‘Yellowstone’ Is Driving Millions of Visitors to Montana—and Boosting the State’s Economy
The hit TV show Yellowstone may be fictional, but it’s having some real-life consequences in the state it depicts.
Montana has seen a huge increase in tourism over the past few years, in large part thanks to the role it plays in the Paramount Network drama, The Washington Post reported on Thursday. According to a study from the Bureau of Business and Economic Research and the University of Montana’s Institute for Tourism & Recreation Research, two million tourists said the show inspired them to visit the state in 2021. And those travelers spent an impressive $730 million while they visited.
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“We definitely have seen an uptick in interest because of Yellowstone,” Lucy Beighle, the communications director for Glacier Country Tourism—which represents Western Montana, where Seasons 4 and 5 of the show were filmed—told the Post. “If Montana wasn’t already on the map, and if people have seen Yellowstone, it certainly is now.”
Locals generally see the influx of visitors as a benefit: The tourists are filling up hotels and ranches, and frequenting local businesses. But they also think that the show has given outsiders an incomplete view of Montana. Residents told The Washington Post that Yellowstone makes the job of ranching look overly dramatic, with gun battles and assassination attempts. And the show was mainly filmed in the summer, so tourists can be unprepared for the state’s freezing-cold temperatures in the winter.
Plus, there’s the potential for over-tourism. During the pandemic, Yellowstone National Park had its busiest year on record, and Glacier National Park had its second-busiest year. With that sort of traffic can come too much pressure on the local environment and infrastructure, which locals want to sustain.
“I think the show has been good for us. It shows how beautiful Montana is,” Hillary Folkvord, the co-owner of a motel and restaurant in Bozeman, told the Post. “We hope to preserve that as stewards. That’s really important to us.”
While the second half of Yellowstone’s final season is scheduled to premiere in November, marking an end to the show, its depiction of Montana may have people traveling to the state for years to come.
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