A road trip to Yellowstone National Park is one of the quintessential American vacations. While it is possible to fly straight to Bozeman and arrange a tour, driving to Yellowstone can be more rewarding and offer you more freedom.
You don’t have to be an experienced outdoor enthusiast to enjoy a self-guided trip to Yellowstone as long as you know the logistics of how to get there and how to navigate inside the park.
Getting to Yellowstone
Total, there are five entrances to Yellowstone National Park around its perimeter. Beginning with the first Montana entrance and continuing clockwise they are:
- West Entrance West Yellowstone, Montana
- North Entrance Gardiner, Montana
- Northeast Entrance Cooke City, Montana
- East Entrance Cody, Wyoming
- South Entrance Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
West Entrance
Best park access for those traveling from the south along Interstate 15
- Access at: West Yellowstone • Montana
- Open to cars: mid-April until early November
- Region: Geyser Country
The most popular entrance to Yellowstone National Park, the West Entrance via the quaint town of West Yellowstone has the easiest access to the famed Old Faithful. You’ll also have immediate access to some of the most spectacular geothermal features created by the Yellowstone Caldera. As the National Parks Service describes, “Yellowstone National Park preserves the most extraordinary collection of hot springs, geysers, mud pots, and fumaroles on Earth. More than 10,000 hydrothermal features are found here, of which more than 500 are geysers.”
From the west entrance, you’ll find Madison Junction about 30 minutes inside the park. Here you’ll find the Madison Campground and a visitor rest area with an information center, bathrooms, and a picnic area.
Turning south toward Grant Village Junction will take you through the Lower, Midway, and Upper Geyser Basins.
In the Lower Basins, you’ll find the Great Fountain Geyser, and one of the most sought-out attractions in the entire park: the Firehole Canyon Swimming Area. A consequence of an underground hot spring that erupts right into the river is the naturally warm water found here. This is one of only two places in the park where they allow swimming, so it fills up quickly on a nice day.
Within the Midway Basins is where you’ll find, among many others, the Grand Prismatic Spring. It is so named because it is so incredibly colorful. “Microorganisms called thermophiles, or heat lovers, make their homes in the hydrothermal features of Yellowstone,” explains the National Parks Service. “Although individually they are too small to be seen with the naked eye, so many are grouped together in the park’s hydrothermal features—trillions!—that they often appear as mats of color.”
In the Upper Basins is where you’ll find what is possibly Yellowstone’s number one attraction: Old Faithful. There’s a visitor center onsite where you can get the day’s eruption predictions and more information about the geysers nearby.
North Entrance
Best park access for those traveling from the west along Interstate 90
- Access at: Gardiner • Montana
- Open to cars: year-round
- Region: Mammoth Hot Springs
Using the North Entrance to Yellowstone in Gardiner is the fastest way to reach Mammoth Hot Springs. Originally designed to be Yellowstone’s main entrance – evidenced by the grand Roosevelt Gate that greets you when you arrive – it is still an extremely important access point as it is effectively the only gate that’s open in the winter. When you first arrive, you can visit the Albright Visitors Center to get more information about the region.
Mammoth Hot Springs is one of the world’s examples of travertine terraces. They are created by the interaction of thermal spring water with natural limestone. While they used to be open to the public to bathe in, the National Parks Service halted this practice to protect the fragile terraces.
“Thermal water rises through the limestone, carrying high amounts of the dissolved limestone,” they explain. “At the surface, carbon dioxide is released and calcium carbonate is deposited, forming travertine, the chalky white mineral forming the rock of travertine terraces.”
If you want to get a particularly interesting view of Mammoth Hot Springs, you can take the Upper Terrace Drive loop. Though it’s only a mile long, there are several places along the way to pull over and take pictures.
The same geothermal activity in the area that creates Mammoth also feeds what’s called the Boiling River. Though bathing in most of the thermal waters within Yellowstone is prohibited, it is legal here when conditions allow.
When you’re ready to leave the Mammoth Junction area, you can take the main road to Tower Junction, or you can take the scenic Blacktail Plateau Drive. Though this six-mile-long road is unpaved and has better wildlife viewing opportunities than the main drag.
And if you’re ready to exit the park back through Gardiner, you can take Old Gardiner Road instead. It’s a one-way, unpaved road that goes from Mammoth back to Gardiner.
Northeast Entrance
Best park access for those traveling from the east along Interstate 90 or 94
- Access at: Cooke City • Montana
- Open to cars: early May until early November
- Region: Lamar Valley
Arguably the most dramatic way to come to Yellowstone, the approach to the Northeast Entrance might be just as exhilarating as the park itself. To reach it, you’ll have to pass through Cooke City, which lies at the end of one of the most scenic highways in the country: Beartooth Scenic Byway, or colloquially, Beartooth Highway.
This stretch of highway 212 begins in Red Lodge, dips briefly into Wyoming, and comes back across the state line just before Cooke City. Along it, you’ll find several places to stop and park to take a hike, admire the view, buy supplies, or even go skiing in the middle of the summer. It goes directly through one of the nation’s most pristine alpine areas, replete with hundreds of mountain lakes that beg for a closer look.
You can also reach Beartooth Highway via the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway. Also known as Highway 296, it branches out from highway 120 and travels northeast through the corner of Wyomi