“It was still a free-for-all, and you could go anywhere you wanted by just renting a sled,” Crowley said.
But change has come to Yellowstone slowly and somewhat painfully in the last decade - both for those who use the park and for the businesses that depend on them.
More changes designed to further curb noise and pollution will be put in place by 2010.
Still, things are calmer now that the new rules have been in place for awhile.
Crowley - who started driving snowcoaches in Yellowstone in 1998 - has watched the changes for the better part of a decade.
“We used to rent a sled and go backcountry skiing in the park,” Crowley said. “It's different now. You don't see near the (number of) law enforcement, because you don't see people buzzing into Old Faithful for a few drinks and buzzing out.”
In the mid-1990s, right about the time the economy and technology made snowmobiles more accessible, if not less expensive, seeing America's favorite national park from the seat of a high-powered machine became one of the hottest forms of winter recreation.
“Back then people were hitting each other, hitting buildings, going off into the Firehole River,” Crowley said. “I was hit three times by snowmobiles my first year as a snowcoach driver.”
The debate about park use in winter often pits snowmobilers against skiers against snowcoach riders. But most users of the park have more in common than people think, said Wayne Freimund, Arkwright Professor of Wildland Recreation and Protected Area Management at the University of Montana.
“They have a common concern for the park,” Freimund said. “They could be a lot of places. They're there because of those unique features that Yellowstone has. They want the wildlife, they want the scenery, they very much care about the bison.”
The difference, according to Freimund, is in the little details.
“A skier is there to be confronted with the air. You're not insulated,” Freimund said. “You want to experience intimately the cold, the smells, the sounds.”
Snowmobile riders, by contrast, wear a lot of clothing and protective gear.
“You've got earplugs in, you're wearing a balaclava, you're behind a windshield,” Freimund said. “It's really indicative of what you're looking for, and your motives are different for being there on some level.”
Freimund has been studying the preferences and opinions of people who use the park for more than a decade.
Before the snowmobile regulations went into effect, so many people were riding in Yellowstone that park staff seemed overextended, Freimund said.
“Visitors were dissatisfied with the sometimes chaotic sense of the park,” he said. “It really did have a sense of being unmanaged.”
But then technology, the very thing that had contributed to the threat of an outright ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone, may have actually saved that form of recreation.
“Technology actually became part of the answer,” Freimund said. “Requirements for clean, quiet, best-available technology are the standard that these industries have to meet now.”
New four-stroke snowmobiles now roll through the park with a quieter hum and almost none of the haze that once hung over crowds of old-model snow machines.
Still, the debate continues. “There are these people who think the park ought to have a rest, and there are people who think philosophically that these parks are for people to be in,” Freimund said.
Dave Olson has not been to Yellowstone National Park since the regulations went into effect.
“It's a good ruling,” Olson said of banning two-stroke snowmobiles in the park. “If that satisfies the need to be able to use Yellowstone in the winter, I'm fine with that.”
What's not fine for Olson, who owns Hamilton Polaris, a snowmobile dealership in the Bitterroot Valley, is the guide requirement for seeing Yellowstone by snowmobile.
“Before, you could see the park at your own pace,” Olson said. “With the guide thing, you've got to do it at somebody else's pace.”
Then there's the impact on towns that border the park, such as West Yellowstone.
“It hurt West Yellowstone,” city manager Jamie Green said. “The change, especially the way the last-minute stuff happened, was really tough to adjust to.”
The town of West Yellowstone relies on a resort tax for its yearly budget.
“There are still people in Bozeman who think the park is closed in winter,” Green said.
A misunderstanding of the rules and last-minute changes disrupted the town's tax collections for several years.
In 2002, the town collected $581,000 in resort taxes. That dropped to $433,000 in 2005, thanks in part to uncertainty over winter park use.
But West Yellowstone and other stakeholders in and around the park have benefited from several years of steady policy since.
“We brought in $480,000 the last fiscal year,” Green said. “We're getting close to where we were.”
But it has required an immense amount of work.
“We cut our budget first,” Green said. “We advertised, we traveled to snowmobile shows. The main thing was to get the word out that West Yellowstone was not closed, that the park was not closed.”
And given the precarious nature of Yellowstone National Park's future management, the town continues changing.
“We all kind of have a good handle on where we're headed as far as the park,” Green said. “We have changed. We push skiing a lot more than we used to, and we had a 112-room time-share open over the holidays. Things like that will diversify the economy here.”
In the park itself, Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash said there has been “a slow, but steady increase in visitors that we also would attribute to stability. Uncertainty was very difficult for visitors and for area residents.”
Ongoing lawsuits could affect the regulations, and pending restrictions have renewed the debate about public access weighed against the well-being of the park and its wildlife.
The next big change, according to Nash, will occur in the winter of 2008-2009, when the total number of guided snowmobile tours allowed into the park daily will decrease from 720 to 540.
“We were charged to deal with the impacts that arose from essentially unregulated snowmobile access into the park,” Nash said. “The new quieter machines now allowed into the park are very different.”
Yellowstone is quieter now, but the debate about how the public accesses national parks is not.
“Parks are a culturally relevant part of our society, and cultures change over time,” Freimund said. “Like the Constitution, creating a framework, having the underpinnings put in the act but leaving enough ambiguity in there - parks can change over time, too.”
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