Floods caused by days of record rain combined with snowmelt from late-season storms ripped through Yellowstone National Park’s gateway communities and the gem of the National Park Service Monday. Resulting damage revealed as the water receded is shocking, with multiple sections of roads washed away, infrastructure damaged and gateway communities isolated.

Three and a half inches of rain and more than 5 inches of snow over this past weekend. The park closed all entrances early Monday as they began to help stranded visitors and employees and to assess the damage. 

“The river potentially has changed its course, perhaps permanently,” said Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly during an online press conference Tuesday.

Park officials did aerial assessments of the northern section, with images showing major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance, near Gardiner, through Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and into Cooke City, near the Northeast Entrance.  

“Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct,” said park officials Wednesday.

“The National Park Service will make every effort to repair these roads as soon as possible; however, it is probable that road sections in northern Yellowstone will not reopen this season due to the time required for repairs,” they said in the press release. 

“This is not going to be an easy rebuild,” Sholly said, adding if “it makes sense to rebuild there in the future.”

Sholly said the million-dollar-question is what’s the damage. “The answer is, we don’t know exactly yet as water is still extremely high. We’re not putting teams in harm’s way at this point.”

The park and surrounding areas are also bracing for more flooding as more moisture fell Tuesday and weekend temperatures could quickly increase, triggering a massive snowmelt event. All entrances to Yellowstone National Park remain closed as of Wednesday at the Tribune’s press deadline. 

The park’s southern loop appears to be less impacted than the northern roads and teams will evaluate damage to determine when opening of the southern loop is possible. This closure will extend at least through the weekend, a park official said.  

The park is looking into how many visitors can safely visit the southern loop once it’s safe to reopen.

“One thing that we definitely know is that half of the park cannot support all of the visitation. So we are exploring a range of options, including some type of reservation-type systems that we would look to implement when the south loop is safe to open,” Sholly said. 

Additional damage to park infrastructure includes a segment of Tower Junction to Northeast Entrance road washed out near Soda Butte Picnic Area, mudslides, downed trees. Tower-Roosevelt to Canyon Junction (Dunraven Pass) has mudslides on the road. And the road from Canyon Junction to Fishing Bridge is potentially compromised and closed for evaluation.

Power continues to be out in multiple locations in the park, wastewater plants have been compromised.

In 2021, an estimated 4.8 million visits were made to Yellowstone, the nation’s first national park. This year the park is celebrating it sesquicentennial, having first being protected by Congress in 1872.

There is still at least 12-inches of snowpack left in the park, Sholly said, and the weekend weather is still a main concern. “if we get warming temperatures in the right mixture of precipitation like we did Sunday, we could have another flood event coming through Yellowstone and the upcoming four or five days,” he said.

Park officials are being cautious heading into the weekend. Several thousand visitors were stranded in Gardiner, along with residents, because they couldn’t come into the park, and they couldn’t exit to the north to Livingston because of road damage, Sholly said.

“Many of our employees lost considerable amounts, so we’re working on a full range of actions to support those employees,” he said.

The park will be “pulling together a large number of people from different agencies around the country to come to Yellowstone and help us assess what the damage is to various infrastructure in the park,” he promised.

He also thanked the “incredible support” from the governors of Montana and Wyoming, as well as congressional delegations from the states.

Park County, Montana, commissioner Bill Berg also spoke at the conference, saying it’s “a little bit ironic that this spectacular landscape was created by violent geologic and hydrological events and it’s just not very handy when it happens while we’re all here settled on it.”