Cooke City Montana Museum

The Cooke City Montana Museum is the community museum of the last town before Yellowstone's Northeast Entrance. It stands at 206 West Main Street, on US-212 in the centre of town, about 4 miles east of the park gate. The museum belongs to the Cooke City Community Council, a non-profit, and covers three neighbouring communities: Cooke City, Silver Gate and Colter Pass. It opened in 2015.

Indoors there are eleven exhibit areas: mining, the Cooke City township, the Beartooth Highway, Colter Pass, Silver Gate, schooling, the women of the area, winter, a revolving exhibit, and "Fill'er Up", on the gas stations and tourism that took over from mining. Out the back is an outdoor mining museum with large mining equipment, an outhouse and a furnished miner's cabin that opened in September 2012, with views up to Republic Mountain.

Mining is why the town exists. The museum dates the first exploration to 1870, when trapper-prospectors found galena, a lead and silver ore, above 7,000 feet; other sources give 1869 or 1874. The camp was first called Shoo Fly. Around 1880 it was renamed after Jay Cooke Jr., who invested in the mines and promised a railroad that never arrived. A US Geological Survey report puts the population at more than 2,000 in the early 1880s and the main mining periods at 1887–1894 and 1916–1930.

The museum also tells the story of the fires of 1988. The Storm Creek Fire, started by lightning on 14 June 1988 in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness north of the park, eventually burned more than 143,000 acres. In early September the wind drove it towards Cooke City and Silver Gate, and both towns were evacuated. Firefighters sprayed water over the Cooke City business district. Four homes and three outbuildings at Cooke Pass were lost, along with one outbuilding in Cooke City, but the town survived.

The museum does not publish its opening hours or admission, and third-party listings disagree, so phone 406-838-2203 before you go out of your way. Allow 30 to 60 minutes. Everything in Cooke City is within walking distance, and in winter the town can only be reached by car through Yellowstone from Gardiner, because US-212 east of town is closed to cars. Cooke City is grizzly country, so carry bear spray on any walk out of town.