Progress made on wilderness incursions

By Chronicle Staff

While the debate rages over the use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, snowmobile advocates and foes alike should greet one bit of recent information as good news.

Snowmobile incursions into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness near Cooke City have declined sharply this winter over the last.

National forest patrollers have documented 36 trespasses into the officially designated wilderness area, down from 188 last winter, and down dramatically from 844 recorded in 1994.

Federally designated wilderness areas are by law strictly off limits to motorized vehicles. But snowmobile trespasses into the A-B Wilderness have been difficult to prevent and sledders have had a history of encroaching into the wilderness - sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately.

The infractions have been damaging to snowmobile advocates' arguments that their sport has an appropriate place in Rocky Mountain backcountry. Though probably a small minority of recreationists are committing the violations, when they are committed on a scale like that found in the early 1990s, they give the whole activity a stigma of illegitimacy.

But this issue is far from resolved. The bad news is that illegal snowmobile use in restricted parts of western Yellowstone National Park is actually up, though the numbers are smaller. Twenty-one people have been cited for encroaching into restricted areas over the western park boundary, up from 12 cited last year.

Renegade snowmobilers need to wake up to the fact their actions cause serious setbacks to their cause. Public patience for flagrant violations of the law is very short and, if they continue, pressure to eliminate snowmobile use from more public land will become widespread.

Wilderness incursions in the Cooke City area are down dramatically because of more and better signs marking the wilderness boundary and educational efforts by the Forest Service and a local snowmobile club. But this campaign is not done. Thirty-six wilderness incursions are thirty-six too many. Efforts now need to be focused on the stubborn few.

And snowmobile enthusiasts in other areas where infractions are common need to pattern their efforts after those that have had an impact in the Cooke City area.

Illegal snowmobiling is in nobody's best interest.

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