Today

Issues Facing the Parks Today

In 2001, after 32 years with the National Park Service, Michael Finley left his post as superintendent of Yellowstone. His parting shot: "At some point, you just can't keep dumping people into the parks," he told the Livingston Enterprise. "The park's mission is not to sell more motel rooms in an adjacent community or more rubber tomahawks."

The struggle to balance recreation and preservation is as old as the park itself, and it's an issue that continually comes to a boil when long-standing park policies, such as the use of snowmobiles, are revisited with a critical eye. Superintendent Suzanne Lewis, Finley's successor, knows all too well that the mission of the Park Service is a tricky balancing act.

"How do you get your hands around 2.2 million acres?" said Lewis in an interview with Frommer's. "You just can't put it in perspective until you come here. And you have almost three million visitors a year who come for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. The magnitude of people's expectations is enormous, and it takes a lot of management."

Bison, Bears & Wolves

In the frontier West -- where bison seemed to be everywhere, grizzly bears were fearsome, and wolves regularly raided livestock -- wildlife was treated as more of a nuisance than a national treasure. Eventually, the bison and grizzly populations around Yellowstone were whittled down to near extinction, and wolves were completely eradicated by the 1930s.

It took some intensive management to bring grizzlies and bison back to reasonably healthy numbers in the area, and now the wolves, which were reintroduced from Canada in 1995, are reaping the benefits of the huge ungulate herds that have enjoyed a nearly predator-free environment for quite some time. But these high-profile species -- called "charismatic megafauna" by biologists -- are not out of the woods yet. Given the pressures of development around the parks, they might never be secure again.

There are now more than 3,500 bison in Yellowstone, and, naturally, they pay no mind to the park's invisible boundary. In the winter, when snows are deep, they leave the park to forage at lower elevations, sometimes in ranch pastures shared with domestic cattle. The ranchers fear that the bison will spread brucellosis, a virus that can be transmitted to cattle, causing infected cows to abort their unborn calves. There have been no documented cases of bison-cattle transmission, but because of the perceived threat to livestock, Montana officials allow them to be shot once they wander outside the park. Animal-rights activists are outraged, and park and state officials continue to search for some middle ground.

Wolves are another sore point with area ranchers. The reintroduction has been astonishingly successful. Rapidly reproducing, feeding on abundant elk in the park's Lamar Valley, wolves now number more than 300 in the Yellowstone area, and the packs have spread as far south as Grand Teton, where several have denned and produced pups. Although the Defenders of Wildlife have set up programs to compensate ranchers for livestock lost to wolves, the ranchers have gone to court seeking to have the wolves removed. The wolves have, indeed, been implicated in the deaths of sheep and cattle, and a federal judge in Wyoming ruled in 1998 that all reintroduced wolves should be removed. This decision was overturned in 2000, and the wolves are finally entrenched in Yellowstone for the long haul.

Grizzly bears once teetered on the brink of extinction in the parks, but they've made a slow comeback to a population estimated at about 500 animals in the Yellowstone area. (It seems the wolves have helped, because their hunting results in many more carcasses to scavenge.) Because of this success, in March 2007 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed grizzlies from the endangered list, a decision environmentalist groups subsequently attempted to reverse by filing a lawsuit. Nonetheless, the grizzly habitat in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem keeps shrinking, as more and more development takes place around the plateau.

A Burning Issue

Yellowstone's park managers faced the ultimate test of their noninterference philosophy of fire management in 1988, when nearly one-third of Yellowstone was burned by a series of uncontrollable wildfires. These violent conflagrations scorched more than 700,000 acres, leaving behind dead wildlife, damaged buildings, injured firefighters, and ghostly forests of stripped, blackened tree trunks.

The debate over park and public-land fire policies still rages, although things have quieted down some. After years of suppressing every fire in the park, Yellowstone, in 1988, was operating under a new "let it burn" policy, based on scientific evidence that fires were regular occurrences in nature, part of the natural cycle of a forest.

What you will see, as you travel Yellowstone today, is a park that could be healthier than it was before. Saplings have sprouted from the long-dormant seeds of the lodgepole pine (fires stimulate the pine cones to release their seeds), and the old, tinder-dry forest undergrowth is being replaced with new, green shrubs, sometimes as thick as one million saplings per acre. Visitors who want to better understand the effects of the fires of 1988 should check out the exhibits at the Grant Village Visitor Center; the coverage there is the best in the park.

Snowmobiles: to Ban or Not to Ban

Winter in Yellowstone is a time of silent wonder, with fauna descending from the high country in search of warmth and food. The only dissonance to this winter wilderness tableau is the roar of snowmobiles, which inhabit the park's snow-packed roads in ever-growing numbers. The noisy, pollution-heavy engines are not exactly ecologically friendly, but the gateway towns are staunch snowmobile proponents because the activity boosts their economies in the moribund winter.

Before President Clinton left office in 2001, he "ended" the ongoing controversy by establishing a ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone, effective beginning the winter of 2003-04. However, gateway communities and snowmobile manufacturers responded with lawsuits; and the Bush administration also voiced its opposition to a total ban, delighting the outfitters in West Yellowstone and Cody. In mid-2004, a judge overturned a ruling enforcing the ban.

Through the winter of 2007-08, snowmobiles continued to ramble through Yellowstone; all trips were guided by licensed outfitters with a daily quota of 720 machines, and the technology met best-available standards. In late 2007, a new winter-use plan was issued that would institute a lower quota (540 a day), with over-snow travel on the Continental Divide Snowmobile Trail discontinued in Grand Teton National Park and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway. If you're planning a trip, you can get up-to-date information by visiting www.nps.gov/yell.