Yellowstone: Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel Will Not Be Open for Winter 2022-2023
Written by Andrew-Rossi on November 9, 2022
The Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel will not reopen for the winter season in Yellowstone National Park, a move that will have direct impacts on Cody and Park County.
Yellowstone National Park’s Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel will remain closed this winter from December 2022 through March 2023. The hotel will be closed to overnight guests, and food services will not be provided.
The hotel concessioner is in the process of notifying guests with reservations about the winter closure.
However, the hotel will not be completely closed. The gift shop, coffee and beverage service, lobby, and ski shop will be open. Furthermore, regularly scheduled tours and snowcoach services between Mammoth Hot Springs, Old Faithful, and other iconic locations will be available.
Courtesy National Park Service & Diane Renkin
One of the only hotels in Yellowstone that usually stays open year-round, the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel closed in the aftermath of the historically devastating floods of June 2022.
In June 2022, unprecedented amounts of rainfall caused severe damage to the North Entrance Road between Mammoth Hot Springs and the park’s North Entrance in Gardiner, Montana. In addition, a sewer line adjacent to the road that carried wastewater from Mammoth Hot Springs to a sewage treatment plant in Gardiner was ruptured.
The hotel closed immediately after the historic June flood because of the damage to the area’s wastewater system. Staff quickly rerouted the wastewater into percolator ponds used between the 1930s and 1960s, allowing summer day-use visitors and residents to stay in the area.
A new wastewater treatment system is being built to serve the Mammoth area. However, the temporary system is not ready to support hotel operations this winter. Yellowstone staff are working diligently to make the new wastewater system operational and anticipate a reopening in spring 2023.
Courtesy National Park Service & Jacob Frank
Cody and Park County will feel the effects of the hotel’s extended closure, as it is one of the main contributors to the budget of Park County Travel and Tourism.
The past several years have been chaotic for the historic hotel – a $30 million renovation was only completed in 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Before then, the hotel had been closed since the winter season of 2018-2019 for the final phase of the renovation.
Unlike most other Yellowstone hotels, the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel remained open throughout the pandemic. Many other hotels had to close due to low staffing and inadequate spacing needs.
Park County’s 4% lodging tax is collected from reservations at hotels and campgrounds in Mammoth, Fishing Bridge, Canyon, Norris, and Roosevelt. Despite being in the park, all those locations are technically still within the boundaries of Park County.
The lodging tax has been in place in Park County since 1986 for anyone booking a reservation at a hotel, campground, RV park, or any other accommodation in Park County. Residents voted to raise the tax to 4% in 1996, where it has stayed ever since.
Money raised from the lodging tax is exclusively used to promote tourism in the county. Therefore, a complete closure of the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel means less money for Park County Travel and Tourism. This shortfall may have noticeable impacts on the county’s ability to promote tourism throughout the United States.
