Yellowstone Winter Silence Being Disrupted By Snowmobile Noise — First Test Seen of Administration’s Pledge to Put ‘Conservation First’ in National Parks

WASHINGTON, D.C. In what will trigger the first major test of the Bush Administration’s recent pledge to put “conservation first” in national parks, new scientific findings of the National Park Service (NPS) show that snowmobile noise has exceeded Yellowstone’s standards in three consecutive winters even as the number of snowmobiles entering the park has declined.

For example, snowmobile-dominated vehicle noise was audible at Old Faithful between 60 and 80 percent of the time during the peak hours of 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. for nearly the entire 2005-06 winter season, according to the 118-page National Park Service report now available at <http://www.nps.gov/yell/parkmgmt/upload/final_soundscape.pdf>.

In response to the new data, the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees (CNPSR), a watchdog organization of 545 NPS veterans with more than 16,000 years of total NPS management experience, said the chronic snowmobile noise problem at Yellowstone interferes with visitors’ opportunities to enjoy natural conditions in Yellowstone and conflicts directly with new Management Policies for the national parks adopted by the Bush administration earlier this year.

The chronic noise at Old Faithful occurred with an average of just 263 snowmobiles present on each of the sampling days. Moreover, the number of snowmobiles park-wide during the past three winters has averaged only 250 per day; and yet the noise standards have been exceeded. Despite this, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana is seeking to authorize 720 snowmobiles per day in Yellowstone through a rider he has placed on the Senate’s Interior Appropriations Bill.

“How the administration responds to this conflict between snowmobile noise in Yellowstone and its newly-adopted policies will tell Americans a great deal about the administration’s commitment to stewardship in the national parks,” said CNPSR Executive Council Chairman Bill Wade, a former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park. “The new Management Policies were adopted with strong bipartisan support and the administration was widely and duly praised for its pledge to put conservation first in the national parks. But that pledge will be seen as a sham, and should be, if the administration fails to adhere to its policies in our first national park.”

Finalized in late August by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the 2006 Management Policies reaffirmed that the overarching responsibility of NPS is to conserve park resources in an “unimpaired” condition. Beyond this, the policies restored highly specific duties related to maintaining quiet and managing motorized use in the parks. These duties had been stripped in an earlier, highly controversial rewrite of the policies spearheaded by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary of Interior at the time and former director of the Cody, Wyoming chamber of commerce.

Famous for natural sounds such as hissing steam, rushing waterfalls and howling wolves, Yellowstone has more recently become known as the national park where rangers working around snowmobiles have suffered partial hearing loss. NPS now advises its employees to wear earplugs when they operate the same models of four-stroke snowmobiles used by visitors.

NPS does not issue a similar warning to visitors. However, last year a nationally recognized expert in noise-induced hearing loss cautioned Yellowstone’s superintendent that, based on NPS’ data, visitors riding snowmobiles are at risk of dam