Protecting Yellowstone by Yochim Michael J.;

Author:Yochim, Michael J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Implications for Public Access and Local Economies

As suggested above, there has been a widely perceived threat to both public access and local economies from the NPS proposal to ban or restrict snowmobile use in Yellowstone. Not surprisingly, then, park managers have had an uphill battle trying to curtail snowmobile use in the park.

In the 1990s, the great majority of Yellowstone’s oversnow travel occurred by snowmobile, with only about 10 percent of winter visitors traveling by snowcoach.50 With that majority being so large, the NPS’s proposal in 2000 to shift all park winter travel to snowcoaches would have been a major change. Snowcoach travel is group travel, has set itineraries, offers little of the touring freedom of snowmobiles, and requires purchasing tickets (figure 30). Furthermore, almost no one owns a personal snowcoach, while many local residents and Yellowstone visitors owned the snowmobiles with which they toured Yellowstone. The proposal to switch to snowcoaches, then, presented several important changes to public access that alone would have met resistance.

While some snowmobilers did indeed own their own machines, many more had to rent them from businesses in nearby communities, especially in West Yellowstone, Montana. The typical snowmobile visitor to Yellowstone would also stay overnight in the small town, purchasing meals and gifts and perhaps snowmobiling on surrounding national forest land for another day or two. On such a visit, the average snowmobiler typically spent hundreds of dollars in West Yellowstone. Such spending collectively constituted as much as 75 percent of the town’s winter economy. As noted in the early 1980s, by Dean Nelson, president of the West Yellowstone First Security Bank, West Yellowstone’s winter economy “is the snowmobile.”51 In the following two decades, little changed relating to snowmobile use in the area or its contribution to the local economy. Snowcoach visitors may have individually spent similar amounts in West Yellowstone, but they were vastly outnumbered by snowmobiling visitors, so their contribution to the local economy was relatively minor. Also, the profit margin on snowcoach tickets, which could be purchased from merchants in West Yellowstone, was less than it was on snowmobile rentals. For all these reasons, the proposal to discontinue snowmobile use in Yellowstone obviously presented a threat to West Yellowstone’s economy.52

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