YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — Tuesday night at a hearing in Gardiner, Yellowstone National Park officials unveiled a new animated flyover and drive-through of the proposed Mammoth to Gardiner Road. The road will be a permanent replacement for the former Gardiner Canyon road that washed out during the June 2022 flooding.
“I think that moving forward, it's really important that we get your feedback on what you want to see as the permanent solution for the connector between here and there,” said park superintendent Cam Sholly.
The road presentation was originally scheduled for September of 2024, but Sholly said engineering studies of the difficult terrain between Gardiner and Mammoth took a lot of extra time. He also noted that the park is dealing with many other infrastructure projects. He said, “Keep in mind, a lot of the infrastructure in the park was built back in the early last century to the middle of the last century. A lot of it hadn't really been touched or addressed in a recent time. And so we've done a lot of work with bridges, roads, wastewater water systems.”
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The park’s preferred road plan splits the difference between going through the canyon, like the old road, and over the top of the bluffs, as the current, temporary road does. The current road was built quickly after the 2022 flooding and will soon wear out. Sholly says there’s another consideration, which is accounting for the unstable nature of some parts of that bluff.
He said, “A lot of people are like, 'Oh, it looks fine, it dries fine, it's beautiful,' that kind of thing. Not everybody likes it, I get it. There are a lot of curves and steepness. We don't want to have a failure like what we saw in Teton Pass last year, and that we would literally be cut off for years and years and years.”
The proposed road will use a part of the lower section of the temporary road, then cut a new route on the opposite side of the Gardiner River from the old Canyon Road. Two new bridges over the river will be built, then the new road will connect with the old Canyon Road close to the former Boiling River parking area. That road provides access to the Mammoth Campground, the oldest campground in the National Park system.
At the hearing, park managers said the parts of the current, temporary road and the old Canyon Road that will be reused will be fully rebuilt. All sections of the new road will be 34 feet wide, with 11-foot-wide lanes and 4-to-6-foot shoulders. Engineers said that a bypass road will be built around the sections of the temporary road that will be affected by the construction. They said that should minimize construction delays.
“This is about the second or third time I've heard about the plans generally, so I'm impressed that there's a variety of them and that they went through the process to make choices,” said District 57 Montana State Representative Scott Rosenzweig, who was at the hearing.
Just after the hearing, Gardiner business owner Betty DeWeese said, “I think this is going to be the best of both worlds. It's going to be a safer, wonderful road, many more. It's going to be better than it ever was, because there are all the turnouts we're talking about now, where people can enjoy it. The little Canyon Road was wonderful, but let me tell you, if you meet an RV, nobody's enjoying any view in those days.”
Park County Commissioner Mike Story said, “I do have constituents in the Cook City side, and so their concern is to have a road, year-round, and this will do it.”
The preferred road plan includes an underpass for animals, removal of the old road through the canyon, and tearing out the current two-lane road and reducing it to a single-lane bike and hiking trail. Sholly said there’s some good logic for keeping the temporary road, which is built on top of a 1870s stagecoach road, viable.
“That's been something that I've heard regularly in different forums: whatever we do, we want some redundancy in case something like this happens again. And so what that would give us, if something did happen later, we would still have that road in place if we needed it downstream,” said Sholly.
Terese Petcoff, the Executive Director of the Gardiner Chamber of Commerce, was particularly pleased that the bike and hike trail will be created. She said, “It would take a lot of the OGR, as it currently is, and make it a path, a recreation path, which is really cool and would be really awesome to funnel visitors towards as well, another recreation opportunity.”
Another part of the plan is replacing the Rescue Creek bridge, providing a trail, and a parking area for access to the new bridge. In addition, there will be a parking area and a trail to the 45th parallel monument. The Gardiner River picnic area will be expanded with more picnic sites and additional parking.
“All I've heard is that people are grateful that there's a plan, and very grateful that it's well-funded, and glad to see that things are moving forward,” said Rosenzweig.
Before the meeting, Ashea Mills, owner of Walking Shadow Ecology Tours in Gardiner said, “I’m gravely concerned with invasive plants that I see cropping up along the roadside, so I think that that's a really important thing as we move forward into this next phase of, you know, making sure that we're doing the very best that we can for our grasslands. That's such precious habitat, especially this time of year in the winter.”
At the meeting, park managers said that particular attention will be given to that issue. They said there will be daily washing of any construction trucks at the park entrance, soils around the construction sites will be closely monitored, and replanting practices that have proven successful for native plants will be used.
The cost of the preferred plan, known both as “Alternative-2” and “The Center Alignment,” is estimated at $250 million. The cost of rebuilding the old Gardiner Canyon road would be at least $100 million more. Park officials say engineers warn that, even with safety measures, a canyon road along the old route would be fraught with dangers from rock and mud slides and future flooding.
Sholly said if the plan is approved by this summer, final engineering work will take another year, with construction beginning in September of 2027. The new road could be finished as early as 2030 or as late as 2032.
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