Yellowstone Reopens a Key Gateway After Devastating June Flooding
Yellowstone National Park is reopening a significant piece of its iconic landscape to visitors next week.
Floods in June 2015 devastated the park, turning much of the iconic landscape into rubble. This week, a team of about 100 park officials is returning to the area to begin a long-overdue cleanup.
“We’re going to do it,” National Park Service Superintendent Jon Jarvis told USA Today. “I think we can show that this is a successful recovery.”
The park will be open, but without the iconic mountain, the park’s namesake, Yellowstone Lake, and the Upper Geyser Basin, which were all inundated.
The official opening is set for July 1.
Yellowstone’s iconic landscape is home to over 100 animal and plant species. In 2016, that included wolves, buffalo, grizzly bears, deer, black bears and grizzly bears, elk and sheep, as well as the park’s namesake geysers.
In 2016, the park had the highest number of visitors in its history with about 16 million people visiting Yellowstone annually.
The area was flooded by the Yellowstone River in June 2015. The river overflowed its banks, resulting in more than 16 trillion gallons of water flowing into the park.