Snowmobiles first crossed into Yellowstone through the West Entrance in the winter of 1963, when the machines were little more than tracked sleds steered by bicycle handlebars.
Sixty-three winters later the same route is a groomed oversnow corridor, and any accounting of West Yellowstone Snowmobile Tours Prices begins with one fixed public figure: 135 USD, a standard entrance pass per snowmobile (35 USD) plus a 100 USD nonresident surcharge. The gate at West Entrance, Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190 is listed as open 00:00–23:59, seven days a week.
The town of West Yellowstone is thirty-six years younger than the park it serves. Yellowstone was set aside in 1872. The settlement at its western boundary took shape in 1908, when the Oregon Short Line, a Union Pacific subsidiary, ran rail to the park line and unloaded passengers within walking distance of the boundary. The 1909 depot still stands, faced in dark local rhyolite quarried nearby. In August 1959 the magnitude 7.3 Hebgen Lake earthquake struck a few miles northwest, killed twenty-eight people, dammed the Madison River with a landslide, and altered the eruption intervals of geysers deep inside the caldera.
Winter access here is among the most regulated in the National Park System. Bombardier snowcoaches began carrying visitors over the snow in the mid-1950s. Since 2004, machines entering the park have had to meet Best Available Technology standards for sound and emissions, which moved the fleet from two-stroke engines to quieter four-strokes. Since the 2014–15 season, one non-commercially guided group per entrance per day has been permitted, capped at five snowmobiles; every other rider travels with a certified guide. Listings for West Yellowstone Snowmobile Tours Prices tours therefore describe guided products almost exclusively, and this gateway carries more oversnow traffic than any other winter entrance.
The corridor itself explains the demand. Fourteen miles inside the boundary the Firehole and Gibbon rivers meet at Madison Junction to form the Madison, a river warmed by thermal runoff and open water in January, drawing trumpeter swans, river otters and bison that walk the packed roadbed rather than break trail. South of the junction the road drops through Firehole Canyon past a forty-foot falls, then crosses the Lower Geyser Basin, where Fountain Paint Pot works above the roof of the Yellowstone caldera. Old Faithful sits roughly thirty miles from the gate — the natural terminus of a West Yellowstone Snowmobile Tours Prices tour, the anchor of the region's winter landmarks, and the reason the route was groomed at all.
9 hr
