May 26, 2001

YELLOWSTONE BY SNOWMOBILE

Fifteen years ago, we spent a winter vacation in Yellowstone National Park. Unforgettable any time, it is especially magical as a land of fire and ice.

We were staying in Gardiner, Mont., and rented snowmobiles to ride from Mammoth Hot Springs to Old Faithful, which is about 50 miles. We stopped at every paint pot and hot spring along the way to marvel at the colors and take pictures. There must have been other people around on their own snowmobiles, but we remember it as vast and quiet and empty, just as advocates for a ban on snowmobiling say it ought to be.

Such a ban had been in the works for same time, and it was officially declared on the last day of the Clinton administration. If the ban stands, it would cap snowmobile use at its current level during the winter season 2001-2002, cut it in half the following year, and end it entirely starting in 2003-2004. Winter visitors could travel only in snowcoaches, vans equipped with tracks; most roads are closed to wheeled vehicles.

The Bush administration said this month it is considering a proposal to allow limited use of snowmobiles in several Western parks, including Yellowstone, if environmental standards can be met.

I hope that's possible, because the experience we had shouldn't be denied to visitors who want it. Being herded around in snowcoaches like sheep, on somebody else's schedule, is far less satisfactory.

Snowmobiles are noisy, and they do pollute much more than cars. But neither of those things is inevitable. Machines with four-stroke engines, which were demonstrated in 1999-2000, began moving into rental fleets in the past season. They are quieter and cleaner than the two-stroke engines people are used to.

Park employees, ban or no ban, will continue to use snowmobiles because there are places they need to go that they can't get to any other way. The machines they will use should be acceptable for public use as well.

About 62,000 snowmobiles visit the park during the short winter season, from the end of December to the middle of March. Average daily peaks on the busiest roads are about 1,000.

Besides noise and pollution, advocates of a ban say people on snowmobiles chase and harass wildlife.

One activist who testified in favor of the ban wrote, "over and over I have witnessed snowmobilers harassing wildlife, especially bison. Chasing them and making them run, sometimes forcing them to plunge into deep snow, and causing them to expend valuable energy at a critical time of year, energy that they need in order to survive until spring."

But surely harassing Yellowstone wildlife is illegal, no matter how it is done. How does that justify restricting access to people who don't do it?

We didn't see anybody chasing bison, which seems in any case to be one of those dumb-tourist things people do in parks, like urging their children to feed the bears -- which we have seen, though much longer ago. The park's efforts to educate visitors on suitable behavior have greatly diminished bear problems, and could diminish snowmobile problems too.

The only bison we saw were ambling along the road in from Gardiner, and they didn't seem harassed at all by the cars backed up behind them. Perhaps we were fortunate not to see any bison chasing people.

Nor did traffic seem to bother the elk browsing on the lawn in front of the hotel in Mammoth Hot Springs. They couldn't have found a place with more cars and more people if they'd tried.

We weren't committed snowmobilers; in fact, we'd never done it before and haven't since. The noise and the vibration are enervating, and we were very tired and glad to get back at the end of the day. But hiking is not an unalloyed pleasure, either, especially when you're dragging into camp the last mile or so of an overambitious trek. You do it because it allows you to go places and see things you wouldn't otherwise be able to.

Go after idiots who deliberately harass wildlife. Enforce the speed limits. Require state-of-the-art machines to reduce noise and pollution. Enlist the businesses that rent snowmobiles in the educational effort; they have a big stake in the park's welfare.

Rules restricting park travel to groomed roads are fair; there is plenty of unrestricted land just outside the park boundaries. A reservation system limiting the total number of machines may be needed.

But not a total ban.

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