Plan allows snowmobiles in Yellowstone

LIVINGSTON, Mont. – Snowmobiles would become a permanent winter fixture in Yellowstone National Park under a proposal released Tuesday that would allow up to 720 lower-polluting machines in the park each day.

That would continue interim rules in place for the past three winters, although actual snowmobile use never reached the cap and averaged about 250 machines per day.

The proposal represents a setback for conservation groups and some former park employees who had sought an outright ban on snowmobiles in the park.

The National Park Service tried to impose such a ban in 2000 but it was never enacted because of a string of legal challenges. In the 1990s, as many as 1,400 snowmobiles a day visited Yellowstone, contributing noise and air pollution that critics in Congress and elsewhere said was inappropriate for the country’s first national park.

Park administrators said Tuesday that changing technologies in the snowmobile industry – particularly the introduction of quieter, less-polluting four-stroke engines – allowed them to back off a ban and still reduce pollution.

“It’s a night-and-day change between the way it used to be and the way it is now,” said John Sacklin of Yellowstone, who headed the team that drafted Tuesday’s proposal.

But critics said snowmobiles in any significant numbers degrade the park and that visitors should be limited to bus-like snowcoaches. Seventy-eight snowcoaches per day would be allowed into the park under the park’s proposal.

Denis Galvin, former deputy director of the National Park Service, said those snowcoaches render snowmobiles as obsolete as stagecoaches.

“Their time has come and gone,” he said.

Carbon monoxide pollution from snowmobiles, at 4,000 pounds a day under the current proposal, would be four times higher than the snowcoach-only alternative, the park service said.

Yet that represents just 6 percent of the 68,000 pounds of carbon monoxide released in 1999, when snowmobiles were still unregulated. Similar decreases versus historical levels were projected for hydrocarbon and particulate pollution.

Snowmobile advocates welcomed a proposal that brings the debate “full circle” since the proposed ban in 2000. “We’ve gone from being completely out of the park to sort of out of the park to in the park for sure,” said Jack Welch, president of the pro-snowmobile BlueRibbon Coalition.

Others criticized the park service’s proposal to force all snowmobile users to join guided trips and to prohibit snowmobile travel through Yellowstone’s east entrance because of perceived avalanche danger over a high-elevation mountain crossing, Sylvan Pass.

Snowshoers and skiers still could access the park through the east gate under the proposal.

In neighboring Grand Teton National Park and along the Rockefeller Parkway, up to 140 snowmobiles would be allowed daily.

Tuesday’s proposal came out of an environmental study of winter activity in Yellowstone that considered options ranging from eliminating all motorized travel in the park to allowing 1,025 snowmobiles a day.

The impact statement concluded that the “environmentally preferred alternative” for the park would be no snowmobiles at all. But Yellowstone Superintendent Suzanne Lewis said that does not meet other priorities of the park service such as allowing public access.

“The environment in which we live and manage the park within is much broader than the confines of an environmentally preferable alternative,” she said.