Sight · Yellowstone National Park
The 1909 depot still tells the story of arriving by rail.
Overview
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
A Porcupine’s Winter Menu“A patch of missing bark high in a tree can be a clue to a porcupine's winter meals. These slow-moving rodents are excellent climbers, using sharp claws to work their way up the trunk.”
Plays on the road 0.2 mi from Museum of the Yellowstone 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
Museum of the Yellowstone is a history museum in West Yellowstone’s former Union Pacific Depot, just outside Yellowstone’s west entrance. It explains how railway passengers arrived for the park and continued by stagecoach, and how that traffic shaped this gateway town. Choose it for railroad, local history, or historic architecture; some visitors find the museum small, so it is a focused stop rather than a sprawling attraction. It normally operates from mid-May to mid-October.
Exhibits cover railroad and stagecoach travel, the town’s historic district, women who worked for Union Pacific (the “Beanery Queens”), and bears, including Old Snaggletooth. The 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake and Yellowstone’s 1988 fires tell a wider story of the region: the earthquake’s landslide blocked a river and formed Earthquake Lake, while the fires affected more than a third of the park’s acreage.
The depot was completed in 1909. Its single-story central block is 117 by 44 feet, with wings that handled passenger services. Native rhyolite from nearby railroad rights-of-way gives the building its stonework. The original plan separated men’s and women’s waiting rooms around ticket and telegraph offices; passengers also had dressing rooms and showers for changing from train to stagecoach.
Union Pacific reached the area in 1907, before West Yellowstone existed; the town began in 1908. The depot replaced a temporary wooden station and is the oldest remaining structure in the Oregon Short Line Historic District. The museum occupied the depot from 1972; after restoration, it reopened in 2001. It returned to the Museum of the Yellowstone name in 2018, so older signs may still say Yellowstone Historic Center Museum.
The broad shingled roof, stone porch and long wings make the building worth noticing before you go in. For a photo, step back enough to keep the low, extended facade in frame; a close crop loses the scale that made this a working station. The museum shop carries books, collectibles and souvenirs related to the town and Yellowstone.
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.
Keep exploring
EasyRiverside Ski Trail7.6 mi · 3.5 hr · 0.2 mi awayTwo loops, a forest approach, and open Madison River meadows.
EasyTwo Ribbons Trail0.7 mi · 30 min · 3.5 mi awayAn easy river loop with a close look at postfire recovery.Parkwolf’s Yellowstone ranking
The audio tour guide for the drive, plus offline maps, trails, and wildlife heatmaps for when the signal drops.
