By Joseph Piccoli

Welcome to the GYE, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Comprising 11 million acres in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana and encompassing forests and alpine lakes, mountain ranges and wild rivers, the GYE is the largest relatively intact ecosystem in the lower 48 states. A small portion of the GYE is private land and people live here, of course, but most of the land is protected in two national parks and more than a dozen national forests, wilderness areas, and state and federal wildlife refuges.

While the human population is small, millions of people visit the region every year. Most of them arrive with their sights set on Yellowstone National Park, the 2.2-million-acre cornerstone of the ecosystem.

Yellowstone is celebrated for several reasons. It was the first national park and is home to the greatest concentration of thermal features in the world including one-fifth of the earth's active geysers. Yellowstone is also a haven for thousands of plant and animal species. Great herds of bison and elk among the largest concentrations in the world roam the park. Moose, deer, grizzly and black bears are common. Even wolves, once eradicated from the region, have been reintroduced to the park and are thriving.

Because it is so large and has been protected for so long, Yellowstone park sustains more species of  "charismatic megafauna" in greater numbers than almost any other place on earth. But big mammals aren't the only wild inhabitants of the GYE. Smaller mammals include coyotes, wolverines, foxes and badgers. Scores of bird species frequent the region among them threatened and endangered species such as bald eagles, trumpeter swans, and whooping cranes. There are wildflowers, edible and medicinal plants in such abundance that visitors can and do spend an entire vacation studying and enjoying the flora alone.

Surprisingly, a large majority of the millions of annual visitors never go farther than a few hundred yards from a road. Still, such folks can see all manner of wildlife in Yellowstone. They can even see many of Yellowstone's famous thermal features including Old Faithful geyser from the front seats of their cars and RVs.

In Grand Teton National Park, visitors need walk no farther than the edge of one of the many scenic turnouts along the two main roads through the park to get great views of the Tetons.

But with thousands of miles of hiking trails criss-crossing the GYE, and with choices ranging from 20-minute strolls to 10-day wilderness treks, why do so few people venture away from the congestion along the paved roads? After all, even folks who can't tackle the footpaths can find roads less traveled and non-motorized options galore.

For example, large tracts of the several national forests in the GYE are accessible via roads originally built for loggers and miners. Although drivers of large RVs shouldn't attempt to travel these roads, many of them are quite suitable for the family sedan. You can get road maps and travel advice at any Forest Service district ranger's office or the headquarters of any of the five national forests in the GYE (check the government pages of a local telephone book).

Many of those roads, by the way, are great places to pedal a mountain bike. Bike shops throughout the region rent bikes and offer advice about where to ride. There are also companies that offer guided bike tours.

You can also park your car or motor home, climb into a raft or canoe, and paddle across a lake, float down a placid section of river, or tackle a wild stretch of whitewater. Several companies in the region rent boats and canoes for those who want to strike out on their own, others offer a wide variety of guided trips and tours.

And this is the Wild West after all, so don't forget to check out the many opportunities to get astride a horse and ride off into a sunset, a sunrise, or a high noon. Your choices range from just a couple of easy hours in the saddle to multi-day pack trips into the farthest reaches of a roadless wilderness area.

Closer to the trailhead, check out the many ranger-led activities offered in both Yellowstone and Teton parks. Rangers conduct tours of park museums, present visitor center and evening campground programs, and lead short strolls through special parts of the parks. Check at park visitor centers for more information.

Those who do leave the highways will find plenty of places to go. In Yellowstone park there are more than 800 miles of hiking trails (compared to about 250 miles of roads). Grand Teton park has "only" about 200 miles of trails, but most of those take you quickly into the heart of the spectacular Teton range. And unlike Yellowstone, Grand Teton abounds in off-trail mountaineering and climbing opportunities.

Both Grand Teton and Yellowstone require backcountry travelers planning overnight trips to register with park rangers. It is also wise for anyone planning a long day trip to consult a ranger before striking out. Both parks have trail maps and rangers can make suggestions, but there are also plenty of guidebooks on the shelves in local bookstores and in park and forest visitor centers.

For those with the time and the inclination to delve deeply into the details of the GYE, the Yellowstone Association Institute and the Teton Science School are non-profit organizations offering year-round programs ranging from simple one-day wildlife viewing excursions to multi-day seminars in both the natural and human history of the GYE.

Between them, the two organizations offer dozens of summer seminars. Although the programs lean heavily toward the sciences, people with an artistic bent will find plenty of interest as well. Consider the Yellowstone Institute's "Nature Painting For Art's Sake" to be offered Sept. 9-12 or the Teton Science School's "A Trail Through Leaves: The Illuminated Field Journal" scheduled for June 2-4.

As their names imply, the Yellowstone Institute focuses on Yellowstone park while Teton Science School gives most of its attention to Grand Teton park. Both organizations, however, range far and wide in the GYE. For more Yellowstone Institute information, call (307) 344-2293 or visit their web site at www.yellowstoneassociation.org. Contact the Teton Science School at (307) 733-4765 or at www.tetonscience.org.

There is, in fact, so much to see and do that it is perhaps not remarkable that so few people get off the beaten paths of the GYE. Even folks who live here are hard pressed to take it all in and the farther you venture from the roads, the more there is to take in.

So let's get started.

Joseph Piccoli is a writer and editor living in Jackson Hole.

National Park News... An update to Ongoing Topics

By Joseph Piccoli

The wit who said "It's always something" probably didn't have Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks in mind, but officials in the two parks must sometimes be tempted to adopt the phrase as their motto.

Yellowstone seems always to be in the limelight, and for good reason. It is the world's oldest national park, an archetype that has been called "a vivid icon of the imagination." It protects one of the largest concentrations of geo-thermal features on earth and is known as "America's Serengetti" for the wide variety of animal species it harbors and for the vast herds of large animals particularly bison and elk that roam the park.

For its part, Grand Teton is acclaimed for one of the most spectacular and recognizable mountain ranges in the world.

And both parks are known for a seemingly endless series of management headaches, a string of "always somethings" that arise from both the popularity of the parks and the constantly-evolving consensus about what parks should be.

For example, managers today put a lot of emphasis on the place of the parks in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, a relatively pristine 11-million-acre island in an increasingly logged, mined, paved, farmed, and subdivided sea.

People are encouraged to visit and enjoy the parks, but once-accepted activities are now often prohibited. For example, in the first decades of Yellowstone's existence hunting was allowed in the park, some native animal species were considered undesirable (hence the park's complicity in the elimination of wolves early in the 20th century), and geothermal features were appreciated not only for their beauty and rarity but for their utility as bathtubs and laundries.

In some ways, Grand Teton park seems more like Yellowstone of 100 years ago than a "modern" park: elk hunts (albeit on a strictly limited basis) still take place every autumn, a large commercial airport operates inside the park, and ranchers graze domestic cows on park grasslands each summer. But the tourist roadhouses that once crowded the shores of Jenny Lake are gone, while cottonwoods and sagebrush rather than vacation cottages dominate the valley floor beneath the Tetons.

As the larger, older and more diverse of the two parks, Yellowstone bears the greater burden of problems and controversies. Among them:

° Bison management problems gained international attention during the winter of 1996-97 when park rangers and officials of the Montana Department of Livestock killed more than 1,000 animals after they moved onto private lands outside the park. The bison were killed because Montana officials feared they might infect domestic cattle with brucellosis. Montana is now a "brucellosis-free" state and losing that status would be a financial burden on the state's cattle ranchers. Public outrage has subsided in the three years since that bloody winter because park rangers no longer participate in the killing, because many bison are now chased back into the park rather than killed, and because mild winters have allowed most bison to remain in the park.

° Bioprospecting, the collection of biological specimens, dates to the earliest days of the park. In the early 1960s, a researcher collected specimens of thermophilic microbe in one of the park's hot pools. Decades later, that microbe became the foundation for a DNA "fingerprinting" process that earns the company that developed it millions of dollars annually. But when park officials made a deal with a for-profit company allowing it to search for more hot-pool microbes in exchange for an up-front payment and royalties if any commercially valuable products are developed, some people feared the park was selling out. A suit seeking to block the deal was recently thrown out, although the judge in the case did order the National Park Service to study potential environmental impacts before establishing any other such "research related benefit-sharing arrangements" and before proceeding with the current agreement.

° A stressed infrastructure of crumbling roads, overworked sewer systems, eroding trails, and inadequate employee housing will require millions of dollars for repairs and replacements. The park's budget is already stretched and will become more so as the park faces a growing backlog of maintenance and repair projects compounded by ever-greater visitation.

° The hue and cry over the project to reintroduce wolves in Yellowstone is diminishing. A federal judge ruled earlier this year that the special "non-essential experimental" status of reintroduced wolves is legal even though it gives a lesser degree of protection to the animals than they would otherwise enjoy under the Endangered Species Act. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit questioning the legality of the non-essential designation let a recent deadline for appealing the rejection of their claim pass, thus ending the suit.

° Winter use may be replacing wolves and bison as the hottest controversy in Yellowstone. After seeing winter visits skyrocket in the last three decades and under pressure from conservation groups, the park service recently completed an environmental assessment of winter tourism in the park. Not surprisingly, the study showed snowmobiles (by far the most common mode of winter transport) have a big impact on the park. The machines are noisy and produce far more polluting exhaust than cars, buses, or snowcoaches, so Yellowstone officials initially proposed limiting their use. The resulting brouhaha with business interests in communities around the park griping about economic impacts and environmentalists complaining that the proposal would do little to reduce snowmobile traffic in the park was eclipsed only when a National Park Service official suggested recently that banning virtually all snowmobiles from Yellowstone might be the only way to avoid violating the Clean Air Act and other environmental protection laws governing the park.

Mountain Country Publisher's Opinion Regarding the winter and summer transportation plans for our national parks, we oppose the Department of Interior's proposed ban on snowmobiles, and we urge the National Park Service to build pathways for bicycles, strollers, and skaters. A new generation of snowmobiles is being developed to comply with modern noise and pollution standards, and visitor limits are being discussed. These actions will mitigate many concerns of those supporting the proposed ban. Based on our observations as photographers and skiers who occasionally go snowmobiling in the parks, we don't fully embrace the notion that these vehicles bother wildlife and degrade the winter experience. We've seen buffalo, elk, and waterfowl ignore snowmobilers in close proximity and go about their natural behaviors unhassled. We've parked our snowmobiles by the roadside and enjoyed the quiet beauty of Yellowstone in winter, and we've walked and skied from our parked snowmobiles into the peace and drama of geysers, forests, and streams. We think it would be unacceptable for the government to force all park visitors to travel via snowcoach. Currently, winter park visitors have a choice. Snowcoaches provide a group experience that is warmer and more comfortable than riding a snowmobile, while snowmobiles allow travelers to go at their own pace and at eye-level with the surroundings. Both are required to stay on the groomed highways and observe the 45-mph speed limit. Even less desirable is an NPS alternative to plow park roads for cars and/or busses, which we feel, if implemented, would drastically and negatively alter the current winter experience. As to summer transportation, we think the public should be able to ride bicycles in the national parks without the fear of a deadly collision with a motorist. A young girl died last summer in just such an incident. Pathways for bicycles, strollers, and skaters would prevent this. How do you feel? Whether you agree or disagree with our opinion, please contact the federal employees listed below and tell them what you think. The NPS is currently reviewing its transportation plan and public input is crucial. They are your national parks. We are asking our government for the same year-round access we currently enjoy, applied in more user-friendly ways: cleaner, quieter snowmobiles in winter; pathways for bicycles, skaters, and strollers in summer. ‹ Focus Productions, Inc.  Contacts: Don Barry Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks 1849 C Street NW, MIB-3156 Washington D.C. 20240 Robert Stanton Director of the National Park Service 1849 C Street NW, MS-3316 Washington D.C. 20240 cc: Jack Neckels, Superintendent,  Grand Teton National Park cc: Mike Finley, Superintendent,  Yellowstone National Park

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