![]() ![]() It wasn’t until the completion of a Northern Pacific spur line-a short extension of the track from the main line at Livingston to the park’s northern entrance-in 1902, however, that Gardiner’s status as the park’s first gateway town was secured.Ī postcard depicting the Northern Pacific Railroad Depot in Gardiner, MontanaĪs the first issue of the Gardiner Wonderland declared in May 1902, “This town is the supply point of the surrounding country, and headquarters for most of the team work and freighting in and about the park.”īy then, officials had established the park’s headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs, one of Yellowstone’s premier attractions. In 1882, the Northern Pacific Railroad reached the town of Livingston, and the hundreds of tourists became thousands, disembarking at Livingston and then taking stagecoaches to Gardiner and the park. But the area was still difficult to reach only a few hundred tourists came through Gardiner to visit Yellowstone in the next ten years. Settlers arrived and built a restaurant and bakery, post office, schoolhouse, barber shop, saloon, general store, and hotel. Within the year, entrepreneurs had built a toll road from Bozeman, Montana, to Gardiner and up to Mammoth Hot Springs. Hayden’s survey led to the passage of the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act in 1872, preserving more than one million acres in the Yellowstone Basin and creating the first national park in the world. The name of the campsite (but not the river) was misspelled in the expedition’s accounts, and in the official government report of geologist Ferdinand Hayden, who brought the first federally funded scientific team into Yellowstone the following year. The area became known as Gardner’s Hole, in part due to legendary guide Jim Bridger, who used the name when he brought the Washburn-Langford-Doane expedition to Yellowstone in 1870. The first white man to take up residence at the confluence was Johnson Gardner, an American Fur Company trapper who caught beavers along the Yellowstone River in the 1830s. Northeast Entrance Station at Yellowstone National Park For thousands of years, the two rivers that rush down from the Yellowstone caldera and into this valley drew bison, elk and wolves-and the Apsaalooké (Crow), northern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone-Bannock and other Indigenous hunters who followed. What is now the town of Gardiner sits between the Gallatin and Absaroka mountain ranges. It shows how the very conditions that create thriving, successful gateway towns-defined as communities located just outside of national parks and historic sites-make them vulnerable to destruction. This early summer flood was the latest in a series of dynamic events that have shaped Gardiner over the past two centuries. “By the time I woke up, the road didn’t exist anymore.” Sunday night,” Dawson Killen, a tourist from Texas who found herself stranded in Gardiner, told ABC FOX Montana. “The road that I took from Yellowstone Park to, I drove on it probably 10:30 p.m. Floodwaters cut off Gardiner’s almost 900 residents from both Livingston and the park’s headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs, leaving them without power and drinkable water for several days. The extreme weather took a heavy toll on the town of Gardiner, Montana, which sits at the confluence of the Gardner (more on the spelling discrepancy later) and Yellowstone rivers. More info: /S5ysi4wf8a- Yellowstone National Park June 13, 2022 We will continue to communicate about this hazardous situation as more information is available. On Monday, Yellowstone’s superintendent, Cam Sholly, announced the closure of all five of Yellowstone’s inbound entrances and the evacuation of most tourists from the area.Ĭurrent conditions of Yellowstone’s North Entrance Road through the Gardner Canyon between Gardiner, Montana, and Mammoth Hot Springs. Choked with debris, the floodwaters joined the Yellowstone River at the foot of the canyon the surge pushed on more than 50 miles north, inundating Yankee Jim Canyon, Paradise Valley and the town of Livingston.Ĭonditions were similar across the park, as creeks and waterways rose to record-breaking levels, covering roadways and sweeping away bridges. By Monday, the Gardner River-whose headwaters are on the west side of the park, in the Gallatin Mountains-was a muddy, rushing torrent.Īs it churned down the Gardner Canyon below Mammoth Hot Springs, the river took chunks of the adjacent roadway along with it. The rivers and creeks were already running high, filled with melting snow from an above-average snowpack. Then a weekend storm intensified quickly, dropping a month’s worth of precipitation on the park in little more than a day. ![]() It had been an unusually warm early June in Yellowstone National Park, with temperatures in the 70s.
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