Where to Stay in Yellowstone National Park

The busiest gateway and the closest town to the park's most crowded interior. West Yellowstone sits right at the West Entrance, you can walk from a downtown motel to the gate in five minutes. Canyon Street packs outfitters, restaurants, gear shops, and hotels into four blocks before the entrance sign. Old Faithful is 30 miles east, a 45-minute drive through the geyser basins. No other gateway squeezes this many hotels, restaurants, and tour desks into one short strip.

A skinny river town of about 900 year-round residents at the foot of the original North Entrance, anchored by the stone Roosevelt Arch that Theodore Roosevelt dedicated in 1903. This gate never closes, so Gardiner becomes the go-to base for winter wolf tours, snowcoach departures, and shoulder-season trips when every other entrance is locked. Mammoth Hot Springs is 5 miles inside, ten minutes by car. Outside the park you can raft the Yellowstone River, hike Yankee Jim Canyon, and watch bison and elk roam the fields north of the boundary.

Xanterra runs twelve lodges and cabin clusters inside Yellowstone. The headline act is Old Faithful Inn, a 1904 log-and-rhyolite pile that stares straight at the geyser. Its seven-story lobby is built from 500 tons of local stone and rooms swing from historic doubles with shared baths to modern suites. Lake Yellowstone Hotel, dating to 1891, fronts the largest high-altitude lake on the continent. Canyon Lodge, rebuilt in 2016, gives you the cushiest rooms in the park right on the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Staying here means bison outside your window at sunrise, Old Faithful before the buses roll up, and no driving to the sights.

A polished resort town 57 miles south of Yellowstone's South Entrance, at the far end of Grand Teton National Park. The drive from Jackson to Old Faithful clocks in at about one hour and 45 minutes, the longest haul of any gateway. But Jackson makes up for it with the best lineup of restaurants, art galleries, and hotels on the Greater Yellowstone circuit. If you're stitching both parks into one trip, Jackson is the logical southern base. Town Square's elk-antler arches, the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, and a real gallery district keep it from feeling like any other gateway.

Cody, the self-proclaimed Rodeo Capital of the World, lies 52 miles east of Yellowstone's East Entrance, about 50 minutes on a dramatic canyon road along the North Fork of the Shoshone River. Buffalo Bill Cody founded the town in 1896, and it still works as a full-on Western destination: the Buffalo Bill Center of the West packs five top-tier museums under one roof, and the Cody Stampede Rodeo runs every night from June through August. The East Entrance gets far fewer cars than the West or South gates, so lines are shorter, roads inside the park are calmer, and the whole feel is closer to Yellowstone's early days. You can easily spend half a day around Cody on arrival or departure without re-entering the park.

Two side-by-side communities at the dead end of a mountain road, 7,600 ft up and right outside Yellowstone's Northeast Entrance. Cooke City has about 140 year-round residents and a main street you can walk in three minutes. The payoff for the isolation is first-light access to the Lamar Valley, the Lower 48's richest big-mammal corridor, where wolves, grizzlies, bison, elk, and pronghorn stay year-round. Serious wildlife photographers and wolf watchers aim for this entrance for exactly that reason. The park road west to Mammoth stays open all winter. The Beartooth Highway east to Red Lodge shuts from mid-October to late May.

A quieter back door 27 miles west of the West Entrance, stretched along what locals call the longest main street in America at 33 miles. Island Park sits inside Targhee National Forest and along the Henry's Fork of the Snake River, legendary fly-fishing water that draws anglers even when they skip Yellowstone. Lodging here costs noticeably less than in West Yellowstone for about the same driving time to the park, and summer weekends are far less hectic. The route to the gate is the same highway used from West Yellowstone. You just start 27 miles farther west, roughly 30 to 35 minutes to reach the entrance.