YELLOWSTONE’S Cold Rush

Geysers, buffalo and bears. To most people, that’s what Yellowstone National Park is all about. But most people visit the park in the summer.

In the winter, when snowfall averages 150 inches and daytime temperatures hover around zero, Yellowstone is a different animal. The bears are hibernating, and Old Faithful’s skirt is hemmed with ice. There are no crowds. The 1.5 million people who visit during the summer have gone home, and the 130,500 who come in winter create fewer traffic jams because wheeled vehicles aren’t allowed, for the most part, from early November to late April.

To get around in the winter season, which runs from December to March, visitors must rely on cross-country skis, snowshoes and snowmobiles. Or they hop on a snow coach, a funky over-the-snow tank that seats about a dozen passengers and has big steerable skis in front and tracks in back for navigating the park’s groomed, snow-packed roads.

I came here for four days in early January, mostly to ride in a vintage Bombardier snow coach. These wonderfully outlandish vehicles were invented in Canada in 1937 (they were the model for snowmobiles) and later adopted by the park concessionaire, Amfac Parks and Resorts. And I never expected that winter would turn out to be my favorite season in Yellowstone. But when icicles hang on the eaves of Old Faithful Lodge, the geothermal wonders spew gigantic mushroom clouds of water vapor into the frigid air and alpenglow paints the flanks of the Gallatin Mountains a nail-polish pink, the 2.2-million-acre national park--America’s first and, in the hearts of many, the foremost--seems most intensely wild, untrammeled and majestic.

Getting here was surprisingly easy. I flew to Bozeman, Mont., and caught a Karst Stage bus from the airport to West Yellowstone. The bus trip lasted 2 1/2 hours and took me south, past Big Sky ski resort, along the Madison River. (Like several Yellowstone waterways, it doesn’t freeze in winter because it’s fed by piping-hot geysers and springs.) I spotted a bald eagle and fancied every snow-frosted lodgepole pine we passed as the perfect Christmas tree. The sun was starting to set, and it looked as cold as the North Slope of Alaska.

On Feb. 9, 1933, the thermometer hit minus 66 in Yellowstone, a record low. But during my visit, the temperature stayed in the 30s during the day, and the skies were clear. The snow level when I was there was low, perhaps a third of what it should have been, and that had skiers and snowmobilers praying for a blizzard to restore the snowpack. At the suggestion of a Karst Stage reservations agent, I was prepared, dressed in layers with long johns, sock and glove liners, a snow-resistant Gore-Tex jacket and pants, boots and gaiters.

More important, though, I prepared myself mentally, deciding to embrace the cold instead of fighting it. I took that advice from George Marshall, one of the park’s early “winterkeepers,” who lived with his wife and four children near Lower Geyser Basin in 1880 and 1881. “None of us have even caught a cold, all are enjoying tiptop health, and I have gained 30 pounds since October,” he told travel writer Robert Strahorn in a letter. “The colder the mornings, the grander the view.”

I didn’t have to test the truth of Marshall’s words about the cold immediately, because the bus took me directly to my hotel, the Hibernation Station on the south side of town, bordering the Gallatin National Forest. The 38 cozy and stout log cabins in the enclave have whimsical carvings of fly fishermen, coyotes and cowboys on the ridgelines of the roofs. Owner William Oldroyd, who made the carvings from Douglas fir using only a chain saw and grinder, told me that most of his guests come for snowmobiling.

This little tourist town at the west entrance to Yellowstone, which looks as if it hasn’t changed a whit since 1955, is a mecca for snowmobilers. There are hundreds of miles of groomed trails nearby, snowmobile routes posted downtown and rental companies offering Arctic Cats, Polarises, Yamahas and Bombardier Ski-Doos aplenty. These over-the-snow vehicles, developed in the ‘50s on the snow coach model, are annoyingly noisy and emit unpleasant fumes. But riding them is fun, I discovered immediately after my arrival by renting a Ski-Doo at the Hibernation Station. (The name of the Bombardier snowmobile is actually an error that stuck, made when a secretary mis-typed the vehicle’s given name, Ski-Dog.)

Timidly at first but with rapidly growing aplomb, I drove my Ski-Doo around West Yellowstone, which seemed refreshingly unaffected compared with Jackson, Wyo., the chichi town south of the park. I checked out the coming attractions at the Yellowstone IMAX Theater, shopped for groceries, film and books, and had dinner at Bullwinkle’s Saloon & Eatery on Madison Avenue, the $18.95 Snowmobiler’s Special, of course--a salad, baked potato, sauteed vegetables, fried onion rings and an 8-ounce T-bone.

On the way back to my hotel, I saw a circle around the moon and heard the howl of coyotes--and snowmobiles.

On Dec. 29, 1,315 snowmobiles entered the park at the gate here, a record for that entryway. Most zoomed 14 miles east to Madison Junction, then south to Old Faithful or north to Mammoth Hot Springs. Routinely, others also enter from the north or south gates, and on a busy holiday weekend it isn’t uncommon for 2,000 snowmobiles to be roaring around Yellowstone.

But the snowmobiles are not to everyone’s liking. People who come here for snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, critter-watching and perfect stillness see the snowmobilers as joy riders with little appreciation for nature. Environmental impact studies say the machines frighten the animals and affect the precious winter resources on which Yellowstone’s animal populations rely. Locals who love the wildness of the park but have a stake in the businesses the snowmobilers support are torn.

Late last year, the park announced a new winter use plan that will largely ban snowmobiles in the Yellowstone wilderness by 2004. A group of snowmobile enthusiasts, dealers and manufacturers promptly sued to block implementation of the plan.

Something about Yellowstone seems to invite environmental controversy, whether it concerns brucellosis-infected bison that stray outside the park and rouse nearby cattle ranchers to arms; the 1995 reintroduction of the gray wolf, a top-of-the-food-chain predator, which, hunters say, has depleted the elk population in the Yellowstone area; or fires, like those in 1988, which were at first allowed to burn naturally but got out of control, destroying nearly a million acres.

Nor has the snowmobiling problem been settled. Some park employees say that eliminating snowmobiles may not be the only solution, because a new breed of quieter, less toxic snow vehicles has recently been developed.

Snow coaches, which will provide all transportation in winter if the snowmobile ban goes into effect, aren’t exactly dulcet either. They ride like a concrete mixer on a dirt road in Baja, as I discovered on a daylong tour with Alpen Guides and six other passengers to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. The tour company has a half-dozen fire engine red, retro Bombardiers bearing such affectionate monikers as Chip and Sally. The hatches on top can be opened for shutterbugs (the vehicles also have windows) and the machines can reach a death-defying 40 mph. Their size alone makes them king of the road in wintertime Yellowstone, despite the peskiness of snowmobilers who don’t pay attention to the speed limit or stop signs.

The scofflaws’ helmets have IQ dampers, joked my tour group’s driver and guide, Mike Bryers, a bearded, self-proclaimed old hippie who has lived in the area for 30 years. Along the road to Madison Junction, where the Gibbon and Firehole rivers merge to form the beautiful Madison and where there’s a warming hut for travelers, Bryers showed us trumpeter swans, white-rumped cow elk, a burn area from the 1988 fire (now covered with baby lodgepole pines 3 to 5 feet tall) and a lava flow.

When Yellowstone is cold and snow white, it’s hard to comprehend that the park is centered on the 24- by 36-mile caldera of a volcano that erupted 630,000 years ago. But we had only to stop at Norris Geyser Basin, 14 miles north of Madison Junction, as the Great Whirligig geyser began to erupt, shooting a curtain of boiling water into the sky, to appreciate the area’s geothermal volatility.

From there it was on to the gorge of the Yellowstone River, which I’d seen on two previous visits in spring and fall but found all the more breathtaking when the falls are crusted with ice and the canyon walls are draped in snow. I was the only member of the group who wanted to snowshoe from the road to the edge of the canyon, a delightful three-mile round trip through the silent forest. I’d never snowshoed, but there was really nothing to it beyond picking up one foot after the other. At Inspiration Point I ate my box lunch, then plodded back to the road for a rendezvous with the snow coach.

The next morning I packed my bags and boarded another snow coach, this one bright yellow, for the trip back into the park to Old Faithful Snow Lodge, where I planned to spend the night and do a little cross-country skiing. Patrick Metheny, the driver and guide, added to my store of Yellowstone lore by mentioning that Gary Cooper drove a snow coach in Yellowstone in the early ‘20s, before making it big in Hollywood.

To my mind, Gary Cooper was about all the Old Faithful Snow Lodge lacked. Its construction in 1997 posed challenges because it lies in a National Historic District, next to the grand and venerable Old Faithful Lodge, built in 1904 but too drafty for winter use. The park did a superlative job on the new lodge, a low building with rooms lined in burnished wood, a restaurant, bar, ski shop and comfortable lobby where guests play checkers and read books by the fire.

After checking in, I went straight to the ski shop to sign up for a cross-country class and to rent equipment. My young instructor taught me how to glide and keep my poles back, then took me to a hill, where I all but gave up after falling twice. But, like Truman Everts, who wandered, lost, through the Yellowstone wilderness for 37 days in the fall of 1870 before he was rescued, I decided to persevere. After his ordeal, Everts wrote that providence implanted in every man a “principle of self-preservation equal to any emergency which did not destroy his reason.”

My reason seemed intact, so I went out on my own the next morning along the trail to Biscuit Basin. This four-mile expedition was pure joy, offering stirring views of spurting Old Faithful, bison, elk, Morning Glory Pool and the steaming Firehole River. In the distance, Biscuit Basin looked like a Civil War battlefield or an Indian encampment, its geysers and fumaroles smoking like cook fires.

That afternoon I caught another Amfac snow coach to Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, 50 miles north of Old Faithful Snow Lodge, near the north gate of the park at Gardiner, Mont. It was dark when we got in, and I was scheduled to catch a Karst Stage bus back to the Bozeman airport early the next morning. So I didn’t have a chance to ski around the limestone terraces of Mammoth or hike to a spot where people bathe in pools fed by hot springs along the Yellowstone River.

There are lots of things I didn’t have the time to do in Yellowstone this winter. I would have liked to ski around Bunsen Peak just south of Mammoth, or take a wildlife tour with a national park ranger into the Lamar Valley and see a pack of gray wolves, which are rapidly supplanting bears as Yellowstone’s most popular creatures, though they’re people-shy and much harder to spot.

I know I’ll go back to Yellowstone in winter. Meanwhile, I’ll carry with me the image of sunset in glorious alpenglow pink on Electric Peak in the Gallatin Mountains.

I’m a city girl, but in my heart I know that’s a sight more precious than the lights of Times Square or the Hollywood sign.

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GUIDEBOOK

Wandering Through Yellowstone in Winter

Getting there: Connecting service from LAX to Bozeman, Mont., is available on United, Delta and Alaska; restricted round-trip fares begin at $295. From LAX to Jackson, Wyo., connecting service is offered on Delta and United; restricted round-trip fares begin at $499.

Getting around: Karst Stage Inc., telephone (800) 287-4759 or (406) 388-2293, fax (406) 388-2297, Internet https://www.karststage.com, offers bus service between Gallatin Field Airport near Bozeman, West Yellowstone and Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel. The price is $35 one way to West Yellowstone; to Mammoth Hot Springs (reservations required) the price starts at $35.

Where to stay: I chose the Hibernation Station, 212 Gray Wolf Ave., West Yellowstone, MT 59758; tel. (800) 580-3557 or (406) 646-4200, fax (406) 646-4200, https://www.hibernationstation.com. Its 38 log cabins range from $99 to $269; some have fireplaces, kitchenettes and spa tubs.

Old Faithful Snow Lodge and Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, operated by Amfac Parks and Resorts, tel. (307) 344-7311, fax (307) 344-7456, https://www.travelyellowstone.com, are inside the park and stay open through the winter season. Prices from $65 to $131 at Old Faithful, and $52 to $261 at Mammoth.

Seeing the park: Amfac (above) books snow coach transportation in Yellowstone as well as cross-country ski drops. It also offers a variety of Yellowstone winter packages, such as “Frosty Fun,” which includes accommodations for two nights, breakfasts, an hour in a hot tub and a snow coach tour for two starting at $89, double occupancy, at Mammoth and $189, double occupancy, at Old Faithful.

Yellowstone Alpen Guides, 555 Yellowstone Ave., P.O. Box 518, West Yellowstone, MT 59758; tel. (800) 858-3502 or (406) 646-9591, fax (406) 646-9594, https://www.yellowstoneguides.com, offers snow coach tours into the park.

Yellowstone Expeditions, P.O. Box 865, West Yellowstone, MT 59758; tel. (800) 728-9333, https://www.yellowstoneexpeditions.com, has a yurt encampment near the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, with heated sleeping huts and a sauna. The tour company takes visitors into the park by snow coach for cross-country skiing adventures.

Where to eat: At Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel and Old Faithful Snow Lodge, the Amfac-administered dining rooms and snack shops are decent--and your only options.

In West Yellowstone, I liked Bullwinkle’s Saloon & Eatery, 19 Madison Ave., local tel. 646-7974, where a T-bone with all the trimmings costs about $20, and the Wild West Pizzeria, 14 Madison Ave., tel. 646-4400. A delicious 12-inch basic cheese pizza costs $9.95.

For more information: Yellowstone National Park, tel. (307) 344-7381, https://www.nps.gov/yell; and the West Yellowstone Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 458, West Yellowstone, MT 59758; tel. (406) 646-7701, https://www.westyellowstonechamber.com.