For millennia before Europeans arrived, the Bad Pass Trail traced the western rim of the canyon. This wasn't a place where people lived, but a corridor of seasonal passage. Indigenous travelers moved between the Bighorn Basin to the south and Grapevine Creek to the north, where the landscape opened onto plains teeming with buffalo. Archaeologists have found evidence of human presence here stretching back 12,000 years. The Crow people, known in their own language as Apsaalooke, settled in Bighorn country by the 18th century after migrating to the region sometime during the 1500s. The canyon became sacred ground. When federal officials proposed damming the Bighorn in the 1950s, many tribal members protested. The government's response was to name the structure after Robert Yellowtail, the tribal chairman who had vocally opposed it.

Today the recreation area spans 120,296 acres across two states but remains functionally split in two. The North District, accessed through Fort Smith, Montana, holds Yellowtail Dam and the deeper, more dramatic sections of the canyon. The South District, reached via Lovell, Wyoming, opens into high desert receiving just six to ten inches of rain annually. No road connects them. Visitors must drive around, a journey of nearly two hours, to move between districts. This division shapes everything about the park experience. The North District is semi-arid, receiving eighteen inches of precipitation yearly, while the South bakes under Wyoming's high desert sun. Wild horses from the Pryor Mountains Wild Horse Range roam the western portions, descendants of animals that escaped from Spanish expeditions centuries ago.

Despite the dam's ecological disruption, Bighorn Canyon has become a refuge for wildlife. At least 231 bird species nest and feed along the reservoir's shores and canyon walls. Bighorn sheep navigate the limestone cliffs with impossible grace, while mule deer, pronghorn, and mountain lions inhabit the varied terrain. Black bears lumber through the North District, and the swift fox, listed as a Species of Concern by Montana, makes its home in the grasslands above the canyon. Below Yellowtail Dam, cold water released from the reservoir's depths has created an unintended consequence: one of Montana's premier trout fisheries. Rainbow and brown trout now spawn in waters that were once a warm-water system, drawing anglers from across the country to the Bighorn River's transformed currents.

Scattered through the recreation area are remnants of lives lived before the dam. The L Slash Heart Ranch belonged to Caroline Lockhart, a journalist and novelist who arrived in the early 1900s and wrote stories of the West gritty enough that two became silent films in the 1920s. Near the ghost town of Hillsboro, Montana, Cedarvale Ranch welcomed guests to what New Yorker Grosvener "Doc" Barry envisioned as a dude ranch empire. President Teddy Roosevelt visited his friend there, though Barry's dreams of attracting Eastern vacationers to this remote canyon never quite materialized. These weathered structures now stand within park boundaries, their stories preserved alongside the deeper Indigenous history that precedes them by thousands of years.

About one-third of the recreation area lies within the Crow Indian Reservation, a reminder that boundaries on maps cannot erase deeper claims to this land. The Crow Tribe continues to exercise sovereignty over their portion, and their history permeates every layer of the canyon. Today, visitors can kayak through slot canyons, fish for trout in the Afterbay, or hike trails like the 4.6-mile Sykes Trail in the South District. Seven campgrounds offer access to the reservoir, three reachable only by boat. The canyon walls still rise a thousand feet above the water, their Paleozoic limestone telling a geological story that makes human conflicts seem brief. Yet those conflicts endure in the dam's name, in the divided districts, in the ongoing negotiations between recreation and ecology, between states, between past and present.