If we could say one thing to describe Cooke City it would be, “old-fashioned.” The town is set in between two mountains on the road that leads in and out of the Northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park. This is the only road open during the winter so the population significantly decreases, going from about 350 people to 88.  The town is pretty much confined to the sides of this road. Most people live either directly behind the stores, in very small houses, or in apartments above the stores they own.

When we fist arrived, we spent some time in the Visitor’s Center where we learned a little about the history of the town. In looking at the displays, we learned that it is a former mining town that has transformed itself to capitalize on the tourism brought by YNP. Also, in the Visitor’s Center, we saw public documents informing tourists about the proper distances to be kept between themselves and the wildlife. One document that stood out to us was a “selfie pledge” that encouraged tourists not to take selfies with the animals, which we later learned geared toward the Asian tourists.

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Walking down the street, we observed that most of the buildings looked like they were stuck in time. Many of them were made of wood and had clear aesthetic damage. All of the hotels in the area were locally owned, not chains, which says that the locals are heavily invested in the tourist economy. Another thing we observed was that most of the business were restaurants or bars, which shows the impacts of tourism on the economy.

Our next stop was at a local convenient store where we spoke with the shop owner who had lived in Cooke City for his whole life. He said that growing up he had and hour and a half trip to school and during the winter the first eight miles was travelled by snow mobile. He also told us that there were only four children in the school right now. This just speaks to how difficult it can be to live in a small town. One of the things that we were most worried about was the fact that there was no cell phone service. He told us that they have never had service and at one point AT&T tried to put a tower in the middle of town, but the town voted it down. He said that everyone there has a landline and two years ago they got dial up internet. We noticed that when we were walking around there were signs for public phones and phone booths for tourists.

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Finally, we finished our visit by walking through the shops lining the street. Many of them were very small and had few customers, but were very obviously geared toward tourists as the sold memorabilia related to the park. Additionally, most of the restaurants were built like bars to give the town an “old west feel” as one of the residents told us. I think all of the members of our pack can agree that living in Cooke City is definitely very different from anything we are used to and would take a big adjustment.

Here is a map of our day!

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