Taming the Snow and Ice

Yellowstone is home to a handful of winter keepers—a chosen few who occupy a solitary, frozen — and captivating — landscape. Yellowstone’s early winter keepers were generally regarded as hermits and eccentrics. The life remains a solitary one, but with the advent of snowmobiles, it’s considerably less isolated. Cell phone service is fairly reliable.

The team of seven winterkeepers at Snow Lodge are part of a mini-community totaling approximately 150 staff working at the hotel. Lake and Canyon locations are a bit more desolate with a few folks who always welcome the Snow Lodge team coming to pay a visit and help out for the day.

Their primary task from December to March is to keep the park’s buildings free of snow by clearing snow from rooftops of lodges and cabins to prevent damage from the weight of Yellowstone’s prodigious snowfalls. Snowfall is highly variable. While the average is 150 inches (381 cm) a year, it is not uncommon for higher elevations to get twice that amount.[1]

Two park hotels, the Old Faithful Snow Lodge and Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, welcome guests for winter discovery from late December to early March. But other visitor facilities are shuttered from mid-October to late April.

Temperatures in Yellowstone range from zero to 20°F (-20°C to -5°C) throughout the day. Sub-zero temperatures are common, especially at night and at higher elevations. The record low temperature is -66°F (-54°C).[1]

That’s where the park’s winter caretakers come in. Some mornings, they are working in temperatures well below zero. In those temps, snow in Yellowstone is so dry and fluffy you can’t even make a snowball with it. The snow will eventually harden and set up so it can be cut with a saw.

Tools of the trade include a crosscut saw to cut the ice blocks and a flat coal shovel to push them off the rooftops. In a region where annual snowfall can measure from 10 to 20 feet, those ice blocks can be six or seven feet tall in areas where the snow has drifted.

Other winter keeper duties include maintaining trails and keeping an eye on cabins, employee dorms, and other structures. Best and Worst?

Impacts of Climate Change

Snowmelt in the alpine areas of the Rocky Mountains is critical to both the quality and quantity of water throughout the region, providing 60–80 percent of streamflow in the West. Climate change is expected to affect both snow accumulation and rate of spring melt. In some places, warmer temperatures will mean more moisture falling as rain during the cooler months and the snowpack melting earlier in the year. The reduction in snowpack is most pronounced in spring and summer, with an overall continued decline in snowfall projected for Yellowstone over the coming decades. The Yellowstone, Snake, and Green rivers all have their headwaters in Yellowstone. As major tributaries for the Missouri, Columbia, and Colorado rivers, they are important sources of water for drinking, agriculture, recreation, and energy production throughout the region. A decrease in Yellowstone’s snow will affect millions of people beyond the boundaries of the GYE who depend this critical source of water.[2]

Scientists have already documented these changes in Yellowstone:

• Average temperatures in the park are higher now than they were 50 years ago, especially during springtime. Nighttime temperatures seem to be increasing more rapidly than daytime temperatures.
• In the last 50 years, the growing season (the time between the last freeze of spring and the first freeze of fall) has increased by roughly 30 days in some areas of the park.
• At the northeast entrance, there are now 60 more days per year above freezing than there were in the mid-1980s.
• There are approximately 30 fewer days per year with snow on the ground than there were in the 1960s.[3]

Washington, DC-based freelance writer Jayne Clark has been a travel reporter at USA TODAY and several other daily newspapers.