re: Yellowstone experiences

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can you enlighten the board? I'm curious but is there even access to most of the park? seems like mid September is the best time to visit after the crowds but before any freeze or substantial snow.

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There's an entire website dedicated to it, but i'll also give my experience.

Yellowstone in winter

The entire north road and both north entrances are open to public travel. This means you can only access the park from Montana in your personal vehicle.

Mammoth is full service throughout winter including the hotel, restaurant, gas stations, general store, etc. This is a fantastic place to stay as they have hot tub cabins, snow shoe / cross country skiing trails, and snow cat and snowmobile excursions that depart from the parking lot.

Old faithful lodge is also open throughout the winter, but you can't drive there. You have to either a) take a snow cat from mammoth or b) take a snow mobile. Snow mobiling must be through licensed outfitters around the park. There are lots of them, mostly in West Yellowstone and Gardner.

When i went in winter of 2017/2018, I stayed in one of the hot tub cabins and used that as my base camp. We did snow shoeing directly around mammoth a couple days though the area where the elk bed for the winter and saw thousands of elk up close. We drove to lamar valley a couple of times and saw some pretty amazing things that you won't see in the summer. A couple of highlights below;

- Herds of thousands of bison on frozen lakes
- Packs of wolves hunting. Many of them have black coats so they are extremely easy to spot in the winter. We saw them take down a bison in person.
- The winter landscape in Yellowstone is absolutely incredible, especially with all the geothermal features around the park which the wildlife flocks to.

There are some natural hot springs along the Gardner River that you can snow shoe to and soak in the river.

Snowmobiling through firehole canyon remains one of the coolest things I've done in my lifetime.

Yes, it's cold, but it's pretty similar to the weather that you'd experience at a ski resort which people from the south seem to enjoy. In my opinion, the pros of no traffic and an overabundance of wildlife (even more than what you see in the summer) combined with the unique winter activities available to you make it a better experience than sitting in your car dealing with idiot tourists for 12 hours a day. If you're backpacking through Yellowstone in the summer then you have my attention, but 99% of people from Louisiana aren't doing that.