Rebuilding Yellowstone a costly and long task

Price tag could be close to $1B to repair damage

Created in 1872 as the United States was recovering from the Civil War, Yellowstone was the first of the national parks that came to be referred to as America’s best idea. Now, the home to gushing geysers, thundering waterfalls and some of the country’s most plentiful and diverse wildlife is facing its biggest challenge in decades.

Floodwaters this week wiped out numerous bridges, washed out miles of roads and closed the park as it approached peak tourist season during its 150th anniversary celebration. Nearby communities were swamped and hundreds of homes flooded as the Yellowstone River and its tributaries raged.

The scope of the damage is still being tallied by Yellowstone officials, but based on other national park disasters, it could take years and cost upwards of $1 billion to rebuild in an environmentally sensitive landscape where construction season only runs from the spring thaw until the first snowfall.

Based on what park officials have revealed and Associated Press images and video taken from a helicopter, the greatest damage seemed to be to roads, particularly on the highway connecting the park’s north entrance in Gardiner, Montana, to the park’s offices in Mammoth Hot Springs.

“This is not going to be an easy rebuild,” Superintendent Cam Sholly said early in the week as he highlighted photos of massive gaps of roadway in the steep canyon. “I don’t think it’s going to be smart to invest potentially, you know, tens of millions of dollars, or however much it is, into repairing a road that may be subject to seeing a similar flooding event in the future.”

Re-establishing a human imprint in a national park is always a delicate operation, especially as a changing climate makes natural disasters more likely. Increasingly intense wildfires are occurring, including one last year that destroyed bridges, cabins and other infrastructure in Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California.

Reconstructing the road in Yellowstone that runs near Mammoth Hot Springs, where steaming water bubbles up over an otherworldly series of stone terraces, presents a challenge.

It’s created by a unique natural formation of underground tubes and vents that push the hot water to the surface, and would be just one of many natural wonders crews would have to be careful not to disturb, said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The Yosemite flood was seen by the park as an opportunity to rethink its planning and not necessarily rebuild in the same places, said Frank Dean, president and chief executive of the Yosemite Conservancy and a former park ranger.

Yellowstone’s recovery comes as a rapidly growing number of people line up to visit the country’s national parks, even as a backlog of deferred maintenance budget grows into tens of billions of dollars.

The southern half of the park is expected to reopen next week, allowing visitors to flock to Old Faithful, the rainbow colored Grand Prismatic Spring, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and its majestic waterfall.

But the flood-damaged northern end may not reopen this year, depriving visitors from seeing Tower Fall and Lamar Valley, one of the best places in the world to see wolves and grizzly bears.

ort of the last couple of decades has been to stabilize the road to make it safe for heavier vehicles to travel on it,” she said.

“I think it’ll probably be several years before the park is totally back to normal,” Hartl said.

David Goldman The Associated Press file Receding floodwaters flow on Thursday past sections of an entrance road that was washed away at Yellowstone National Park in Gardiner, Mont.