What does a Yellowstone park ranger need to wear?

A gas mask. To date 20 employees have requested gas masks.


At times there are 1,200 idling snowmobilers at


the park's west enterance.


Park service trying to asses employee health issues vs. economic considerations in rural west.

things got turned around. towns around parks sprang up to make money off the visitors. but now the states think that the parks are there for the economic well being of the towns. sad.

the faseout of snowmobiles in yellowstone over the next couple of years is getting sidetracked by the bush administration. what may help it is that they have found hunderds of illegal intrutions in off limit areas.

You must be kidding...

I'm ashamed to admit that I've probably spent more time around our nation's national parks than any of you people. And more time hitchiking through them, picking up hitchikers in them, and sleeping in them, to where I understand their population dynamics pretty well. And the truth is, 1) they're basically abandoned in winter, and 2) snowmobilers are easy to please and harmless.


The snowmobilers go way out of limits. Usually, a road through a park is closed in winter, and not plowed, but there are a number of different gates where the closure can begin. Usually, after the first gate, they allow snowmobilers to the second gate, or something. So this gets all tracked out, meanwhile there's still fresh just on the other side of the second gate, and some snowmobilers can't resist. Or there's a big, flat, untracked, frozen pond off to one side of the road and, again, they can't resist, but it has to be called off limits for rescue/liability reasons.


In fact safety/responsibility costs, on one hand, and winter economic traffic on the other, are the two things being weighed in this debate, and anybody who thinks they are noisy and dangerous is an idiot. Why? Well, I have snowshoed, and hiked, and rondeneted, and X-countried around snowmobilers, and it is about as much fun as a picnic on the I-80 median. But that is my own stupid fault, because the areas I can take my little snowshoes are just about unlimited, whereas I have to be pretty lazy and uncreative to park my car and take exactly the same trails the snowmobilers take.


I can't remember ever having ridden a snowmobile. I'm sure I have, it just didn't leave much of an impression on me. But again, the important thing to recognize is that complaints about snowmobilers are originally rooted in bad statistics. There's an entire Continent out there but, for some reason, the snowmobilers and the people who don't like them end up right on top of each other. And this is by design, we just aren't willing to pay for some park ranger to do bong hits in a little hut all winter. If he wants a job then somebody has to show. The park isn't a free Federally-Funded vacation for employees.


One of the things that used to make me laugh was arguments that national parks needed more money for maintenance. In reality, they needed more money for toilets and trail flattening, so that more people would make it further from the parking lot, and then create a need for more toilets and trashcans, in a circular way. In truth, a park doesn't need any maintenance at all, and it is only when you start calling it a park, and telling people where to go, and making it easy for them to go there, that a parking lot needs maintenance. Which just means that fees relative to taxes are too low, because politicians, not tourists, want parking lots built and are willing to pay for them.


Probably the funniest and most revealing thing I have ever heard about parks was when part of that big granite face in Yosemite - rock climbers love it, the name escapes me - sheered away. There was a story in the SF Examiner, or the Chronicle or somewhere, to the effect that such-and-such attraction had been "ruined" or "destroyed," in a terrible tragedy, it would never be the same again. Destroyed by geology, for crying out loud! And another thing I'm tired of hearing is that I'm trampling through a fragile ecosystem when I'm racing up avalanche gulch on Mt. Shasta, for instance. Since when does about a zillion pounds of rock and ice grinding across some little flower bring up the image "fragile?"


eLROY