The People Who Stay

The few dozen people who spend the entire year in Cooke City have chosen one of the more demanding domestic arrangements in the American West. The nearest full-service grocery store is in Gardiner, about fifty-five miles away through a national park, or in Red Lodge, roughly sixty-five miles away over a mountain pass that is closed for half the year. The nearest hospital is in Livingston, about one hundred ten miles away in good conditions. In winter, when the Beartooth is closed and the Yellowstone road is the only option, every supply trip is a round trip of more than one hundred miles.

What the year-round community has in exchange for these inconveniences is a specific quality of life that resists simple description. The elk that come into town in winter. The absence of the traffic and commercial noise that define the summer months. The sense that the place belongs, in some real measure, to the people who have committed to staying through all of it, not merely the months that are photogenic or convenient.

The town's winter population knows each other well by necessity, and the relationships that form over years of shared isolation have a durability that transient resort towns rarely produce. Small towns with extreme natural settings attract a specific self-selection: people who have decided that proximity to raw landscape and genuine remoteness is worth whatever it costs in convenience. Cooke City has been selecting for those people since the mining era of the late nineteenth century, and the ones who stay tend to stay for decades. The summer visitors come through and go home. The year-round community has already decided that home is here.