You Will Not Find a Single Hawaiian Living in Gardiner, Montana

While trying to find the zip code for Gardiner, Montana, I chanced upon demographic information for the town at www.zip-code.com.  Gardiner, for those unfamiliar, is a tiny town teetering on steep embankments just above the Yellowstone River at the Northwest entrance to Yellowstone Park.

Assuming the information I found is accurate, Gardiner is somewhat unusual.  By unusual, I mean mostly white and aging.  The median age is 47.1.  I checked a couple of other sites with demographics and found a median age of 37.6 for the United States as a whole.  As a point of interest, Uganda and Gaza Strip have the lowest median ages in the world.  The median age in these two tumultuous and impoverished places has been held to a startlingly low age of 15.

Gardiner, Montana, has a total population of 875.  Not a single Hawaiian lives in Gardiner, which might spare the use (maybe abuse) of vowels, but reduces human diversity.  You will find four Asians in the little town.  I am not sure if it is possible to locate the Asians all at once, but you should be able to locate at least one on a given day.  One black person lives in Gardiner, Montana.  The average household supports the lives of 1.88 persons.  When you split the population by sex, you will find three extra males.

I am most interested in the .88 person in each house.  What does .88 of a person look like?  What is missing?  Do they lack the part of them that wants to earn money by working (like some of my friends)?  I think I have the three extra males figured out.  They are probably cranky old electricians—thrice divorced.  If so, I may be seeing the three men in a continuing education class I will be presenting to Yellowstone Park Employees at Mammoth Hot Springs next week.

Finally, in the event you are also looking for Gardiner’s zip code, the code is 59030.

--Mitchell Hegman