Yellowstone Insider Your Complete Guide to America's First National Park
Last year was a pretty good one in terms of visitors at Yellowstone National Park — good if you want to see lots of people seeing the sights, less so if you like the back trails to yourself, of course.
Chances are pretty good you could have more of the park to yourself this coming summer season, as a spot check of room availability shows plenty of open lodgings available for the 2009 season. When we first did this roundup entering the 2008 season, we found most rooms in Yellowstone National Park were already booked months in advance of the May season opening.
This year, there are many more rooms available. Not a surprise, really: with the economy in bad shape, many Americans are holding off on making any leisure plans at all. And although gasoline is cheaper now than last summer, a family of four will still spend a grand or so driving to Yellowstone by the time gas, lodging, food and miscellaneous expenses are paid. That’s a lot, especially with so many families suffering through the bad economy and the potential of future layoffs affecting them.
To assess the status of room availability for the 2009 season, we checked out availability on three dates: June 20, July 21 and August 15. In theory, these should be popular days: school is out for the summer, and we purposely included a weekend night in the mix.
Not surprisingly, we found there were plenty of rooms available in the Park – even in less expensive cabins at Roosevelt Lodge and Lake Lodge. Here’s what we found at each of the Park’s hotels and lodges:
Canyon Lodge
Rooms available on June 20, July 21 and August 15.
Grant Village
Rooms available on June 20 and August 15; sold out on July 21.
Lake Lodge
Rooms available on June 20 and July 21; sold out on August 15.
Lake Hotel/Cabins
Rooms available on June 20, July 21 and August 15.
Mammoth Hotel/Cabins
Rooms available on June 20 and August 15; sold out on July 21.
Old Faithful Inn
Sold out on June 20, July 21 and August 15.
Old Faithful Lodge Cabins
Sold out on June 20 and July 21; cabins available on August 15.
Old Faithful Snow Lodge/Cabins
Rooms and cabins available on June 20 and August 15; sold out on July 21.
Roosevelt Lodge Cabins
Sold out on June 20 and July 21; cabins available on August 15.
We also surveyed room availability in the three most popular gateway cities: Cooke City, Gardiner and West Yellowstone. In Cooke City, the usually booked Super 8 had opened in all three dates of our survey. The same went for the most popular lodgings in Gardiner: lots of availability all three nights. Only in West Yellowstone did we run into some resistance with room availability, with many hotels reporting sellouts on June 20. That number diminished on July 21 and August 15.
