High Horsepower Sledding See Yellowstone as few have ever seen it on a guided snowmobile tour. By Dina Mishev
Egret Communications
Living, as I am lucky enough to do, a mere 90 miles from Old Faithful, I hang out with the explosive fellow fairly frequently. But, until tonight at least, my visits have always been chaperoned by anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred fellow spectators. Tonight, it’s just the two of us though, along with a new moon, a few lazily falling snowflakes, a pair of sleeping buffalo and a wonderful settled silence.
Welcome to winter in the world’s first national park.
Since most of Yellowstone’s 350 miles of roads are closed to cars from November through April, getting into the park, be it to Old Faithful, Norris Geyser Basin or Yellowstone Lake, is a bit more of an adventure come winter. The park itself isn’t closed of course – there are still entrance fees and lodges, hotels, restaurants, bars and gift shops are open – it’s just that the only ways to get inside are by ski, snowshoe, snowcoach or snowmobile.
Skiing or showshoeing the 40-some miles to Old Faithful from the park entrance closest my home will take a few weeks and more patience than I have. I opt to snowmobile instead. And then I rationalize that since one day on a snowmobile is fun, four are even better. I sign up for a multi-day adventure that has me sleeping in a different lodge every night and hitting all of the park’s biggest sights during the day.
Since the 2003-2004 winter season, it is required that guides accompany all snowmobilers into Yellowstone National Park. (Guides work for private companies based in and around Jackson and Cody and are not affiliated with the park other than the fact they have a permit to guide within it.) But few people, especially those astride a machine capable of hitting 90 miles per hour before you can say, “whiplash,” like having their hands held in such a manner. Fear not. Guides and speed limits (most roads are 35 mph and some are 25 mph) don’t mean tedium: the park’s bison, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, geysers, waterfalls, gorges and hot pots protect against that. The new rules are great for novices too: even first timers can handle all of Yellowstone’s snowmobile roads.
With the new rules, snowmobiling in the park is less about snowmobiling
Rick Carpenter
and more about the park. (The surrounding millions of acres of national forest are for snowmobiling.)
Heading into Old Faithful from the park’s southern entrance, my group of six has what our guide calls a “fairly uneventful ride.” Our uneventful day involves passing about two-dozen bison in clusters of three to six just off, and, in one case, smack-in-the-middle-of, the road. With the exception of the gal bison trying to make some time on the road, they’re all either bedded down or looking for deeply buried grasses, using their ponderous necks as pendulums to push snow out of the way. As we near Old Faithful Snow Lodge, a few coyotes dart across the road in some Animal Kingdom version of a game of Chicken.
At dinner, before my solo date with Old Faithful, I corner guide Henry and ask what makes for an eventful ride. “Seeing something you don’t see everyday,” he says. “Like if we had seen a wolf, that would have been eventful. But bison, they’re everywhere in the park in the winter. It would be eventful to take a ride and not see some.”
The same season guides became mandatory, the park cut down on the number of sleds allowed in each day. It used to be that, on winter holiday weekends, upwards of 1,800 snowmobiles zoomed and zipped around the park. There’s a rumor that, on such weekends, air quality in the park was worse than in Los Angeles. It could be pretty noisy too. I’ve seen park employees wearing earplugs. Nowadays, no more than 720 snowmobiles are allowed in on any given day. Ear plugs are no longer needed and you don’t need to worry about getting black lung. But the best part is this: with nearly 180 miles of groomed roads available to snowmobiles, that means only about four sleds per mile of road. Try to get that much room to yourself when jostling with summer’s 3-some million visitors.
Riding along the shores of Yellowstone Lake en route to Sylvan Pass on day three, we pass a few other groups, but not so many to stop me from imagining the park as my private playground. At the 8,350-foot summit of Sylvan I don’t have to imagine. My group has gotten slightly ahead and it’s just me, a cobalt blue sky and the snowmachine that made it all possible. A few mountain goats quietly chaperone from a hillside above. It’s just a regular winter day in the world’s first national park.
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