plan that in this first phase includes day-use only, no overnight camping or lodging, no tour buses, and no food service. The idea is to go slow in hopes that an outbreak of coronavirus can be avoided for the park’s staff and, if lucky, in the surrounding communities because the last thing Sholly and his crew want to do is close the park again.
“We’re trying to get used to the new system,” he said. “There’s always going to be a learning curve.”
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Brett French is the Outdoors editor at the Gazette. He can be reached at french@billingsgazette.com