John and Susan Purcell toured Yellowstone this winter the new, noisy way--by snowmobile. And like thousands of visitors who clamber onto winter scooters every week to explore America's oldest national park, they can't get over those close encounters with wild elk, moose, trumpeter swans, coyotes and, closest of all, buffalo. The huge, hairy beasts--some weighing as much as a Volkswagen--ambled right down the middle of the road, often forcing drivers to hit their brakes to avoid a meaty collision. "We got within 5 ft. of them!" says an excited John Purcell. "I've never seen so many bison."
And that's a problem--as much for the bison as for the snowmobilers. In a desperate search for food beneath 4-ft.-deep snow, the animals are using routes that are maintained for the snowmobilers to make their way to forage areas at the park's perimeter and on into Montana. That state's livestock agents, fearful that the animals will infect beef cattle with a disease called brucellosis, are shipping the animals to slaughterhouses as soon as they cross the border. Or sometimes, with the help of park employees, shooting them on the spot.
The kill count, which already exceeds 1,000 this year, has outraged animal lovers and the local Native American tribes--some of whom showed up on the steps of the U.S. Capitol last week to protest the slaughter. Many are blaming Yellowstone's snowmobiling tourists for the massacre. By opening the park to unrestricted numbers of the machines, they say, and meticulously grading and packing the deep snow on the roads to accommodate riders, the Park Service has inadvertently made it easier for the bison to move around in search of food, thus increasing their survival rate and boosting their population (from 400 in 1970 to 3,500 last fall). Now the matter has come to a head. Ice and snowdrifts piled high by the fiercest winter weather in 50 years have buried the buffalo's usual feeding grounds and driven the starving animals to remote ranges. Warns Mary Meagher, a wildlife biologist at the park: "The buffalo herds are heading for a crash."
If so, it would be another strike against those Arctic Cats, Polaris Indys, Mountain Maxes and Skidoo Formula 500s--machines whose booming popularity seems to be matched only by the growing number of people who hate them. Antisnowmobilers complain that the motorized sleds, with their primitive but powerful two-cycle engines, are loud, dirty and dangerous and that they intrude on quieter users of public lands. Most national parks tightly restrict their use; California's Yosemite and Montana's Glacier national parks prohibit them outright.
The issue is most contentious at Yellowstone, whose 190 miles of carefully groomed roads make for unsurpassed winter touring. A busy weekend will see 2,000 snowmobilers buzzing the approaches to Old Faithful, their engines filling the subzero air with a cacophony of chain-saw whines and casting a blue haze against the stands of lodgepole pines. "We are turning a national park into a national playground," complains D.J. Schubert, a biologist for the Fund for Animals, which is threatening to sue the Interior Department.