Parks weren't meant to be locked up as pristine wilderness

"Virtually unfettered access." That's what you'll read in the papers about the recent Washington, D.C., district court ruling reinstating the Clinton administration's phase-out of all snowmobiles from Yellowstone National Park.

As with much reporting of public lands issues, this story contains substantial errors in fact. Becky Bohrer of the Associated Press erroneously described the Bush administration's snowmobile plan as "aimed largely at curbing air and noise pollution, and park officials considered it a balance between virtually unfettered snowmobile access and a ban."

"Virtually unfettered access" by snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park has never been allowed. Prior to environmental groups' national campaign to eliminate snowmobiles and other motorized vehicles from all national parks, snow machines were limited to certain roads that are open to motorized traffic in the summer and also limited to a 45 mph speed limit. A vast majority of Yellowstone was always off limits to vehicle access during winter.

The environmentalist campaign to ban vehicles from parks began in Yellowstone. A petition to ban snowmobiles was immediately followed with a lawsuit based on the assumption that snowmobile use disturbed the bison herd. Interestingly, while the lawsuit moved along in court, populations of elk, grizzly bear, gray wolf and bison were increasing with no change in snowmobile access.

Of course "protecting the bison" wasn't really the point, so the lawsuits began to bounce around on a number of theories, including water and air pollution. The Park Service's own environmental analysis showed that the air and water in Yellowstone are not polluted, and while snowmobiles do have impacts, they are a fraction of the total human impacts to the park. This makes intuitive sense, since Yellowstone receives over 1.6 million summertime visitors traveling in all types of motorized vehicles along a more extensive road network than previously available to the 60,000 or so visitors on snowmobiles. Nevertheless, the Clinton administration was only too happy to accommodate the environmentalists with a three-year phase-out followed by a complete ban.

The pro-access advocacy group BlueRibbon Coalition joined the International Snowmobile Manufacturing Association and the state of Wyoming, each suing the Park Service, claiming that the ban was unwarranted.