JACKSON, Wyo. — Oversnow travel in Yellowstone National Park (YNP) goes back to the middle of the 20th century, but the legacy of its experience hasn’t been without controversy.
According to a support document for YNP’s Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS), winter use in the Park has been debated for more than 75 years. Interest in exploring the Park’s winter landscape has been growing substantially since the 1960s, and the increase in visitation has come with an increase in impact. As a response to environmental concerns, over a dozen separate court cases have been filed against YNP winter use policies.
“It has been difficult to strike the right balance between protecting the park’s natural resources and allowing for an appropriate level of use and enjoyment at Yellowstone,” YNP’s SEIS states.
Due to the amount of snow that YNP receives in a winter season, visitors must utilize oversnow vehicles (OSVs) to travel the unplowed roads. Snowcoaches have been in the Park since 1955, followed by the introduction of snowmobiles almost a decade later.
1960s: Pressure for Plowed Roads
According to Former Deputy Director of the National Park Service (NPS) Michael D. Snyder’s 2005 testimony on snowmobile use in the national parks, pressure for more plowed road access through YNP led to a Congressional hearing in Jackson in 1967. In 1968, the NPS rejected the idea to plow and formalized oversnow use in order to “best preserve the scenic value of the region.”
1990s: Increased impact and lawsuits
Despite that preservation effort, years of lawsuits from environmental groups followed, alleging that the NPS was failing to sufficiently examine the environmental impacts of winter park use on wildlife. A large part of the impact was the increasing visitation; by the early 1990s, the NPS logs that winter visitation exceeded 140,000 people per year, a threshold they claim was met almost a decade earlier than anticipated. This resulted in high levels of pollution in the late 1990s, and the NPS reports that carbon monoxide pollution came close to violating the Clean Air Act’s standards at the West Entrance during this time.
As a result of a court settlement in 1999, the NPS was required to produce a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that included proposed road plowing from West Yellowstone to Old Faithful. Despite the public pressure years prior, the NPS website reports public comment did not favor plowing.
2000s: A back-and-forth on bans
In 2000, the Clinton Administration moved to ban snowmobiles in YNP due to noise and air pollution, leaving snowcoaches as the only form of oversnow travel. The ban was challenged with legal action from snowmobile users, and Best Available Technology (BAT), guided snowmobiles were allowed back in 2003 under the Bush Administration. A federal judge directed the Park to start phasing out snowmobiles again that same year.
Early in 2004, a different federal judge stopped the snowmobile phase-out with new environmental assessments (EA) to follow. While the EAs increased the limit on snowmobile numbers, a Final Rule winter plan was canceled by the Federal Court in 2008 under claims that permitting snowmobile use violated the responsibility of the NPS to “protect the clean air, wildlife and natural quiet of national parks.”
But a modified plan opened the season that same winter with an allowance for 720 BAT guided snowmobiles daily.
2010s: Final Rule
Modified and interim plans over the next five years led to the Final Rule for winter use in October 2013, a policy which is still used today.
Currently, guided snowmobiles or snowcoaches are necessary to access all unplowed roads, like those to Old Faithful, the Grand Canyon and accommodations like the Snow Lodge. Regulation 36 CFR 2.18 allows for up to 110 daily “transportation events,” defined as either a group of up to 110 snowmobiles or one snowcoach. A limited number of visitors is also allowed each day to take permitted, non-commercial snowmobiles through on their own.
All OSVs are required to be BAT. The Final Rule also authorizes an adaptive management program to continue informing and improving winter use management. However, in the winter of 2021/2022, the Wildlife Working Group part of that program was suspended due to suggestions that wildlife was sufficiently accustomed to the regulated OSV use.
