The Elk That Live in Your Front Yard

Gardiner is the only town in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem where it is entirely normal to find an elk sleeping in someone's front yard. The Northern Yellowstone elk herd, one of the largest and most studied herds in North America, spends its summers grazing at high elevation inside the park and its winters at lower elevations in and around the Gardiner basin.

As many as two thousand of the herd's animals use the Gardiner area in winter, drawn by the combination of the lowest elevation in the northern part of the park's watershed and the geothermally influenced soils that keep some grass accessible even in hard winters. Elk walk down the main street of Gardiner in December and January with the attitude of animals who have been doing this considerably longer than the town has existed. Bison sometimes accompany them.

The Northern Yellowstone elk herd became the subject of one of the most watched wildlife management debates of the late twentieth century. After wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in nineteen ninety-five, the elk herd declined significantly in size, from more than nineteen thousand animals at its peak to roughly seven thousand by the mid-two thousands. Researchers studying the changes documented what they called a trophic cascade: wolves not only reduced elk numbers but changed elk behavior, pushing the animals away from streambanks where their overgrazing had been degrading riparian vegetation. Willows, cottonwoods, and aspens began returning to stream corridors where they had been absent for decades. Gardiner sat in the middle of that transformation, watching the landscape adjust in ways that ecologists were still trying to understand.