Snowmobile Capital: Four Hundred Inches and Direct Park Access
Near West Yellowstone, Montana
West Yellowstone makes a straightforward claim: it is the snowmobile capital of the world. The town is snow-covered from early November into May, with a snowpack that typically peaks around three and a half to four feet. The terrain surrounding it, across the national forests to the west and north and inside Yellowstone to the east, offers hundreds of miles of groomed trails. And from Canyon Street a rider can drive a snowmobile directly through the west entrance of Yellowstone to Old Faithful and beyond. Those facts together underpin a legitimate claim.
Through the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, snowmobile access to Yellowstone was largely unlimited, and on busy winter days hundreds of machines at a time converged on the Old Faithful basin. By the late nineteen nineties, air quality monitors at the geyser areas were registering dangerous levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons from the exhaust of two-stroke engines. The National Park Service proposed banning snowmobiles from Yellowstone entirely. A decade of lawsuits, political pressure from gateway towns like West Yellowstone, and competing court orders followed. The eventual compromise imposed daily entry limits, required guided tours for access to the park interior, and mandated the use of cleaner four-stroke engines.
West Yellowstone fought the restrictions hard and emerged with an arrangement it could survive. Guided snowmobile tours into the park continue. Hundreds of miles of groomed trails fan out from town across the surrounding national forest lands, available without any permit or guide requirement. The annual snowmobile season, running roughly from late November through March, is now as economically important to many local businesses as the summer tourist season.
