What Really Happened During the Yellowstone Park Flood?

An overview of the 2022 Montana flooding and what's next for Yellowstone National Park.

Errata: At 8:53, the bridge shown in the photo is the Gardner River Bridge, not the Yellowstone River Bridge slated for replacement.

In June of 2022, many tourists and residents of the Yellowstone National Park area found themselves at ground zero of a natural disaster. Torrential rainfall in Wyoming and Montana brought widespread flooding to the streams and rivers that flow through this treasured landscape and beyond. How will the National Park Service Rebuild? Hasty engineering of large infrastructure can be extremely damaging to natural systems like those in Yellowstone, and you don’t want to invest millions of dollars into repairs that might be subject to similar flooding in the future. After all, we build parks (and roads to parks) to get closer to the natural environment and all its wildness, and there’s almost nothing more natural or wild than a flood.

Practical Engineering is a YouTube channel about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that ‘like’ button, give us a comment, or watch another of our videos!

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This is not engineering advice. Everything here is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Contact an engineer licensed to practice in your area if you need professional advice or services. All non-licensed clips used for fair use commentary, criticism, and educational purposes.

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This video is sponsored by 80000 Hours.
Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images.
Tonic and Energy by Elexive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License
Producer/Writer/Host: Grady Hillhouse
Editor/Production Assistant: Wesley Crump
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Background Painting: Josh Welker

[maryl]

My Dad is an engineer. Growing up, we had a whiteboard in the dining room where he could illustrate the cool projects he was working on while we ate dinner. He specialized in dams, but did side projects, too. The dam work was physically very challenging: he had to be rope certified since he was rappelling down and in some cases inside of these gigantic structures, sometimes with lots of equipment. I love your videos because they remind me of those dinner time conversations.

[Sorrell]

As a Montanan, I appreciate you covering this. There were quite a few people complaining that their "Vacation was ruined", not realizing the extent of the damage that was done. I have friends of friends that were affected by these huge floods, and it's nice to see such a well put together explanation of what happened. I appreciate the work and detail you put into your videos!!

[jorgenolson]

I’m a park employee in Yellowstone. I was never evacuated from the park so I got to experience the rare sight of a nearly empty Yellowstone during the summer. As a temporary measure the old Gardiner road, a stagecoach route that had been used as a one-way scenic route and bike path for many years has been expanded and is already in use for employees and tour groups from Gardiner mt. It’s convenient because it’s an already set path that has been surveyed and it doesn’t follow the course of the river so there’s less chance of further collapse. Communities on the northeast entrance of the park require quick fixes to the roads because otherwise, they are trapped, as the Beartooth pass, the only other way out besides the park roads closes in the winter.

[hyperspeed]

I was at Yellowstone less than a month before this event (right at the end of pre-season). It was amazing experiencing winter, spring, or summer just by driving only a few miles from where I had just been, and in a place with such awe inspiring terrain. One day I was in snowfall as deep as my hips, and just 15 minutes later was in a completely different climate wearing only a t shirt and shorts

[MatthewCrawford]

Being someone from Wales, the size comparrison was really useful!

[archdiesel]

I was at Yellowstone a few weeks ago and while at Mammoth I had the opportunity to talk to an Army Corp of Engineers Ranger who was there as part of a large deployment working on the recovery.

One interesting detail is that the services at Mammoth were at an absolute minimum and the reason is that the fresh water and sewage systems can’t handle all the staff and over night guests, but can handle day use.

[kevinvanpelt]

My family and I just returned from Yellowstone less than 24 hours ago. The repairs and associated reopening of the park is a direct testament to the engineers and contractors working this project. The northern routes were closed for repair and I am glad as the communities in the north border area rely upon these routes for not only tourism but daily life. My hat is off to everyone working hard to restore services to this gem of a national park. As always, an excellent presentation, Grady.

[crezychameau]

Everytime I see some of the "great outdoors" places you have in the US like in Montana, oregon, etc. I always get a sense of wonder
I get why activities like camping, hunting, road tripping are so popular in the US, your landscapes are GORGEOUS !

[iansampson]

I work for the U.S. Geological Survey and it’s awesome getting to see our data being used!

[TuggerOver]

I've visited yellowstone from europe just one day before the big rainfall. My plan was actually to be there 2 days later but my road trip turned up to be a bit faster than i thought. I guess i am really lucky that i could see the beauty of the park before this big rainstorm. Sad to see how destructive it was. I didn't know it happened untill 2 days later when i was talking to some local people in Cody WY.

[TrunkyDunks]

Headed there shortly for a TON! of testing for DOT and Structural steel inspections. Its gonna be a long season. Wish all of us engineers and the workers luck!

[chufnoski]

My first time to Yellowstone National Park and it flooded, at first I thought it was normal, no signs of people getting evacuated until we were told to start heading out later that day by park rangers. Never underestimate the power of nature. Unforgettable experience

[esmm]

The USGS river gauge network and the fact that the data is all publicly accessible is such an incredible resource

[martinparmer]

Fantastic video
The 80, 000 hours thing is interesting to me. I've been retired almost 3 years and the one thing that has surprised me most is the amount of time I now have versus when I was working.
The 80, 000 hours, by the way, doesn't include"
commute time
work prep time (washing work clothes, making sure other life people/events are taken care of while you are away at work)
Worrying about what's going on at work
I'm glad there's a non profit out there trying to help people select the best career for them.
You always hear people say "pick a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life". I've always said that saying is technically true but is mostly BS because most of us wind up having to "take" the first opportunity that presents itself due to economic necessity. (being broke).

[TheDeerein]

This video got me thinking about the beach erosion we experience around the county. Specifically, the Outer Banks in North Carolina has changing sands from currents and storms and beaches that need to be repaired. It would be really neat to see a video about beach nourishment efforts and how they pump sand from the sea onto the islands to help with catastrophic storms. Keep up the awesome work!!

[anthonydyer]

In Scotland, we had a similar rain storm in 2015 called “Storm Frank”. A 500 metre section of highway called the A93 was washed away due to river erosion between the villages of Ballater and Braemar, both in the Cairngorms national park.

And yet, they reopened the road 3 weeks later. They didn’t repair the road, they re-routed it a respectable distance away from the river bank! Ordinarily such a project would take years worth of planning, budget allocation, red tape etc….. but in times of emergency it’s interesting to see how quickly they can exercise compulsory purchase orders, make drawings for a new road and let contracts out to build that road. 7 years later, that re-routed road is permanent and has a condition / geometry that’s no worse than the previous section of road. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was one of the cheapest sections of new road to be built on a per mile basis in recent years.

[theodoreboyer]

Another great video, Grady! I'm happy to announce that after watching your 100-year flood video (repeatedly, until it stuck) I was able to understand what you mean by a 500-year flood, and even figured out the 0.2% chance in my head before you said it. You are an excellent teacher!

[christopherwarsh]

When we were in Gardner in July, a shop owner said they agreed for a temporary upgrade of an old stage coach trail to restore northern access, and then 2-3 years for a new road. They can’t simply repair the old road because of the extensive damage, so they’ll have to do new routes. I hope the northern towns survive this.

[squishy]

In addition to the rainfall, we had an unusually late, very heavy snowfall in April. We had about 2-3 feet here in Billings, and I'm sure a lot more in the mountains. That is also a contributing factor to this event. Normally, we get an inch or two here or there. This year, it was almost a week of wintery weather, with the first two days, heavy blizzards and most of that snow. The late, cooler temperatures, kept most of the snow frozen longer than normal. So when the rain happened, it all melted at once, rather than slowly, over March, April, and May. It's like when you defrost a freezer with ice build up. You get a lot more water than you expect.

[adriennegormley]

A lot of those roads, bridges, walkways and stuff in Yellowstone my dad helped build. He was a trained carpenter. He was born in 1898, and was 50bwhen i was born. It was during the Great Depression. And part of the WPA was building roads, walks, fences bridges etc. My dad was one of many local workers who were employed there.
It was due to his extensive work in Yellowstone including a lot of out of the way locations that we, as kids, got to visit a lot of those features. I grew up primarily in Madison and Gallatin counties in Montana, although for the few years we lived near Anaconda while my dad worked at the old smelter there was a break in that.
As kids even after he died we had so many Sunday picnics in Yellowstone that we couldn't keep count.