Yellowstone National Park Is Getting a $250 Million Upgrade That Could Transform Visitor Experience

Millions of people head to Yellowstone National Park each year, making traffic through popular areas a major problem for the world’s first national park. That was true even before a 500-year flood event in June 2022, which not only forced the closure of the park for several days but destroyed portions of some of the entrance roads, including the section of the North Entrance Road located between Mammoth Hot Springs, Wyoming, and Gardiner, Montana. 

According to the National Park Traveler podcast, “the North Entrance Road through Gardiner Canyon remains closed to traffic.” Instead, vehicles must use Old Gardiner Road, a stagecoach route that was also Yellowstone’s original entrance, which “was relatively quickly rehabilitated to handle vehicle traffic.” But that could be changing soon: As Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly said on the podcast, there’s a $250 million project in the works that would create a new North Entrance Road—and it could begin as early as 2027.

The Preferred Plan

“After the flood, I asked the team to develop a plan that would look at every possible corridor you could build, a road from here to Gardiner,” Sholly said on the podcast, per TheTravel.com. “If you had to build a road, where could you build a road up to Mammoth from Gardner? And they came up with about seven different options where a road could be constructed.”

According to the National Park Service (NPS), there are several proposed solutions to the issue:

• The No Action Alternative: Old Gardiner Road (OGR) is maintained with only general and emergency maintenance conducted; the areas of the old entrance damaged during the flood are not reclaimed.
• The Center Alignment: A new alignment would be created utilizing some of the old North Entrance Alignment; Old Gardiner Road is redesigned as a multi-use trail; and some parts of the old North Entrance Road canyon alignment are reclaimed.
• The OGR Alignment: The temporary Old Gardiner Road stagecoach route is brought up to current NPS standards by widening lanes and shoulders; some of the old route is reclaimed.
• The Gardner Canyon Alignment: The Old North Entrance road is rebuilt, and the stagecoach route is used as a multi-use trail.

The Center Alignment, the NPS’s preferred plan, would cost between $200–250 million and require five phases of construction. The design of the route is 70 percent complete. You can see more details about the route in the video below.

Why not go with the OGR alignment instead? According to Sholly, “A lot of folks really do like that road, but there’s a lot of people that [think] it’s too steep, too curvy.”

The amount of fill used in the project is also a strike against it: “It wasn’t necessarily built to modern-day engineering standards,” Sholly said. “There is a fairly sizable glacial shift of soils coming from the west in that whole area, and that road’s corridors are prone to that. When you’ve got six inches to 12 inches of shift, sometimes per year, of the soil underground, and you've got a road that was built very quickly with a lot of fill, you do set up a potential circumstance of having massive sections of road that could become compromised as time goes on, especially with the seismic activity we have here in the park.” 

Per The Travel, Redditors have weighed in on the plan, with at least one saying that it’s possible that replacing the twisty OGR will cut down on traffic and delays. And as another pointed out, “Doing a proper build out of the current road would cost nearly as much as building the center alignment and traffic would be significantly delayed for around 6 years. The center alignment plan avoids the worst parts of the canyon and the worst parts of the OGR.”

You can share your feelings about the plan online through February 4. 

Yellowstone National Park Quick Facts

• Yellowstone National Park was established on March 1, 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant.
• The park sits atop an active volcano and experiences between 1,000 and 3,000 earthquakes annually.
• The park has more than half of the world’s geysers—there are more than 500 active geysers in the park.
• It also has around 290 waterfalls.
• There can be as many as 6,000 bison in Yellowstone—the only place in the U.S., according to the NPS, “where bison (Bison bison) have lived continuously since prehistoric times.”