Picnic area · Yellowstone National Park
A real lunch stop with river views, tables and fire grates.
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 place
Snake River Picnic Area“Snake River Picnic Area is coming up near the South Entrance, a simple stop for a packed lunch beside the river and open meadow. There are eight tables, but no drinking water, so bring your own.”
Plays as you drive up to Snake 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
Snake River Picnic Area is a simple picnic site near the South Entrance Ranger Station. It has eight picnic tables, six fire grates and one wheelchair-accessible vault toilet. I'd stop here for a proper lunch on a South Entrance drive; the river and open meadow make a better break than eating in the car.
The tables make this an easy place to sit down with a packed meal, and the fire grates let you cook when fire restrictions allow. There’s no potable water here, and the vault toilet has no running water, so bring drinking water with you.
The Snake rises on Yellowstone’s Two Ocean Plateau, and 42 miles of it run within the park. Its name was in use by 1812; Shoshone people also called parts of the river Yampa-pah, “stream where the yampa grows.” In 1872, the Hayden Survey called the stretch above Harebell Creek Barlow’s Fork, after surveyor J.W. Barlow.
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.
