Picnic area · Yellowstone National Park
Nine picnic tables put lunch beside the Madison River.
Map
Plan your stop
The highest, rockiest slopes around here are a summer buffet for grizzly bears.
Yellowstone Tour Guide
Parkwolf is a GPS audio tour guide for Yellowstone National Park. As you drive, it chimes in with what’s ahead: hidden gems, upcoming stops, history, geology, and wildlife, right through your car’s speakers.
See the Yellowstone audio tourRecorded for this area
The Fire Left a Patchwork“The nineteen eighty-eight fires left a patchwork across the forest. Some places lost their tree canopies, others had scorched trunks with surviving trees, and nearby patches escaped burning.”
Plays on the road 0.3 mi from Madison River Picnic Area in the Parkwolf Yellowstone Tour Guide.
More stories near here in the app
“First time driving through a national park. We used the Yellowstone tour on grand loop Road and it’s just like having a tour guide in your car with you.”
Guide
Madison River Picnic Area is a simple picnic stop along the Madison River in Yellowstone's western corridor. Nine picnic tables and a vault toilet make it useful when you want a proper place to sit and eat; I’d treat it as a practical break, not a major sightseeing detour. Bring your meal and drinking water: no on-site food or potable water is confirmed.
Yellowstone allows camp stoves and self-contained charcoal grills at picnic areas. Campfires are allowed only where a fire grate is provided. Keep food and cooking gear secured from wildlife when you aren’t using them, and don’t stay overnight.
The Madison begins at Madison Junction, where the Firehole and Gibbon rivers meet. It then runs 19 miles through Yellowstone before crossing the park boundary toward Hebgen Lake. The river is the setting here; the tables and fence sit beside it, as the site’s view shows.
Wildlife
713 sightingsGrizzly BearMost seen around 6 AMSighting map
743 sightingsWolfMost seen around 6 AMSighting map
5,273 sightingsBisonMost seen around 7 AMSighting map
3,258 sightingsElkMost seen around 7 PMSighting map
397 sightingsMooseMost seen around 7 PMSighting map
1,494 sightingsBlack BearMost seen around 7 PMSighting mapSighting maps show where each species has been reported across Yellowstone. Wildlife moves, so no sighting is guaranteed.
Parkwolf’s Yellowstone ranking
The audio tour guide for the drive, plus offline maps, trails, and wildlife heatmaps for when the signal drops.
