Peppered with jokes and lightly salted with history and geology, the trail ride to Yancey's Hole for a cowboy cookout fills a unique niche for Yellowstone National Park visitors.

"For seniors, this kind of trip gives them a little bit of spice," said Phil DeLeo, the driver and tour guide for 15 senior citizens from Bonney Lake, Wash. "We have seniors who have never seen this part of the park and have never ridden in a covered wagon."

On Thursday, about 160 visitors representing several corners of the nation and world crowded onto seven covered yellow wagons pulled by draft horses. The round trip takes 3Æ' hours. The 2-mile ride is guided on each wagon by a team of two wranglers who provide the comic relief, as well as the history and geology lessons. There's also an option for guests to take horses into the picnic spot, including a two-hour trail ride.

"This area is called the Bear-muda Triangle," wrangler Traci Rottier, 20, of Michigan told her guests as the wagon bumped down the trail to Yancey's Hole. "You go a mile in any direction and you'll find bears - grizzly bears, black bears."

Xanterra Parks and Resorts, the main concessionaire in Yellowstone, operates the trail ride and dinner. There's also a stagecoach ride during the day. At full bore, the nightly dinner can accommodate about 200 guests guided by 19 wranglers and four cooks.

In its 25-year history under Xanterra's management, the cookout has been canceled only twice, Rottier said. Once was during a blizzard, and no guests showed up, although the wranglers were prepared. The second time was when the cooks found a grizzly bear in the kitchen gorging itself on the steaks.

For $60, guests get the guided ride in, a live musical serenade of such old-timey tunes as "Home on the Range," coffee boiled over a campfire and steel plates they can fill, and then refill, with food. The menu Thursday included a grilled 12-ounce steak, watermelon, cornbread muffins, potato salad, coleslaw, corn and apricot cobbler. Soda, hot chocolate, lemonade and iced tea rounded out the meal.

"They're going to lose money on me," one hungry tourist said as he stood in line contemplating how many steaks he could eat.

Guests dine at picnic tables under a grove of mature fir trees, at the edge of the meadow or under the covered shelter - a good option for shade or rain. Reservations can be made by logging on to the Xanterra Web site at www.travelyellowstone.com.

The secluded corner of the Roosevelt area has been visited by other four-legged dinner guests in the past. Moose frequent the moist Pleasant Valley, bull bison bluff-charge some of the wagons on the way in, and a black bear once caught a marmot on a nearby talus slope and hunkered down to eat it next to the amazed guests.

Youngsters at the out-of-the-way dinner aren't tuned in to electronic devices. Instead, they splash in the small stream, play "hot potato" with a pine cone or scratch messages into the dirt.

Once the evening cools and the dishes are collected, the wagons are loaded up for the return trip and another round of history, geology and jokes.

"What did the mama buffalo say to her son on the first day of school?" asks wrangler Katie Finkbeiner, 20, of Grass Range. "Bye son!"

Contact Brett French at french@billingsgazette.com or at 657-1387.