Hotel stays inside Yellowstone National Park appear to be up in the early goings of the park’s winter season.
Mike Keller, the general manager of Xanterra’s Yellowstone National Park Lodges, said there were 300 more bookings at the Snow Lodge at Old Faithful in the first 11 days of 2017’s over-snow travel season than in the same time period last year. Over-snow travel began on Dec. 15, making that the first day guests could get to the lodge.
Guests are also taking advantage of the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, near the park’s northern entrance, which was closed last winter for renovations.
Keller said the holidays are often the busiest times of the winter season, and it helps that there’s plenty of snow for cross country skiing and other winter activities.
“Some years we don’t have enough snow,” Keller said. “We’ve had a very good winter start this year.”
That good start comes in the last month of a year that has lagged behind 2016 in terms of total visitation and seems likely to end the park’s streak of two consecutive record-breaking years. But visitation has remained well above levels seen just three years ago.
Through the end of November, Yellowstone National Park had counted nearly 4.1 million visits for this year.
It’s the third consecutive year to climb that high, but likely won’t touch last year’s record of 4.25 million visits.
No official visitation numbers for December 2017 are yet available, but recent totals for December have hovered around 20,000.
Although the year won’t set a visitation record, it does signify that the higher visitation numbers may be here to stay. The total number of visits for 2014 was a little more than 3.5 million, at the time the second-busiest year on record. It’s now the fifth-busiest.
