Winter Wonderland

Winter in Yellowstone means a lot of snow and few crowds.

// By Dina Mishev // photography By KATHRYN ZIESIG

Pushing open a hatch in the roof of the Sprinter van that has brought my 16-year-old niece Sofia and myself into Yellowstone National Park, I stand up on one of the back seats and look down on two bison languidly grazing alongside the van. Because their tails are hanging down, I can tell they’re unbothered by the vehicle’s presence or by me peeking out of its roof. (If you ever see a bison with its tail standing straight up, beware! That’s a sign it feels threatened or aggressive and it might charge.) 

So close to two of the shaggy one-ton beasts, I can smell them. (They smell like mushrooms.) I try to take photos, but these bison are so close my photos might as well be of a fuzzy carpet. Sofia draws my attention to a larger group of bison about 50 feet away. “They seem like a better distance for photos,” she says. And they are, but every single one of them—I count 12—is grazing with its butt to me and my camera. I hold my camera at the ready, though, praying and primed for just one to turn around so that I might capture the memory of this experience for perpetuity. 

It takes about five minutes until one does eventually turn around. And then, finally face to face-ish with a bison, I forget about photos. With my camera zoomed in, its liquid, prehistoric eyes reflect the magic of this day and place and remind me to be in the present rather than taking pictures of the present. Experiencing the world’s first national park, home to more than 10,000 thermal features, including 60 percent of the world’s geysers, in winter is something very few people have the privilege of doing.

In 2023, more than 4.5 million people visited Yellowstone, making it the second busiest year on record. More than half of these visitors came between June and August, though. Only about 3 percent—150,000 people—came during the park’s 14(ish)-week winter season between mid-December and mid-March. During this time, all but the 54 miles of road between Gardiner (the park’s northern entrance) and the northeast entrance are closed to cars. The other 139 miles of the park’s roads are groomed for guided snowmobiles and over-snow vehicles like the Sprinter van outfitted with Mattracks instead of tires that Sofia and I are in with Kevin Taylor, a lead guide with Wildlife Expeditions of Teton Science Schools. At the time I pop my head out of our van’s roof hatch, our van has passed only two other vehicles and a couple of groups of guided snowmobiles.

“Yellowstone is a special place any time of the year,” Taylor says. “What I enjoy most about it in the winter is the solitude and sense of intimacy. You can find solitude and intimacy in summer, but you have to work harder for it. In winter, even being road-based, you’ll feel these.” Winter in Yellowstone also feels wilder. 

For many visitors to Yellowstone, the ultimate symbol of the park’s wildness is its wolves. Shortly after Yellowstone’s designation as a national park in 1872, the federal government, prodded by ranchers and farmers recently settled outside the park’s boundaries, took the view that wolves were varmints. Their habit of killing prey like elk and deer, both considered “more desirable” species than wolves, and also of sometimes going after livestock, was deemed “wanton destruction” of those animals. 

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, canis lupis were poisoned and hunted, even within Yellowstone. By the 1920s, wolves had been killed off inside the park. After decades of planning, over two winters in the mid-1990s, 31 wolves captured in Canada were reintroduced into Yellowstone. This reintroduction, although controversial (wolves don’t know about park boundaries and do prey on the livestock of ranches outside of the park), was successful. There are now between 90 and 130 wolves, in about 10 packs, that live mostly within the park’s boundaries. (An estimated 500 wolves live in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, a 20-ish-million-acre area that includes the park itself along with parts of six national forests, the Wind River Indian Reservation, federal and state wildlife refuges, and private lands. All the wolves in the GYE are descendants of the 31 that were reintroduced almost 30 years ago.) Today, Yellowstone is one of the premiere places in the world to spot wolves in the wild. 

Experiencing the world’s first national park, home to more than 10,000 thermal features, including 60 percent of the world’s geysers, in winter is something very few people have the privilege of doing. 

I have seen wolves in Yellowstone before, and I want to see them again. Sofia has never seen a wolf in the wild. But, from the start, Taylor warns us that seeing a wolf on our day trip is unlikely. “I’ve seen wolves on several trips, but it is not common,” he says. “More often in the southern part of the park we see wolf tracks,” Taylor says. “They like traveling on the groomed roads.” (If seeing a wolf in the wild is your highest priority, head to the Lamar Valley, in the park’s north. Because most of Yellowstone’s roads are closed to cars in winter, the Lamar Valley is not accessible as a driving day trip from Jackson Hole, though. The Four Seasons Jackson Hole offers a day trip to the Lamar Valley from Jackson Hole via private plane; this trip starts
at $16,750.) 

We end up seeing neither wolves nor their tracks, but this doesn’t bum me out. It instead reinforces how vast and wild Yellowstone is. Over our eight hours in the park, we drive almost 100 miles in the snowcoach and walk about two miles on packed trails on boardwalks. It feels like we covered a lot of ground, but evidently not, since we don’t see so much as a single sign from a single one of the 100-plus wolves that call Yellowstone home. 

While we don’t see wolves, we do catch an eruption of Beehive Geyser, which is almost as elusive. Close to Old Faithful in the Upper Geyser Basin, Beehive erupts at irregular intervals and usually only once or twice a day, shooting water up to 200 feet into the sky, making it higher than Old Faithful. We watch the eruption from a footbridge over the Firehole River, into which the hundreds of gallons of hot, mineral-rich water expelled during Beehive’s eruption flow. Walking along the river back to Old Faithful, ribbons of thermal runoff into it create kaleidoscopic terraces that add color—golds, oranges, and grays—to the otherwise white landscape. (The average annual snowfall at the Old Faithful area of Yellowstone is more than 16 feet.)

In the Upper Geyser Basin, we also catch an eruption of Old Faithful, which is neither the tallest nor the most predictable geyser in the park, but is the tallest predictable geyser. It spews superheated water up to 180 feet into the air for between 90 seconds and five minutes at intervals ranging from 60 to 110 minutes. I enjoy watching it with only a handful of other people as much as I enjoy watching the eruption itself. In summer, about 2,000 people catch every daytime eruption of Old Faithful. Our eruption has about 20 other spectators.

Between the eruptions of Beehive and Old Faithful, we wander the singletrack paths packed into the snow on top of the boardwalks that wind through the Upper Geyser Basin, which is home to the highest concentration of geysers on the planet. We could walk to Biscuit Basin, the northern-most part of the Upper Geyser Basin, but in winter, the two miles would be very long without skis or snowshoes because the farther you get from Old Faithful, the less packed the snow-covered trails are. 

“Yellowstone is a special place any time of the year. What I enjoy most about it in the winter is the solitude and sense of intimacy. You can find solitude and intimacy in summer, but you have to work harder for it. In winter, even being road-based, you’ll feel these.”

—Kevin Taylor, lead guide, Wildlife Expeditions at Teton Science Schools

In the van, we’re at Biscuit Basin in less than five minutes, which is just enough time for Taylor to give us an intro to the area. “I want people to see a lot of interesting things, and to learn even more,” he says. (Two of my favorite Taylor facts? 1) The North American Tectonic Plate, on which Yellowstone along with all of North America sits, is moving west-southwest at a rate of about one inch per year—about the same rate that human fingernails grow—but the magma chamber beneath the plate that gives Yellowstone all of its thermal features isn’t moving;
2) In winter, the feet of grouse, bowling ball-sized, ground-dwelling game birds, grow scales that work similarly to snowshoes, keeping the birds from sinking into the deep snowpack.)

At Biscuit Basin, few of the biscuit-shaped mounds of silicious geyserite that gave this area its name still exist. The 1959 magnitude-7.3 Hebgen Lake Earthquake changed the plumbing of many of Yellowstone’s thermal features, including Sapphire Pool, the hot spring pool that created the biscuit mounds. Although the biscuits look more like scones today, the 200-degree Sapphire Pool is as startlingly blue and clear as it ever has been. I take a few photos of it and, before I can get frustrated that my camera isn’t getting the pool’s 1,000-some shades of blue, take a deep breath—am I imagining I smell mushrooms?—and focus on enjoying the privilege of being in Yellowstone in winter instead of the impossibility of capturing its fantastical wonders with a camera. 

This winter season, Wildlife Expeditions of Teton Science Schools offers day tours of Yellowstone between Dec. 15 and Mar. 13. Tours are 12 hours long and start and end in Jackson. From $635/person; tetonscience.org/wildlife-expeditions

Respect Wildlife

Although I am within a couple of feet of bison in this story, I was in a van and the bison walked up to it. Without the protection afforded by a vehicle, you want to keep a distance of 25 yards from all wildlife and 100 yards from predators like wolves and bears. (Not sure what 25 or 100 yards look like? 1 yard equals one adult stride.)

These distances are just guidelines though. A better rule is that if an animal is reacting to your presence, you’re too close. Surviving a Wyoming winter isn’t easy for wildlife, and we don’t want to be the cause of any additional stress on them. If you are in a vehicle and an animal approaches it, close the windows and stop until the animal passes or drive very slowly until clear of the animal. 

Finally, never, ever feed wildlife. This hurts animals in several ways: 

1. Human food is bad for the teeth and digestive systems of many species; 

2.animals dependent upon handouts can lose their ability to find their own natural food and then die when winter comes and no one feeds them; 

3.feeding animals can make them lose their fear of humans, which can make them easy targets for hunters; and 

4.fed animals will start associating humans with food and coming into populated areas. With some species, like squirrels, this is merely a nuisance; with other species, like bears and mountain lions, this can be dangerous, and, to prevent humans from being hurt, wildlife managers either relocate or kill these animals. There is truth to the saying, “A fed bear is a dead bear.” Help keep wildlife wild. JH