Yellowstone Snow Job

In the midst of summer in Maine, few people are thinking of snowmobiles. But a major battle over whether snowmobiles should be allowed in Yellowstone National Park, the nation’s first such preserve, is quietly raging in Washington. After a decade of study, the National Park Service in January 2001 concluded that keeping snowmobiles out of the park was the only way to protect wildlife, air quality and worker health. It approved a ban that was to begin last winter. The ban fell by the wayside when the snowmobile industry went to court to stop it and nearly 70,000 snowmobilers rode into the park last winter, mainly to see Old Faithful.

President Bush then stepped into the fray and suggested that new four-stroke snowmobiles were cleaner and quieter and, therefore, would cause less degradation of the park and neighboring Grand Teton National Park. He asked the park service to reconsider the ban. In a 300-page internal report last winter, the park service again found that the best way to protect the park was to keep snowmobiles out. Despite this information and a record-setting 361,000 public comments, more than three-quarters of which support the ban, the Bush administration is quietly writing a new policy that would continue to allow snowmobiles into Yellowstone, albeit only the newer four-stroke models.

Even if you are a supporter of snowmobile access generally, this course of action is unwise because it ignores years of study, expert opinions and public sentiment. The park service, under two administrations, found there are serious consequences to allowing thousands of snowmobilers on 200 miles of park road. The National Park Service Air Resources Division determined that despite being outnumbered by automobiles 16 to 1 during the course of a year, snowmobiles produce up to 68 percent of Yellowstone’s carbon monoxide pollution and up to 90 percent of the park’s annual hydrocarbon emissions. The situation is so bad that park rangers often wear respirators and fresh air must be pumped into the booths where rangers work at the park entrance. For this reason, the ban was supported by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Aside from the environmental and health concerns, snowmobilers also cut new trails and sometimes harass the wildlife.

If the assessments of government officials were not enough, there was also the weight of public opinion. Five public comment periods – two during the Bush administration – were held and comments ran 4 to 1 in favor of the ban. Eighty-seven percent of the comments from Maine, which numbered 1,726, supported keeping snowmobiles out. Last month, six former National Park Service directors and deputy directors and two former Yellowstone superintendents, dating back to the Johnson administration, wrote to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton asking that she protect the park by ending snowmobile use.

If the administration won’t follow the advice of its agencies or the people, Congress must act. More than 140 members of the House of Representatives have signed on to the Yellowstone Protection Act, which would phase out snowmobile use in the park by 2005. Missing from the bipartisan coalition are Maine’s representatives. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate last month but to date has only lined up five sponsors.

Snowmobile advocates have raised some good points that need to be addressed. One is the use of snow coaches, glorified buses, to ferry visitors into the park. Unless these vehicles can be converted to nonpolluting alternative fuel sources, they, too, should be kept out of the park. Another is the abundance of cars in the park in the summer. Acadia National Park, with its use of propane-powered buses to take visitors around, provides a promising solution.