Parts of the national park may stay off-limits for the rest of the season. Visitors were evacuated after record rainfall washed away roads and bridges, the authorities said.
Yellowstone National Park, punished over four days by record rains and melting snow that caused floods and mudslides and drove more than 10,000 visitors to safety, will remain closed for about a week, and the most severely damaged northern section may stay closed for the rest of the season, officials said Tuesday.
The park’s southern loop will be reopened sooner, while entrances to the northern half of the park will likely remain closed until late October or early November, the superintendent of the park, Cam Sholly, said in a news conference.
“I’ve heard this is a thousand-year event,” he said.
Only 12 campers, who are all safe, remained in the park’s backcountry, Mr. Sholly added. Though the flooding ate away concrete roads and wrecked bridges, there were no injuries from the storm aside from one person suffering a fatal cardiac arrest at a campground, officials said.
On Tuesday, Gov. Greg Gianforte of Montana declared a statewide disaster. A dozen people who had been stranded because of flooding north of the park, in Roscoe and Cooke City, Mont., had been evacuated by the Montana National Guard, he said.
Millions of visitors are drawn each year to the wilderness and active geysers in Yellowstone, which is the oldest national park in the United States and sprawls across more than two million acres in the northwest corner of Wyoming and into Montana and Idaho.
In 2021, more than 4.8 million people visited Yellowstone. The park is particularly popular in the summer, and Mr. Sholly suggested that 10,000 people was a conservative estimate for how many visitors had been in the park when evacuations began.
The storm in Yellowstone began with two to three inches of rain over the weekend and combined with warming temperatures that melted 5.5 inches of snow, creating a major flood with voluminous and extraordinarily fast water flow, Mr. Sholly said.
Jason Straub, a meteorologist with the Weather Service, said 1.37 inches of rain fell on Sunday, according to measurements taken at Yellowstone Lake, beating a record of just under a half inch in 2005.
Officials evacuated visitors from the battered north of the park on Monday, and by late Tuesday floods were still raging, Mr. Sholly added.
Ominously, some forecasts suggest more warmth and rain in four to five days, even as another foot of snow remains on Yellowstone’s mountains, raising the possibility of yet another series of floods, Mr. Sholly said.
Mr. Sholly conducted his news conference from Mammoth, a tiny settlement in Yellowstone that he said had lacked power for 30 hours. Gardiner and Cooke City, two Montana towns that serve as northern entrances to the park, were cut off from supplies of food and clean water, officials said, adding that it had become impossible pick up trash, clean the streets or enforce the law. Officials were “assuming” there had been damage to the towns’ sewer system and that it had merged with floods, Mr. Sholly said.
Yellowstone last closed in 2020, when the pandemic shut down the park for two months. Local businesses struggled, but 2021 saw record levels of tourism, and 2022 was on pace to surpass that, Bill Berg, the commissioner of Gardiner and Cooke City’s county, said on Tuesday.
“Now that’s all gone,” he said. “It’s a lot on top of a lot.”
Shawn Darr, the owner of Little Trail Creek Cabins, a vacation rental in Gardiner, Mont., north of the park, said that in the past two days, she had already received about 20 cancellations for the summer period.
She said that she and her husband, who had recently retired to run the cabins full time, were now looking at “a very decreased income, with the possibility of no further income for the year” and were considering “other avenues to make ends meet.”
Ms. Darr, 43, said that she was thinking about commuting to nearby towns where she could take up her former profession as a nurse. Her husband, she added, operated heavy equipment, and hoped that he might be able to earn some money assisting with recovery efforts.
Anna Holloway, 45, runs a bookstore and cafe in Gardiner. She said that her business had been closed on Tuesday afternoon by the health department, because of the lack of clean water.
Previously, Ms. Holloway said, she and her colleagues had been hauling water in 10-gallon jugs from a nearby well, and using disposable plates to cut back on washing dishes, so that they could remain open.
“We already have a town of stranded people, the last thing you want is a town of stranded people with no coffee in the morning,” Ms. Holloway said, adding that while she had been trying to remain optimistic, she believed that the flooding spelled the end of this year’s tourist season for the town.
Unfortunately, she added, “without Yellowstone, there’s no reason for people to come to Gardiner.”
She said that she had told her 11 employees she would try to help them find jobs elsewhere, and in the meantime, would either operate her business solo, or leave town for the summer to find another job. “My business is my job,” Ms. Holloway said. “I’m not going to be able to pay my bills.”
Other businesses were less accommodating, workers said.
“They just fired us all,” said Madeline Arsola, 30, who works for a hotel in the town that she said told several of its employees on Tuesday that they would no longer have jobs.
“I’ve been doing this job for three and a half years,” she added. “I have no clue what to do.”
Many of those evacuated found themselves stranded in the region, like Angie Lilly of Lake Stevens, Wash., northeast of Seattle, who had visited Yellowstone over the weekend with her mother and sister.
“We were all very excited to see most of it on Sunday,” Ms. Lilly, 38, said of the park, singling out the Old Faithful geyser as a highlight.
Then the rain came, and the family took shelter in their hotel in Gardiner. When they awoke on Monday, the roads leading to and from the hotel were washed out or badly damaged, she said.
“We had no idea that we would wake up in the morning and be stuck here,” she said.
This year is the 150th anniversary of the establishment of Yellowstone, and plans to celebrate included events with Indigenous tribes like a tepee village and horseback riding. Mr. Sholly stopped short of promising those plans would go ahead, but he expressed hope that they would, both for the value of Native-American tribes occupying the Yellowstone landscape and for the likely economic benefit to the region.
Johnny Diaz and Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting.
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