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 3 million visitors a year who come for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. The magnitude for Yellowstone is pretty steep, 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 and Grand Teton 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 4,000 bison in Yellowstone and Grand Teton, 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 healthier population estimated between 300 and 600. It seems the wolves have helped, because their hunting results in many more carcasses to scavenge, and there have been rumblings the government will remove grizzlies from the endangered list. Nonetheless, the habitat that they need so much of keeps shrinking, as more and more development takes place around the plateau.

A Multiple-Use Park

Grand Teton National Park is much more than just a preserve of mountains and lakes and wildlife. Its land is used for all sorts of things that most people don't expect of a national park. There's a big dam holding irrigation water for potato farmers in Idaho; a commercial climbing business that charges big bucks to take climbers up the peaks; and even a commercial airport and a country club.

Each year, one of these conflicting uses makes headlines. Lately, it's cattle, which graze in the fall only a short lope from a den of young wolves. What's the purpose of this park, critics ask, to feed a rancher's cattle or to protect wildlife?

As park spokesperson Joan Anselmo points out, these are the sort of public-lands conflicts that arise more often in modern times. With its pockets of private land, uses that predate the creation of the park, and heightened debate between park purists and multiple-use advocates, Grand Teton is a prime example of the difficulty of modern park management.

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 visit the exhibit Yellowstone and Fire at the Grant Village Visitor Center; its coverage 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. Just 3 months later, in mid-2004, a judge overturned a ruling enforcing the ban.

All of this means that, through the winter of 2006-07, snowmobiles will continue to ramble through Yellowstone and Grand Teton; all trips will continue to be guided by licensed outfitters with a daily quota of 720 machines; and the technology will continue to meet best-available standards. If a new plan is not approved by 2007, snowmobiles will be phased out. If you're planning a trip, you can get up-to-date information by calling tel. 307/344-2580 or visiting www.nps.gov/yell.