These Yellowstone National Park Webcams Will Cure Your Cabin Fever (Video)

Spanning 3,500 square miles of wilderness across Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, Yellowstone National Park is among the most famous of our national treasures. With natural wonders and a diverse range of roaming wildlife, including bears, moose, wolves, bison, elk, otters, and antelope, there’s always something fascinating to see at the park.

As of publication, the park is completely closed to visitors due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The National Park Service stated, “In consultation with local county health officers to prevent the spread of COVID-19, the park is closed to all visitors until further notice.”

Luckily, you can take virtual tours of Yellowstone National Park through a multimedia compilation of photos, videos, and interactive maps. Or, if you’re yearning for wide open spaces punctuated by craggy canyons, prismatic hot springs, rivers, thick forests, and explosive geysers, turn to the Yellowstone National Park webcams for a peek at nature as it keeps calm and carries on.

And if you're looking for even more virtual national park action, check out these Yosemite and Glacier National Park webcams.

If there’s one thing we can count on in rocky times, it’s that our nation’s most trusty geyser will go on gushing. You have two options for viewing Old Faithful on the daily. There’s a static webcam posted inside the Visitor Education Center, where time is measured not by a clock, but by the geyser’s eruptions. This camera is trained solely on Old Faithful, but it’s presented in static images that update every 60 seconds.

For a second-by-second livestream of Old Faithful, check out the Old Faithful and Upper Geyser Basin livestream webcam. This camera provides a live look into the park, but displays a variety of hot spots around the Upper Geyser Basin, not just Old Faithful. The Upper Geyser Basin is home to around 500 active geysers, giving it one of the most unique topographical landscapes in the world. You can view the NPS guide on the same page to help identify which geyser you’re seeing on the livestream at any given time.

Predictions about Old Faithful’s next eruption are only available when the Old Faithful Visitor Education Center is open, so take advantage of the learning experience available to you now and calculate your own prediction for the next fulmination.

One of the characteristics that makes Yellowstone National Park so famous is its many readily visible hydrothermal features, including hot springs, geysers, mudpots, fumaroles, and travertine terraces. Travertine terraces are hot springs that rise up through limestone, dissolve calcium carbonate, and deposit calcite, forming funky-looking landscapes.

One of the best ways to view these crusted, chalky, bizarrely shaped geological features is through the Mammoth Hot Springs webcam, where virtual visitors can tune in for an ever-changing landscape of carbon dioxide releases and calcium carbonate deposits. Note that the terraces may be hard to see in the winter, thanks to the coating of white snow.

Craving a peaceful lakeside stroll? The Yellowstone Lake webcam is installed on a cell phone tower near Fishing Bridge, almost smack-dab in the middle of the park. The camera is trained over Yellowstone Lake, with an expansive lookout down the southeast arm and toward the 50-million-year-old volcanic Absaroka Mountains, including a view of tiny Stevenson Island on the right.

If you’re viewing the Yellowstone Lake webcam during the summer, you may be confused by the white shores, which resemble snow. In reality, the Brimstone Basin is white because it’s acid-bleached, not snow-coated.

Rise with the sun to enjoy the best of the North Entrance Electric Peak webcam. Grab a cup of coffee and pull up the webcam early: As the day’s first rays of light ignite Electric Peak, the glorious scene may not be the only thing bringing out the oohs and aahs — online visitors might just be treated to a sighting of elk, bison, or pronghorns, all of which are known to graze in the area. Located near the Wyoming border, Electric Peak boasts an impressive elevation — its pinnacle reaches nearly 11,000 feet.