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New winter use plan dumps snowcoaches From Gazette Staff and wire service reports Yellowstone National Park managers would plow the park road from West Yellowstone to Old Faithful during the winter and eliminate today's snowcoaches and snowmobiles in favor of buses and cars under their "preferred alternative" for winter use in the park. The proposal is one of several winter-use alternatives outlined in a list released to state and local officials in the Yellowstone region this week. Winter plowing could be done in a way that allows escape routes for wildlife, said Sarah Creachbaum, outdoor recreation planner in Yellowstone. The alternatives will be included in a new winter-use plan for Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and an accompanying draft environmental impact statement. Lawsuit sparked change effortThe National Park Service committed to writing the plan and EIS after the Fund for Animals sued the agency, claiming that it broke the law by permitting snowmobiling in the park without analyzing its environmental impacts. The group claimed that roads groomed for snowmobile use lead bison out of the park, where about 2,000 have been killed by Montana state officials worried that the carry the disease brucellosis.The preferred alternative of plowing the road from West Yellowstone to Old Faithful "is believed to provide the most benefit for the dollars expended," the list says, and would provide "a moderate range of affordable and appropriate winter-visitor experiences. Cutting down on emissionsIt would also restrict snowmobile exhaust emissions and noise, and any snowmobiles not meeting the standards by the winter of 2008-09 would be banned from the park. Winter travel by snowcoaches would continue on unplowed roads.Bob Ekey of The Wilderness Society praised the idea because it would eliminate the noise and air pollution and safety risks associated with snowmobiles. He said the Park Service should go even further and require that people ride buses on the plowed road between West Yellowstone and Old Faithful instead of using private vehicles and that snowmobiles be eliminated entirely, with only snowcoach travel allowed in the rest of the park. "Mass transit in the whole park would eliminate snowmobiles altogether," he said. "Many national parks are going to mass transit, and Yellowstone should be part of that." The Park Service's proposed alternative states that some sections of road should be closed "if scientific studies indicate that human presence or activities have a detrimental effect on wildlife that could not otherwise be mitigated." Other alternatives offer a wide range of options. All call for continued plowing of the road from Gardiner to Cooke City and its use by cars. U.S. 191 through the northwestern corner of the park would also be plowed and left open to vehicles. One alternative calls for the closing of the park's avalanche-prone east entrance road to all winter travel. One West Yellowstone businessman said the proposal could be "catastrophic" to the town's economy, and Michael Scott of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition said a plowed highway could be both better or worse for wildlife. Clyde Seeley, who owns motels, rents snowmobiles and offers snowcoach rides in West Yellowstone, said he envisions safety concerns and a dreary drive through the park between big walls of snow piled up by snowplows on both sides of the road. "I'm not sure how many people are going to want to drive through a tunnel of snow 30 miles, get to a destination, turn around and come back," he said. "I can't imagine people are going to want to do that." A confrontation between animals such as bison and elk and vehicles between snow berms could be disastrous, he said. West Yellowstone has built a four-season tourism economy over the past two decades that employs hundreds of people, Seely said. Winter visits to Yellowstone are the biggest draw, he said, and if the park loses its appeal in winter, there will be "drastic financial impacts." West Yellowstone cannot return to its past as a summer-only community because there has been too much investment in winter operations. But Ekey said plowing of the road to Old Faithful would make Yellowstone much more accessible during the winter than it is now. Families that cannot afford a $100-per-day snowmobile rental to visit the park in winter could afford the much more modest cost of a bus ride into the park. "You're talking about making it much more affordable to middle-class families and letting a wider range of visitors enjoy the park during the winter without the intrusion of snowmobiles," he said.
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