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In Yellowstone, quiet marks snowmobile debate
Federal court won't immediately stop phaseout of snow machines.

By Rebecca Huntington

OLD FAITHFUL ­ The only engine buzzing in the background as this geyser erupts is a snowblower. And following an appeals court ruling Tuesday, Yellowstone National Park will remain that quiet for at least the near future.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has denied a request by the State of Wyoming and snowmobile groups to restore snow machines to Yellowstone. State officials and snowmobilers are fighting a lower court ruling that cut snowmobile numbers in half this winter and will ban them entirely next winter. Snowmobilers had hoped the appeals court would at least delay the phaseout until their appeal could be heard.

But in a one-sentence ruling, the appeals court concluded the case did not meet the stringent requirements necessary to justify suspending a lower court ruling. The appeals court did not rule on the merits of the case, and snowmobilers are looking at other legal avenues to press their fight.

All that clamor was in contrast to the scene Thursday at Old Faithful, where visitors hustled up walkways to catch the world-famous eruption just before the lunch hour. About half of the 50-some visitors sported snowmobile suits and helmets. The other half wore street clothes, having arrived at the geyser in multi-passenger snowcoaches conservationists tout as an alternative to snow machines.

The only audible engine noise emanated from the snowblower wielded by an employee clearing pathways around park buildings. The snowmobile parking lot behind the visitor center was quiet, in contrast to years past when it has been a source of noise, haze and smoke.

Snowmobile operators attribute the renewed quiet to a new, four-stroke engine design, patterned after car engines.

"The four-strokes are doing what they are designed to do," said Ray McCoy, who guides snowmobile tours through Yellowstone's South Gate from the Heart Six Ranch in Moran.

Though the judge's ruling does not require four-stroke machines, nearly all snowmobile tour operators have committed to using them this winter to prove how quiet they are, McCoy said.

On Thursday, a slow day with the holidays over, the world's first national park was tranquil. A small herd of elk and bison loafed and foraged on a patch of bare ground next to Old Faithful's visitor parking lot, which was nearly empty. The lot previously had been dedicated to private snowmobiling parties, who entered the park unguided. Those parties are now banned.

In contrast, neat rows of four-stroke machines filled another parking lot for guided tours. Under the lower court ruling, only guided snowmobile trips are allowed in Yellowstone this winter. One raven sat on a snowmobile windshield, while another looked for an easy meal ­ snacks stored in a snowmobile pouch, perhaps.

The ravens may be in for a rude awakening this winter with far fewer machines to pilfer, observed Jack Welch, president of the BlueRibbon Coalition, one of the snowmobiling groups fighting the phaseout.

Welch ventured into the park Thursday with McCoy ­ the first commercially guided trip Welch has ever taken in Yellowstone since he started snowmobiling here in 1969. Welch had made reservations to visit the park as an unguided party, but the legal upsets forced him to travel with a guide.

With the latest rulings the Park Service has cut snowmobile numbers in half to 493 a day. But McCoy, like many operators, has spent $100,000 on 15 new four-stroke snowmobiles, anticipating more liberal rules for Yellowstone tours.

Now McCoy only can run seven sleds in the park. The other eight are gathering snow on the ranch, which McCoy and his wife, Linda, manage for a Louisiana family.

"Here's our dead sleds," he said, waving at the new machines buried in snow as he departed the ranch for the Yellowstone tour. If efforts to overturn the ban fail, McCoy said jokingly he'll make "snowhenge" out of his machines by turning them on end and painting them gray.

Betsy Robinson, who also leads winter tours of Yellowstone, wants to see snowmobiles banished for good and cheered Tuesday's ruling. The Bozeman, Mont., guide has been leading trips through Yellowstone since 1992 via snowcoach, snowshoe, ski and on foot.

Four-stroke engines are not the only change improving the Yellowstone experience this winter, she said. A reduction in the number of snowmobiles in the park has restored a sense of wildness.

In Yellowstone, her clients anticipate "a certain amount of remoteness," she said. In past years, clients have been disappointed, she said.

Not so this year.

"This time you really felt [the remoteness]," she said, describing a multi-day tour through Yellowstone over New Year's Day. "You didn't feel overwhelmed by the crush of machines and exhaust."

During previous trips at the same time of year, Robinson said she and her clients were unable to escape snowmobile noise, even on an approximately three-mile walk from Old Faithful to Morning Glory Pool.

"It's a long way for you not to be able to escape engine noise in that whole distance in the center of one of the wildest places in North America," she said. But this year, "it was just beautiful," she said. "You could hear the geysers going off, which at times in the past you could not."

In place of engines, Robinson and her clients took in the squeak of snow underfoot, the snorting of bison and wind whistling through trees, she said.

Along the Yellowstone River, Robinson and her clients disembarked from a snowcoach to photograph trumpeter swans. They watched swans and smelled pine trees with only infrequent interruptions by passing snowcoaches and guided snowmobiling parties, she said.

Multi-passenger snowcoaches are a good alternative to snowmobiles, relieving visitors of driving duties, and thus allowing them to absorb more park scenery, she said.

"It's a much nicer experience," she said, "at least for most visitors."

McCoy, who prefers snowmobiling to snowcoaches, tries not to dwell on the legal wrangling.

"If I let myself even remotely think that [a complete ban] is a possibility, then I'm not waking up every morning with the same attitude," he said. And attitude is key when it comes to serving clients on a dude ranch, said McCoy, who introduces himself as Ray, or "a drop of golden sunshine."

McCoy is full of humor and offers clients Western flair with a handlebar mustache that makes a full curl and a fringe leather vest and purple neck scarf under leather snowmobile bibs.

McCoy has been leading snowmobile tours in Yellowstone since 1990. On this particular day, he showed Welch a burbling fumarole he's nicknamed Yellowstone's tea kettle, and he imparted historical tidbits, explaining, for example, that Kepler Cascades was named for the 12-year-old son of a park superintendent in 1888. McCoy and Welch ventured onto a narrow viewing platform to take in the roiling cascades, cloaked in white.

Snowmobiling was a key part of McCoy's business plan to make the summertime dude ranch a year-round resort. The transition would help attract quality staff by offering year-round employment, he said. Now all that's in limbo.

The biggest disappointment for Welch, meanwhile, is that the plan adopted under the Bush administration, which would have regulated technology and numbers, never got a chance to get off the ground. Welch said that plan would have cleared up environmental concerns, from air quality to visitor safety to noise. Like McCoy, Welch attributes improvements in the visitor experience this year to the switch to four-strokes.

At the South Gate, the back of the Yellowstone sign says "Leaving Yellowstone," something McCoy has wanted to photograph. But on Thursday, he stopped himself from snapping a photo, superstitious the message might come to pass for snowmobiles.

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