The Northeast Entrance and the Lamar Valley

The road between Cooke City and the northeast entrance of Yellowstone, and the Lamar Valley that lies beyond it inside the park, forms one of the finest wildlife corridors in North America. Visitors who drive the Lamar Valley, often called the Serengeti of North America, regularly observe wolves, grizzly bears, bison herds, pronghorn, elk, and the full complement of species that Yellowstone's protection has allowed to persist and, in the case of wolves, recover.

Access to the Lamar Valley from Cooke City is the most direct of any approach in the park. The northeast entrance is the gateway. From there, the road drops into the valley and follows Soda Butte Creek west before the creek joins the Lamar River and the valley opens into the broad grassland where wildlife concentrates. In the early morning hours, particularly in winter and early spring when elk and bison have moved lower in search of forage, the density of wildlife visible from a single pullout in the Lamar can be extraordinary.

The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone in nineteen ninety-five transformed the Lamar Valley from a place where wildlife watchers came to see bison and elk into a place where they came hoping to watch predators. Wolf watching in the Lamar developed quickly into a specialized form of wildlife tourism. The Yellowstone Wolf Project established field biologists and volunteer wildlife watchers who tracked the wolf packs daily and shared sighting information with the public. Cooke City lodges and outfitters built winter programs around wolf watching in the Lamar, giving visitors who made the effort to reach this isolated town access to one of the most compelling wildlife spectacles in the world.