By Todd Wilkinson EBS ENVIRONMENTAL COLUMNIST
Just five months shy of his 50th birthday, Yellowstone
Superintendent Cam Sholly, the top decision-maker in this country’s most venerable
nature preserve, is being tasked to confront a mind-boggling array of
controversies, large and small, immediate and long term.
On the day we met, he was preparing for his first summer
deluge of visitors that traditionally commences after Memorial Day.
Some 434,000 visits were notched in Yellowstone in May,
slightly down from the same month a year ago, which was the busiest May ever. In
spite of the government shutdown last winter, the number of park visitors
overall is up one percent and is 11 percent higher than in 2015.
Sholly noted that some things about Yellowstone in summer
are not markedly different. “Since my first days here back in the mid-80s, I
remember traffic gridlock caused by bison, bears and other animals along the
roadside,” he said.
“People love this place and that’s not going to change,” he
added. “If people weren’t so enthusiastic about coming here, I’d be worried.
Fundamentally, the question we need to ask ourselves is how do we continue to
give visitors an experience they’ll never forget, while preserving the most
important aspects what keeps Yellowstone a one-of-a-kind place in the world: it’s
diverse and interconnected resources.”
Talk to local people who live in the region, including those
who steadfastly avoid going to Yellowstone in summer, and many say its
front-country is congested beyond capacity.
“I don’t take quite the alarmist’s viewpoint that some
people do—at least not yet,” Sholly said. “Let’s put some things in
perspective. Traffic moving through a road corridor, which covers one percent
of Yellowstone’s 2.2 million acres, is not nose diving the condition of the
resources, even when it’s bumper to bumper in certain places. That said, there
are more visitors here than ever. We need to take it seriously and have an
organized approach to how we manage visitors today, and what that might look
like tomorrow.”
A lot of ideas have been floated, not by Sholly but by
citizens: a quota or lottery system that limits the number of people allowed to
enter the park on a given day; a public transportation system comprised of
shuttles; even monorails. Maybe someday such things might gain traction, Sholly
said, but not anytime soon.
At current rising rates, Yellowstone could see the number of
total annual tourist visits rise from 4.2 million to 6 million in a decade. “I
can say unequivocally that we have not strategically-managed increased visitor
use in this park,” Sholly said.
In one of the most extensive visitor-use surveys conducted
in Park Service history, conducted in 2018, 75 percent of visitors to
Yellowstone were found to be in the park for the first time. Surprising perhaps
to critics is that among those visitors surveyed, well over 90 percent said
they had an excellent to very good experience during their stay.
This raises another question: Who is able to be a better
gauge of what the Yellowstone experience should be—those who have been making
regular pilgrimages to the park for decades and are dismayed, or those
encountering it new with possibly lower expectations?
Sholly says it’s important for people who live close by in
the tri-state region of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho to understand perspectives
of the latter.
“To those who are here seeing a bison or bear for the first
time, it’s a life-changing event. When they do, they’re going to stop and get
out of their cars, take pictures—it’s a bucket-list moment to them and they’re
enjoying it. To the angler sitting behind the steering wheel 30 cars back, who
has seen thousands of bison, he’s frustrated,” Sholly said. “Reconciling these
various forms of enjoyment while protecting the resources successfully is
really what visitor-use management is all about.”
Given the wide range of Yellowstone stakeholders and varying
interests, he’s under no delusion that it will be easy. And he notes no one is
surveying the wildlife, asking it what level of human visitation it would
prefer.
No other national park in the Lower 48 has the diversity of
large mammals Yellowstone does and there’s a reason for that. Most of the park
is unfragmented, devoid of huge throngs of people, including recreationists
that are rapidly inundating wildlands outside the park, and habitat remains in
good shape, at least for now.
Sholly isn’t the equivalent of a crusading Captain Planet.
He is really akin, in some ways, to a big city mayor dealing with huge
infrastructure challenges that often overshadow other priorities.
Two statistics loom immediately large: Yellowstone’s
multi-billion-dollar asset portfolio—its human-built infrastructure—is plagued
with a reported $580 million in deferred maintenance. Some estimate that number
to be considerably higher than reported, perhaps twice as large. Another stat
is rising visitation.
Not long ago, Sholly told Montana Gov. Steve Bullock
something that park advocates have been seeking for years: “We don’t have a
visitor-use-management strategy in this park. We have talked a lot about
increased visitation. We’ve done some excellent surveys and social science
exercises to get more data. But generally speaking, no one could tell you right
now what our strategy is, or what we’re doing to manage visitation more
effectively, and that needs to change.”
Todd Wilkinson is the founder of Bozeman-based Mountain
Journal (mountainjournal.org) and is a correspondent for National Geographic.
He’s also the author of “Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek” about famous Jackson Hole
grizzly bear 399, which is available at mangelsen.com/grizzly.
