Gardiner: The Only Door That Never Closes

Gardiner, Montana, population roughly eight hundred, occupies one of the most consequential positions in the geography of American conservation. It sits at the exact northern edge of Yellowstone National Park, where the Yellowstone River cuts its way north through a basalt canyon and the Gardner River comes in from the west to meet it. Above the town, through a stone arch built from locally quarried basalt, lies the only park entrance that personal vehicle traffic can use every month of the year.

The settlement that became Gardiner was first established in eighteen eighty by James McCartney, a hotel operator who had been asked to leave the park's interior due to disputes over his business practices and had relocated to the land just outside the boundary. McCartney became the town's first postmaster and its unofficial first mayor, and Gardiner grew up around his presence at the river confluence. The town's name, spelled with an i, comes from Johnson Gardner, a fur trapper who operated in the area around eighteen thirty, though the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition of eighteen seventy wrote the name as Gardiner, a phonetic variant that became official and eventually displaced the trapper's own spelling.

For most of its history, Gardiner's economy has organized entirely around its position as the northern door to Yellowstone. Gold rushes and mining activity in the surrounding hills brought additional commerce at various points, particularly with the settlement of Aldridge to the north in the eighteen nineties. The Northern Pacific Railroad reached town in nineteen oh two, a year before President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the north entrance arch, and for several decades the combination of rail access and park proximity made Gardiner a significant stop in the summer tourist season.

Today Gardiner is the only community in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem from which visitors can drive directly into the park's northern range, home to the Lamar Valley and its extraordinary wildlife, every month of the year. In winter that year-round access makes Gardiner the base for everyone who wants to see wolves, bison, and elk in the conditions that make the northern range one of the great wildlife spectacles on the continent.