Last Updated: October 10, 2026
Since 1995 the National Park Service has killed more than three million trout in Yellowstone Lake on purpose. It does it with gillnets, from contracted boats, every summer, and the whole point of it is to save a different trout.
Fishing Bridge is where the lake turns into the Yellowstone River, and it is the place where that story is easiest to see. We spent a week here at the end of May and into June 2022, parked in the RV park just east of the bridge, and it snowed on us.
Yellowstone turned 150 that spring. Congress made it the world’s first national park on March 1, 1872, and it covers 2.2 million acres. It is our favorite park anywhere, for the combination: the hydrothermal features, the geology and the animals, all in the same place. Nothing else compares in the world.
The Bridge and the Trout
The first bridge here went up in 1902, a log span over the outlet of the lake, and it got its name for the obvious reason. Yellowstone cutthroat trout spawn in the river just below the lake, and for seventy years the railings were lined with people catching them. The bridge has been rebuilt since, and in 1973 it was closed to fishing, with the support of anglers, because the fishing itself was helping to pull the cutthroat down. The grizzlies that fish here were the other beneficiaries.
Yellowstone Lake was long described as home to the largest inland population of cutthroat trout in the world. Then, on July 30, 1994, a fishing guide out with clients caught a lake trout in it.
Lake trout belong in the Great Lakes and the big cold lakes of Canada and Alaska. They were stocked in Lewis and Shoshone lakes, south of here inside the park, more than a hundred years ago, and the likeliest explanation for how they reached Yellowstone Lake is that somebody carried them over illegally. They grow large, they live deep, and a mature one eats something like forty cutthroat a year. By the early 2000s the cutthroat were in steep decline, and a cutthroat in this lake is not only a fish. Bears, otters, eagles and ospreys had been eating them for thousands of years.
Gillnetting began in 1995, and for years it did not work — the lake trout kept increasing. In 2012, on the advice of a scientific review panel, the effort was pushed past 46,800 hundred-meter net-nights a season, and that finally turned it. Lake trout biomass fell by more than half between 2012 and 2019, mostly through a 79 percent drop in adults. Altogether 3.35 million lake trout were killed between 1995 and 2019. The cutthroat are still below the target, but the ones being caught are bigger and in better condition than they have been in decades.
Earlier on this same trip we had stood at the fish hatchery in Spearfish and read how a federal program put tens of millions of trout into Black Hills streams that had never had a trout in them. Yellowstone Lake is the same century working in the other direction. Somebody put a trout in, and the Park Service has spent thirty years taking it back out.
LeHardy Rapids
Three miles downstream from the bridge the river runs over LeHardy Rapids, and in spring the trout come up through them on their way to spawn. We stopped and watched them there, and we saw trout from the bridge itself as well. We did not know at the time what they were. In late spring, in the river just below the lake, they were almost certainly cutthroat on their spawning run — lake trout spawn in the autumn, out in the lake, and stay deep. The other fish you can watch from the bridge is the longnose sucker, which is native.
Ice on the Lake at the End of May
At 7,733 feet, Yellowstone Lake is the largest high-elevation lake in North America, roughly 20 miles long and 14 wide (there are more of its numbers in our 2023 post). It freezes over by late December or early January and usually thaws in late May or early June. On May 30, 2022, a good part of it was still white.
Rangers at Lake Village have recorded the date the ice goes out every spring since 1927, and when researchers went through that record they found something they did not expect. A century of warming has not shortened the ice season at all. The likeliest reason is snow: spring snowfall on the lake has nearly doubled over the last hundred years, and a snow-covered lake keeps its ice longer. We watched the mechanism in action. Eight inches of it fell on us one night that week.
When we came back through on June 11 the ice was gone.
Fishing Bridge RV Park
We had a pull-through site with 50-amp electric, good water pressure and sewer. There is no WiFi. We had a Verizon signal, but it was limited and the download speed dropped every evening. It is about a two-hour drive from Cody, Wyoming over Sylvan Pass to the RV park.
Fishing Bridge is the only campground in Yellowstone with water, sewer and electric at every site, and it takes hard-sided units only — no tents, no pop-ups, no soft-sided trailers. There is a reason for that, and it is the same reason the bridge closed to fishing.
The trout drew bears. Through the 1970s and 1980s Fishing Bridge had a large tent campground as well as the RV park, on ground where grizzlies came to feed on spawning cutthroat, and the conflicts were constant. By 1986 biologists were attributing most of the grizzly deaths in the park since 1976 to this one development. The Park Service committed to removing the facilities here, and built Grant Village on the other side of the lake partly as the replacement.
The tent campground closed in 1989. The RV park stayed, after strong opposition to closing it from Cody and from Wyoming’s members of Congress. It has since been rebuilt with 310 sites, and the hard-sided rule is what is left of the argument: the bears never moved.
We had a partly cloudy day when we arrived, and that was the last of the sun for the week. Nights were in the twenties, and one night at the end of May about eight inches of snow came down on the Airstream. It was very nearly June.
The Great Gray Owl
A great gray owl was hunting from the tree line just southwest of the junction where the Grand Loop Road meets U.S. 14, very close to Fishing Bridge, looking for its next meal.
It is the tallest owl in North America, and most of that is feathers — a great gray weighs about two and a half pounds, less than a great horned owl. The huge round face is the working part. It is a dish that gathers sound toward ears set at different heights on either side of the head, and that is how a great gray finds a vole moving under snow it cannot see through, then drops on it feet first. Fresh snow on the ground and an owl watching it from the edge of the forest is exactly the picture.
Hayden Valley and the Last Wild Bison
North of the bridge the Yellowstone River slows down and wanders through Hayden Valley. It is a great place to see bison and elk.
After a couple of days of light snow, Hayden Valley took on a winter look.
The animals carried on despite the rain, sleet, snow and freezing temperatures.
The bison seemed comfortable in the snow, as they still had part of their winter coats.
Every one of them descends from a very near thing. By 1902, after years of poaching, about two dozen wild bison were left in Yellowstone, wintering in Pelican Valley — the next valley east of Fishing Bridge. They were the largest wild herd of plains bison left south of Canada. That year the park bought 21 more from two private herds, one in Montana and one in Texas, kept them in a fenced pasture at Mammoth, and in 1907 moved them to a new Buffalo Ranch in the Lamar Valley, where they were fed through the winters and rounded up on horseback every fall into the 1930s. By 1928 the northern herd was about a thousand animals.
Today Yellowstone’s bison are the largest wild, genetically viable herd of plains bison in North America, and animals from it now go to tribes through the InterTribal Buffalo Council, the same program we wrote about in the Badlands. Nearly every large animal on this trip has had a reintroduction story. This is the oldest of them, and the only one where the animals were never entirely gone.
There were Canada geese everywhere, and they did not mind the snow either.
Mud Volcano
Mud Volcano is a few miles north of the bridge on the road into Hayden Valley, and you smell it before you see it. The rotten-egg smell is hydrogen sulfide rising from below. Microorganisms turn it into sulfuric acid, which breaks the rock down into the gray clay mud that bubbles in the pools.
The hillside above the boardwalk was forest until 1978, when an earthquake swarm under the area heated the ground enough to kill the trees, and it has been called Cooking Hillside ever since. Tree rings taken here later showed that the swarm came with a sharp surge of carbon dioxide from deep below. The bison seemed to love the area, and Sandy found fresh proof of it on the boardwalk.
Yellowstone Falls
There is an Upper and a Lower Falls, a quarter mile apart, and they are not a far drive from Fishing Bridge. The Lower Falls drops 308 feet, nearly twice the height of Niagara, and is widely described as the largest-volume waterfall in the Rocky Mountains.
North to the Lamar Valley, and the Gate From the Other Side
From Canyon the Grand Loop Road climbs north over Dunraven Pass to Tower Junction, and from Tower a road runs east through the Lamar Valley to the northeast entrance. It was still early spring up there. The mountains had snow on them and the wildflowers had not started.
Earlier on this trip we had driven the whole Chief Joseph Byway out of Cody to reach that northeast gate and found it shut, because the road on this side was still being plowed. This time we came at it from inside the park.
We saw a couple of black bears, and this sow decided to nurse her two cubs right next to the road.
And very close to the northeast entrance — the gate that had turned us back — we saw a grizzly.
Color is no help in telling them apart. Black bears come in cinnamon and blond as well as black, and grizzlies can be very dark. The reliable marks are shape: a grizzly has a muscular hump over the shoulders, a dished face and short rounded ears, while a black bear has no hump, a straight profile and taller, more pointed ears.
This fox was on the hunt, and it got what it came for.
This pronghorn was out in the Lamar Valley. We wrote about why it can run the way it does in Cody. Time to change locations.
Bison Jams
Almost daily the bison moved to better grazing, and when they moved they took the road with them. One day, along the Madison River, we were held up for an hour and a half. The sight is so amazing that you just have to go with the flow.
It was wonderful to see so many newborn calves, and the herd appeared to be very healthy. Bison calves are born in spring and are a reddish orange for their first few months, which is why they are nicknamed red dogs.
Mammoth Hot Springs and Gardiner, Montana
There are always elk in the Mammoth area, especially around the buildings, possibly because of the good grazing and protection from predators. At this time of year many of the cows were pregnant.
The bulls were nearby too, with their antlers in velvet — the soft, blood-rich skin that feeds the new antler while it grows. It dries and comes off in late summer once the antler has hardened.
We came across about twenty elk grazing on the high school sports field.
Gardiner is a fun town, and we would be staying there later. We enjoyed lunch at the Cowboy Lodge and Grill, even though it was a good drive from Fishing Bridge.
We came across a large flock of western tanagers.
Birds Around Fishing Bridge
Birding around Fishing Bridge was amazing.
The swan is a trumpeter, and it was huge — the trumpeter is the largest native waterfowl in North America. By 1933 only about seventy were left in the lower forty-eight states, nearly all of them nesting and wintering in and around Yellowstone, and the park is a large part of the reason the species survived. Its own resident flock has struggled since: the count peaked at 72 in 1961 and was down to about ten by 2007, and the park has been releasing young swans to rebuild it, four of them in 2019 onto the Yellowstone River in Hayden Valley.
The Clark’s nutcracker is named for William Clark of Lewis and Clark. It buries pine seeds by the thousands every fall and finds most of them again months later, under snow, from memory.
What We Missed
Pelican Valley and Storm Point. Both are only a few miles from the bridge, and in late May both were snow or mud. Pelican Valley is the one we regret now that we know it held the last wild bison in 1902. On a later trip, in 2023, the road east of there toward Sylvan Lake, through the old burn, was where we saw most of our grizzlies, and that is in our East Entrance post.
Fishing from shore. Fishing from the bridge has been closed since 1973, but the lakeshore is open with a park permit, and any lake trout you catch you are required to kill.
Visitor Information
Fishing Bridge RV Park is on the East Entrance Road just east of Fishing Bridge, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. It is run by Yellowstone National Park Lodges; reserve through their Fishing Bridge RV Park page or by phone at 307-344-7311. There are 310 full-hookup sites for hard-sided RVs only, with no campfires or fire pits allowed. The season runs from roughly mid-May into early October, with dates set each year.
Park entry and roads: A Yellowstone entrance pass is required. Current fees, road openings and closures are posted on the National Park Service Yellowstone site, and the Fishing Bridge and Lake area page covers the visitor center, the bridge and LeHardy Rapids.
Practical Tips
Late May is still winter at 7,700 feet. We had nights in the twenties and eight inches of snow on May 30. Bring real cold-weather gear and expect some interior roads to open late.
Book Fishing Bridge early. It is the only full-hookup campground in the park and it fills early. Remember it takes hard-sided units only.
Plan to be offline. There is no WiFi. Verizon worked for us, but slowly, and it got slower every evening.
Watch the trout in spring. LeHardy Rapids, three miles north of the bridge, is the place to see trout moving upstream to spawn, and you can watch fish from the bridge itself. No fishing from the bridge.
Give bears and wolves 100 yards and everything else 25. That is the park rule, and it includes bison, which injure more visitors than bears do. Stay in your vehicle when a bear is close to the road.
Budget for bison jams. When a herd moves it takes the road, and we once waited an hour and a half. Turn off the engine and enjoy it.
Look for owls at the forest edge. Great gray owls hunt meadows from the tree line, especially early and late in the day. Ours was just southwest of the Grand Loop Road and U.S. 14 junction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can’t you fish from Fishing Bridge? The bridge was closed to fishing in 1973, with the support of angler groups, because heavy fishing at the outlet was contributing to the decline of Yellowstone cutthroat trout, which spawn there. Fishing is still allowed elsewhere on the lake with a Yellowstone fishing permit.
Why is Fishing Bridge RV Park for hard-sided RVs only? The area is prime grizzly habitat because bears feed on spawning cutthroat trout there. After years of bear conflicts the Park Service closed the tent campground in 1989; the RV park remained, open only to hard-sided units.
When does the ice go off Yellowstone Lake? Usually in late May or early June. The lake freezes over by late December or early January, and ice-off dates have been recorded every year since 1927. On May 30, 2022 much of the lake was still frozen; by June 11 the ice was gone.
How did lake trout get into Yellowstone Lake? They were first found on July 30, 1994. They are not native, and the most likely explanation is an illegal transfer from Lewis or Shoshone Lake, where lake trout were stocked more than a century ago. The park has removed them by gillnetting since 1995, killing 3.35 million through 2019.
How many bison were left in Yellowstone? By 1902 only about two dozen wild bison remained, in Pelican Valley east of Fishing Bridge. The park added 21 from private herds that year and raised them at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch, and the herd has grown into the largest wild, genetically viable plains bison population in North America.
Where can you see trout jumping in Yellowstone? LeHardy Rapids, about three miles north of Fishing Bridge on the Yellowstone River, is the classic spot in spring, when cutthroat trout move upstream to spawn.
Can it snow in Yellowstone in late May? Yes. We had about eight inches overnight at Fishing Bridge at the end of May 2022, with nights in the twenties. At 7,700 feet, snow is possible in any month.
How tall is the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone? 308 feet, nearly twice the height of Niagara. It is a short drive north of Fishing Bridge near Canyon Village.
Next Stop
From Fishing Bridge we moved west to West Yellowstone, Montana, about an hour and a half away, and spent the next stretch driving the Grand Loop Road.
