For Now, Randy Roberson Survives Yellowstone's Snowmobile Controversy

By Todd Wilkinson, 2-08-06

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer climbed on the back of a new-generation "cleaner and quieter" snowmobile this week and proceeded to make a round-trip visit between the town of West Yellowstone and the popular Yellowstone Park attraction of Old Faithful. Afterward, he was sounding like an "I saw the light" pitchman for winter tourism in America's first national park.

In a story written by Scott McMillion that appears in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, the governor said he wants to help get the word out to the world that Yellowstone is open for business. This all comes as the National Park Service is preparing its third major environmental study of winter tourism over the last decade, and as environmentalists accuse the Bush Administration of ignoring compelling science in order to keep snowmobiles as a vehicle for winter tourists in the park. Previously, some conservationists have sought an all-out ban of the machines, particularly two-stroke engines, that spew air pollution and are loud running.

Not long ago, I wrote a short little essay about one tourism operator in West Yellowstone who for years fought the Park Service's tighter regulations on snowmobiles then in recent years decided to build up his fleet of snowcoaches. Snowcoaches are like over-the-snow buses that ferry tourists into the park. Here's the piece:

A few short years ago, a span, which to him seems like a lifetime, Randy Roberson had very real fears that his entrepreneurial dreams were going up in smoke. Everything he worked hard for, he could see it dissipating into an ethereal haze like the exhaust being spewed by two-stroke snowmobile engines.

Mr. Roberson, a lifelong resident of West Yellowstone, Montana -- the community that built its winter economy around the slogan "snowmobile capital of the world" -- had rented motorized sleds to Yellowstone National Park visitors since 1982.

Over the years, as any good businessman does, he followed the trail created for him by the market. "It was all about responding to the forces of supply and demand," he says.

By the late 1990s, Roberson and his wife, Jeanine (his high school sweetheart) had built their fleet to 150 snowmobiles, investing about $550,000 annually into new machines, upkeep and maintenance.

Then, near the tail end of the Clinton Administration, the federal government moved to phase snowmobiles out of Yellowstone, citing primarily air and noise pollution that violated the National Park Service's Organic Act of 1916 (and other environmental protection laws).

In 2000, just as the snowmobile ban was about to start kicking in, folks in West Yellowstone, including Mr. Roberson, predicted economic calamity. I remember it well because Randy and I had several telephone conversations.

"I was terrified. I thought I was going to lose everything, including my house," he told me the other day. "Three years ago, I was basing my concerns on statistics I had seen accumulate over the previous 10 years. The ratio of snowmobile to snowcoach visitation in Yellowstone was seven to one."

Forced to abruptly adapt to changes in his economic environment, which in this case meant gambling with everything he had by switching over to offering snowcoach trips instead of focusing on snowmobile rentals, Roberson was confronted with his own Darwinian test of survival.
The good news is that the Robersons and their diverse family-owned company called Yellowstone Vacations (which includes snowcoach tours, running three hotels, offering guided tours in summer, and renting cars), is alive, well, and thriving. They appear to have passed through the evolutionary bottleneck that their gateway community confronted (which is not to say that all of their colleagues in West Yellowstone have).

During the month of December, puffed up by the heavy snows of a real Rocky Mountain winter, Yellowstone Park reported a large volume of snowcoach travel. Around Christmas, Roberson says he had 136 people on a waiting list for snowcoach trips into Old Faithful.

Today, the Robersons have six snowcoaches, and Randy, a mechanic by trade, has been enlisted to help the Park Service with its research and development of new snowcoach technology.

For winter tourism in Yellowstone, Roberson says a major challenge was overcoming misperception. After the number of snowmobiles allowed in the park was scaled back, word got out in some circles that access for all tourism had been dramatically cut or eliminated, too.

Roberson's snowcoach tours into Old Faithful are guided, toasty warm, relatively smooth riding, and custom designed to suit passengers' wishes. They love it, he says. Whenever someone wants the driver to pull over to watch a bison or have a natural feature explained, there's the flexibility to do it."We aren't driving the snowcoach market. It is driving us," he says. "I'm not bashing snowmobiles but I can see the advantages that snowcoach tourism has."

Has the switch been a good step?

"It wasn't my first choice three years ago but we've taken the new park regulations we've been given and tried to move forward," Roberson says. "As far as what has happened....gosh, how do I say it? We are delighted with the direction it has gone and the acceptance of the public for these kinds of tours and experiences. It is working out."

No one is saying that change isn't hard, nor are they saying that sometimes change isn't for the better.

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