Conservationists fumed over the hundreds of snow machines being allowed into the park on a daily basis — putting chemicals in the air, making noise and bothering wildlife. Meanwhile, recreationists were furious to have activists trying to curtail their traditional wintertime trips to Yellowstone.

The fight really kicked off in 1997, when the Fund for Animals sued the National Park Service, arguing winter use of Yellowstone was damaging bison populations. Park managers were eventually required to reexamine their policies and they responded by recommending that all snowmobiles be banned from the park in favor of snowcoaches.

Predictably, that didn’t sit well with snowmobile enthusiasts.

Yellowstone managers abandoned the idea of a snowmobile ban and instead suggested various caps — 720 machines per day, then 540, then 318. However, through 2011, each of the Park Service’s attempts to resolve the winter use issue was met by litigation from one group and/or the other. No one was particularly happy. Federal judges even clashed with one another over how to handle the dispute, which dragged on and on. At a 2008 hearing before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Wade Brorby asked rhetorically, “Does justice require an end to litigation?”

Much of the debate fixated on the number of snowmobiles that the Park Service was allowing into Yellowstone versus the number of snowcoaches, which can pack in more people.

But in 2012, park managers took a new approach that switched the focus to the number of “transportation events.” As the Yellowstone website now explains, the decision was based on the fact that “a group of snowmobiles traveling together is comparable to a snowcoach in terms of impacts.” In fact, by using larger, fewer groups (and continuing to require cleaner and quieter machines), park leaders found they could actually allow more people into the park while reducing noise and pollution

When the new winter use plan took effect in 2014, it gave commercial tour operators the flexibility to mix-and-match snowcoach and snowmobile tours and sometimes bring bigger groups to better match visitor demand. The Park Service has also allowed snowmobilers to enter Yellowstone without a commercial guide (after completing some training and meeting requirements) and — in a positive development for local tourism/recreation — the East Entrance’s winter season has been extended by a couple of weeks.

And that’s not all: In the eight years that have passed since the new plan took effect, the National Park Service has continued to monitor the vehicles’ impacts on the environment — and the results look good.

A report released this month says that Yellowstone winters are quieter than they’ve been in decades, strict air quality standards are being met and wildlife are being left alone (95% of bison effectively ignore passing coaches and sleds, according to park research).

The park is not as accessible in the wintertime as it used to be, but the current rules do seem to be keeping up with visitor demand; for instance, only 71% of the allowable transportation events were used during the 2019-2020 winter season.

Not everyone is happy, but it seems like the vast majority of people are at least OK with the result. It offers some hope that the right shift in focus could help resolve other sticky environmental issues, too. It certainly seems impossible to consider a future where we no longer battle over, say, the management of gray wolves and grizzly bears in Wyoming. But let’s remember that Yellowstone’s winter use debate once seemed similarly hopeless.

The Park Service is planning to make some minor changes to the way it monitors winter use in Yellowstone, and is currently accepting public comments on the proposal. Although it’s not the kind of comment the agency is looking for, we’d offer, “Keep up the good work.”