When the Pass Closes: Living Through Yellowstone
Near Cooke City, Montana
When the snow closes the Beartooth Highway each fall, typically sometime in October depending on conditions, Cooke City enters a mode that is more fundamental than winter anywhere else most people live. The only road in or out of town runs forty-five miles west through Yellowstone National Park to Gardiner. There is no other pavement. There is no shortcut.
The snowpack that builds in the Absaroka and Beartooth ranges surrounding Cooke City is among the deepest in the lower forty-eight states. Cooke City averages more than two hundred inches of snow a year, among the highest totals in Montana. The weight of that snow reshapes the landscape, and managing it, clearing roofs, keeping driveways passable, maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the town heated and functional, becomes a primary occupation for the people who stay through winter.
Cooke City in winter is not silent. Snowmobiles are the practical transportation for reaching areas beyond the plowed road through Yellowstone, and the town has developed a winter economy around snowmobile rentals, guided rides, and the services that snowmobilers need. The trails accessible from Cooke City in winter cross some of the finest snowmobile terrain in the American West, on the high plateaus above the valley where the snowpack is deep and the landscape is open.
The people who stay in Cooke City through winter are, as a group, people who have consciously chosen extreme conditions. They have done the math on what it means to be forty-five miles from the nearest full-service grocery store that is not inside a national park, and they have decided in favor of it anyway. That is a distinctive personality type, and the town is full of them.
