In at least two advertisements in the last decade, tourism boosters in Cody, Wyoming, claimed that “Cody has a nice city park: . . . Yellowstone.”Footnote ¹ The ads of course referred to Yellowstone National Park, about fifty miles west of the remote tourist town. While the phrasing was catchy, it also revealed a lot about the relationship between the town, the state in which it sits, and the iconic national park. As illustrated in three case studies in this article, parochial interests in Cody and Wyoming, acting in concert with powerful elected officials, have regularly overpowered National Park Service (NPS) managers in Yellowstone policymaking contests, with weakened resource or safety protections a common result. Other gateway communities and their political representatives have had similar effects in both Yellowstone and other parks, suggesting that such domination is not unique to Yellowstone. In most cases, politicians are responding to constituent concerns that NPS proposals will harm their economies or restrict their park access. While such domination does not always occur and some collaboration with gateway communities is laudatory, it is clear that political influence regularly overpowers the NPS and that park resources suffer as a result.

National parks have received a large amount of scholarship in the natural and cultural sciences, but fairly little from political scientists.Footnote ² William R. Lowry has written three books examining the management of U.S. national parks from a political scientist’s perspective, but few other scholars have undertaken such inquiry. Lowry argues that political influence upon the national parks is strong and growing and that park managers advocating policy changes must therefore take care to build coalitions with supportive members of the public.Footnote ³ A number of ex-NPS directors, speaking from the perspective of their firsthand experiences, also argue that the parks are politicized, although they provide fewer concrete examples.Footnote ⁴

Other authors have argued that the NPS should embrace collaborative conservation with concerned stakeholders in an effort to produce solutions that achieve political support and are therefore more durable. These authors provide some success stories, but they collectively make the point that such solutions can be labor- and time-intensive, and that there are many limitations to collaborative processes.Footnote ⁵ Further, in a specific critique relevant to this article, political scientist Judith Layzer finds that collaborative conservation efforts involving economic interests are less successful at environmental protection than efforts pursued through more traditional government policymaking channels. Most often, the economic interests—often supported by local politicians—water down the collaborative solution to the point where the desired environmental protection is not achieved. Perhaps unexpectedly, Layzer finds that land managers working within contemporary policymaking structures are more successful at achieving environmental protection.Footnote ⁶

Layzer’s studies did not involve national parks, but the Yellowstone controversies discussed in this article suggest that park managers may not find conventional policymaking avenues any more successful. In all three case studies examined here, Yellowstone managers followed typical contemporary government policymaking procedures but saw their efforts thwarted by more powerful actors in Wyoming. In each case, Wyoming politicians rose in opposition to perceived threats to their state’s economy or to the public’s park access. They then successfully overpowered park managers and the associated proposals. Each controversy resulted in resource or safety problems that those managers had wished to avoid. Given the limits to collaboration discussed above, such difficulty with conventional policymaking procedures suggests that if park protections require restricting visitor access or reducing economic activity, the NPS will be unsuccessful in protecting its resources. Long-term park protection is not assured, as the case studies shall illustrate.

BOATING ON YELLOWSTONE LAKE

Canoeists on Yellowstone Lake today sometimes wonder why their serenity is interrupted by motorboat noise. The effects of motorboats on wilderness were hotly debated about fifty years ago, and the debate was perhaps the first time that Yellowstone managers butted heads with Wyoming’s unique political geography and strength. One of the larger states in physical size, Wyoming has the country’s smallest population, only about five hundred thousand. The state’s populace is well represented on Capitol Hill in Washington, though, with two senators (like all other states) but also with a congresswoman who represents fewer people in the House than any other representative. Wyomingites therefore find access to their federal congressmen and women considerably easier than people in most states.Footnote ⁷

That attention to the concerns of a small number of people was illustrated by Wyoming senator Gale McGee in the early 1960s. The action started with a 1958 proposal by Yellowstone Superintendent Lon Garrison to zone portions of Yellowstone Lake off-limits to motorboats (using his superintendent’s authority). Garrison wanted to preserve a wilderness atmosphere in the lake’s three remote arms (about 20 percent of the lake’s surface area); motorboats would continue to be allowed on the remaining lake surface. Garrison also wanted to curtail problems with speeding and wildlife harassment that were accompanying rapidly increasing motorboat use at the time.Footnote ⁸

By 1960, regional debate about Garrison’s proposal had become polarized between conservationists supporting the boating ban and boaters defending the lake access they had had for some time. Senator McGee, alerted to the issue by boaters in Cody and Billings, Montana, agreed to hold a congressional hearing on the matter in Cody that February (the first of four hearings that year). He conducted the first hearing objectively, but seemed unable to understand Garrison’s primary motive, the preservation of a quiet, aquatic wilderness. The second hearing provided good evidence of the power of the proboating constituency. Former Wyoming governor Milward Simpson spoke against the proposal, as did former Assistant Secretary of the Interior Robert Rose (by then a Casper, Wyoming, lawyer counseling boaters). Additionally, S. J. Gardner of Cody’s Husky Oil Company provided a “who’s who” list of guests he had taken out on the lake in his company’s boat: “two Secretaries of the Interior, Governors of a number of States, Senators, Congressmen, executives of large oil companies and industrial and commercial firms, such people from the entertainment world as Arthur Godfrey and Esther Williams, [and] Admirals Nimitz, Radford, and Byrd.” Certainly there was high-level support for retaining motorboat access to the lake—support McGee would soon heed.Footnote ⁹

The intimacy of Wyoming’s political geography (and the deep pockets of the boating fraternity) soon came to bear on this controversy. That same summer, five boaters stationed their craft on Yellowstone Lake to fish for Yellowstone cutthroat trout. When they had accumulated 160 large fish, they trucked them to Cody and then flew them to McGee in Washington (exports of fresh food from remote Cody, then as now, are uncommon). McGee soon held a fish fry for the fellow members of his Senate Committee on Appropriations, using the event to convince them to allocate Yellowstone $25,000 to procure a new patrol boat. By so doing, he reasoned, some of the motorboat problems would be resolved, thereby making restrictive lake zoning unnecessary and preserving fishing opportunities. The fish fry was successful in its purpose, and by August Superintendent Garrison had acquired his first patrol boat, with two more purchased the following winter.Footnote ¹⁰

The fish fry portended McGee’s actions to come. Throughout the winter of 1960–61, he waged a campaign of letter writing and personal visits to retain motorboat use in the lake’s arms. Just after the November 1960 election, for example, he wrote outgoing Interior Secretary Fred Seaton twice to advance a compromise: that the remotest two miles at the southernmost tip of each arm be closed to motorboats, for those areas contained the most sensitive wildlife habitat. Elsewhere in the arms, motorboat use would continue, and problems with speeding would be remedied with the new patrol boats.Footnote ¹¹

Seaton was not persuaded by McGee’s suggestion. With a Democrat soon to take the oath of office, Seaton knew he was a lame duck, so he approved the boating ban on December 29, 1960. McGee, though, was not so easily defeated; shortly after the ban was announced, he began planting the seeds to reverse it. As he wrote a constituent, he was “very greatly” disturbed by the matter and was determined to “press for a realistic regulation governing the use of power boats on Yellowstone Lake.” He stepped up his efforts, discussing the matter with Interior Secretary nominee Stewart Udall before Kennedy was even inaugurated. In Udall’s first week in office, McGee met personally with the new secretary, discussing the zoning issue “at length.” The two also met separately with NPS director Connie Wirth during this period.Footnote ¹²

In March 1961, McGee formalized his compromise proposal for Udall, discussing it with him while traveling together to Wyoming the following month to dedicate a dam. In early June, McGee’s efforts paid off, with the Department of the Interior announcing revised boating regulations that reduced the areas closed to motorboats to the southernmost two miles of the arms (McGee’s original compromise proposal). Motorboats would be allowed in the remainder of those two arms at five miles per hour or slower (a new facet of the compromise, probably to address continuing NPS concerns about speeding). Clearly, McGee went to great lengths—and heights, operating well above Garrison’s level—that winter and spring to retain widespread motorboat access. As he wrote to another constituent, “Believe me, it was an effort to get the Interior Department to reverse its position regarding the closure of the . . . arms.”Footnote ¹³

Upset about McGee’s actions, conservationists demanded another hearing, and got one, on July 17, 1961, in Salt Lake City. Interior Solicitor Frank J. Barry presided, finding testimony to be largely supportive of the closures and critical of McGee’s actions. Influenced by the testimony but also by a personal experience with Garrison in Yellowstone witnessing boaters harassing molting, flightless ducks, Barry recommended to Udall a year later that he return to the boating ban. Udall’s staff drafted a press release to that end, but McGee played his last card before the press release could be issued: he took the matter to the top, to President Kennedy. What Kennedy said was not recorded, but it is clear that Udall never issued the press release or reversed himself in the matter.Footnote ¹⁴

McGee’s compromise has endured to this day, with motorboats allowed in most of the lake’s three arms at five miles per hour or less. Canoeists paddle the same areas, commonly reporting motorboat noise traveling long distances over the water. While natural quiet was not singled out as a resource to be preserved during Garrison’s era, it was implicit in his desire to preserve a wilderness atmosphere and is explicit in today’s NPS Management Policies. McGee’s compromise, while it seemed to address most of his constituents’ concerns, has not been as successful for the wilderness-seeking visitor. More significantly, none of Yellowstone has been declared Wilderness pursuant to the 1964 Wilderness Act, most likely because the agency’s 1972 wilderness proposal included the lake’s arms, which would have ended motorboat use there. McGee was not about to promote a proposal that would have reversed his own hard-won gains, so the wilderness proposal floundered. The consequences today are that the park and the lake’s arms enjoy one less level of protection and noise persists in what most people would perceive to be spectacular, quiet wilderness.Footnote ¹⁵

CLOSING FISHING BRIDGE

Visitors to Yellowstone may wonder why some park villages are in the middle of important grizzly bear habitat. Park managers have debated the same question, beginning in 1974, when they completed a master plan proposing to close Yellowstone’s Fishing Bridge Village at the outlet of Yellowstone Lake. They would have replaced the village’s RV park, campground, and tourist cabins with similar facilities twenty miles away. Tapping into research and scientific opinion dating back to the 1940s, the plan proposed this swap to protect and restore prime grizzly bear habitat in the Fishing Bridge area. Besides the fish available in the nearby waters, there were many terrestrial food sources for the bruins in the area’s extensive meadows. The hundreds of cabins and campsites in the area displaced bears from those important food sources. Additionally, bears regularly obtained human food there, whether through illegal feeding or by raiding campground garbage cans. Once bears got that food, they lost their fear of people, became nuisances or dangers, and often needed to be killed. More bears were dying in this manner at Fishing Bridge in the 1970s and early 1980s than anywhere else in Yellowstone. The killings took their toll—soon, grizzly bears were declared a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.Footnote ¹⁶

In the early 1980s, movements to actually begin closing the Fishing Bridge developments began to pick up steam. Yellowstone Superintendent Bob Barbee and his staff began working on a new zoning plan for Fishing Bridge and two nearby tourist villages, Lake and Bridge Bay. The plan was to eliminate the Fishing Bridge campgrounds and cabins, a proposal that angered Cody residents, accustomed to enjoying those facilities. The town’s chamber of commerce worried in particular that the closures would dampen tourist travel from Yellowstone to Cody, the closest gateway town to Fishing Bridge, and that associated visitor spending in town would decrease.Footnote ¹⁷

Quickly, the issue appeared on the radar screen of Wyoming’s congressional delegation, Senators Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop and Representative Dick Cheney. Simpson, Milward Simpson’s son, lived in Cody, so it is likely that he heard from neighbors concerned about the closure. Seconding a 1984 request from the town’s chamber of commerce, Simpson asked the NPS to draft an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the proposed closure. The EIS would be a comprehensive examination of the impacts of closing the area; Simpson specifically requested that this EIS’s economic analysis focus on the impacts Cody would suffer.Footnote ¹⁸ Knowing how to get his way through typical bullying tactics (like public castigation in personal terms, with four-letter words thrown in when women were absent), Simpson refused to listen to Barbee’s response, which was that an EIS was unnecessary because Fishing Bridge was incidental to the journey of most people who passed through the village. Instead, Simpson was going to “stay with this one,” prevailing both with the EIS and the eventual controversy’s outcome.Footnote ¹⁹

So, Barbee’s staff wrote the EIS from 1985 to 1987. Knowing that Cody residents would suspect any findings contradicting their fears of economic harm, Barbee contracted with Wyoming’s only four-year postsecondary institution, the University of Wyoming in Laramie, in an effort to produce an economic analysis of the proposed closure that would stand the best chance of acceptance. Scott Atkinson, the professor responsible for the survey, found that most people came to Yellowstone to see bears and geysers, not to camp in a specific campground. Spending less than $50 in surrounding communities, the tiny reduction in tourist travel from the proposed Fishing Bridge closure meant that “the economic impact in the public sectors of Cody and Park County will be insignificant.”Footnote ²⁰

The report, though, was not what Simpson or the other Wyoming interests wanted to hear. Almost as soon as it was issued, Simpson stated, “I don’t agree with it in any way.” Simpson reflected public belief in Cody: the Fishing Bridge closure would materially affect them and their economy, no matter what the research said.Footnote ²¹ Disregarding the report, Cody and Simpson became the single biggest influence upon Barbee and his staff as they drafted the EIS. Under pressure from Simpson and his allies, the document’s preferred alternative called for just a partial closure of the Fishing Bridge developments, along with replacement of the closed facilities elsewhere in Yellowstone. Justifying their retreat from their own preference, park managers presented research showing that most of the euthanized grizzlies had encountered problems not at the RV park, but rather at the campground across the road. So, their compromise was to retain the RV park while closing the other campground (separately, the cabins had already been removed because they had become obsolete).Footnote ²²

As the science evolved between draft and final EIS, it more clearly showed that completely closing Fishing Bridge would provide the most benefits for the grizzly bear. However, Yellowstone planners felt constrained against altering the preferred alternative due to commitments to Simpson and his colleagues. Barbee in fact acknowledged that he had “underestimated the political bottom line” and could not close both campgrounds, even though he wanted to and the science was on his side. Public opinion seemed to support full closure as well, with a plurality in favor of closing the village entirely. Caught between public opinion and the Wyoming pressure, Barbee was not able to make more than small changes to the final proposal. For example, he would delay the campground replacement until remaining park campgrounds filled to a 95 percent capacity for any three of the next five summers. In 1988, after clearing the changes with the Wyoming Congressional Delegation, he released the Final EIS and the controversy subsided.Footnote ²³

In 1989, the Fishing Bridge campground saw its final season. Three years later, the 95 percent occupancy threshold was reached, so park planners began another EIS to replace the lost campsites elsewhere in Yellowstone. In 1994, they released the Draft EIS, proposing to add 310 new campsites to existing campgrounds at Norris, Canyon, and Grant Village. Replaced in concept, the campsites were never actually built—because Alan Simpson retired in early 1997. Without his influence, Barbee’s successor, Mike Finley, felt no need to replace the campsites.Footnote ²⁴

Alan Simpson dominated this story, compelling the NPS to compromise by retaining the RV park. Faithfully representing his constituents, he continued the state’s already long history of battling the federal government and defending the state’s perceived rights. In this case, the NPS was able to get part of what it wanted, but not the full area closure as desired. Wyoming retained the RV park, which still operates in prime grizzly bear habitat, as do some other developments. Perhaps in part because the other campground did close, grizzly bear populations have since rebounded, enough that federal agencies removed the bear from the endangered list in April 2007.Footnote ²⁵ Also, because the NPS was able to avoid replacing the closed campsites, the agency was able to modify an unsatisfactory compromise toward its own ends, after the fact. Such compromise revisions are not always possible; when the balance of power lies elsewhere, the NPS sometimes must live with outcomes that cause resource protections and employee safety to suffer, as the boating issue already demonstrated and the winter use would soon reemphasize.

WINTER USE

When Superintendent Barbee and his staff finally finished the Fishing Bridge EIS, they turned their attention to another issue that had been festering for a while, winter visitor use—particularly snowmobile use—in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. While that complete story is beyond the scope of this article, two aspects of this debate reveal a continuing imbalance of power between Cody, Wyoming, and the National Park Service.Footnote ²⁶

The first was a late 1980s proposal to build a new snowmobile trail through Yellowstone’s neighbor to the south, Grand Teton National Park. Dubbed the Continental Divide Snowmobile Trail (CDST), the trail would parallel the divide south to Lander, Wyoming, where the idea originated. Grand Teton park managers were not happy with the idea, because the trail would either have to be built in a backcountry portion of the park (following a powerline) or along a plowed road; both possibilities strained NPS policies. Whether to build the trail was one of the issues being debated in a Winter Use Plan Environmental Assessment that managers were writing at this time. Some members of the public were nervous about possible visitation limits being discussed by the planners, so they began to spotlight the winter-use planning, delaying it—and bringing Alan Simpson’s gaze back upon the NPS.Footnote ²⁷

Early in 1990, Simpson took action to move the CDST proposal forward. That January, he sent NPS director James Ridenour a bold letter that began with an accusation: “I believe that Park Service officials have been intentionally dragging their feet in considering routes for this snowmobile trail through Teton National Park. . . . They are pleasant and sincere—but they are stalling and really not doing a damn thing. Many of us are tired of the ‘bum’s rush’ we are getting.” Simpson concluded with an obvious threat: “If I do not determine that adequate and vigorous progress is being made in the next few weeks, I will introduce and work for legislation requiring the Park Service to allow the snowmobile trail to be completed through Teton National Park. I don’t know if I will succeed, but I’ll sure give it my best shot.”Footnote ²⁸

Simpson knew how to get his way and that the balance of power was in his favor. Intimidated, NPS regional director Lorraine Mintzmyer sent him an obsequious response three weeks later: “We are certainly distressed over the displeasure you expressed on the progress we are making on this important issue. The project is being given top priority with an accelerated schedule to complete the process as expeditiously as we can achieve. We are scrupulously adhering to the schedule.” She kowtowed to Simpson, and the trail was eventually built, opening in 1993.Footnote ²⁹

After living with the trail for more than a decade, Grand Teton managers closed it recently, primarily because use on it had virtually ceased. In 2004, they had begun requiring all trail users to use “Best Available Technology,” which substantially quieted snowmobiles and reduced their emissions. Most trail users opted to stop using the trail rather than adopt the new and expensive technology. With fewer than two dozen persons snowmobiling the trail per winter in the mid-2000s, park managers proposed closing it, thereby saving more than $100,000 per year. Alan Simpson was long gone from office, and most Wyomingites were focused on a different aspect of winter use in Yellowstone (discussed below), so park managers closed the trail in 2008.Footnote ³⁰ In succeeding with this closure, Grand Teton managers illustrated again that NPS personnel may sometimes be able to address unsatisfactory compromises after they have been struck—though they may have to be patient in seeing the right opportunity. Also, as the lake-zoning issue illustrates, they cannot always achieve redress in this manner.

In 2001, Dick Cheney became vice president, a position possibly more powerful than Simpson’s. Six years later, he and his Wyoming constituents became concerned about an NPS proposal to close Yellowstone’s East Entrance in winter to reduce avalanche danger to visitors and employees. That snowmobile route crossed about twenty avalanche paths on Sylvan Pass, a high and windy passage through the Absaroka Mountain Range. For the last thirty years, park managers had been releasing avalanches with explosives delivered by surplus Army artillery (a 105 mm howitzer), thereby making travel over the pass safer. In recent years, they began scrutinizing the operation more and more closely. Most worrisome was the fact that their employees had to travel across several uncontrolled avalanche paths to reach the howitzer, before they could even begin to target the slides (the howitzer could not be moved without sacrificing its ability to reach all avalanche start zones). Some slides came dangerously close to burying employees at the gun, while rocks and cornices often fell hundreds of feet from cliffs above and behind it. Managers rectified what safety hazards they could, but employees were still exposed to avalanche danger, and any other solutions came with hefty price tags (such as $170 million to construct snowsheds, linear structures allowing avalanches to pass over a roadway without impeding traffic through the slide zones).Footnote ³¹ Further, winter visitation across the pass had never been significant, comprising less than 5 percent of total visitation in the best of winters and falling as low as about five hundred visitors for the entire winter of 2006–7. Park managers, questioning the wisdom of spending as much as $200,000 annually to keep the pass open, proposed closing it for the winter.Footnote ³²

With Sylvan Pass providing the only winter access to Yellowstone from Cody, it was not surprising that Cody residents and Wyoming representatives reacted strongly. From the city to the county and state governments, along with the state’s federal representatives and local citizens groups, opposition to the NPS proposal quickly mounted. Park managers responded by expressing empathy but patiently reiterating their concerns. Wyoming interests, as with the Fishing Bridge issue, were not mollified and, when the NPS finalized its proposal late in 2007, they prepared to overturn-once again-park managers and their proposal.Footnote ³³

Soon, NPS personnel found themselves meeting with several Washington staff persons, including policy advisers for both President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Park staff also met several times with state senator Colin Simpson—the third generation of Simpsons in the Wyoming political community. Simpson later said that the Cody community applied “whatever political pressure we could bring to bear. . . . There was knowledge at high levels of the issue.” The highest level was Cheney himself, who later said, “We did work with the Park Service. My office was contacted by folks from Cody. I talked to Colin Simpson. I’m familiar generally with the importance of that east entrance to the folks in Cody, the business community there. I recommended that my staff work on trying to keep that entrance open. As vice president, I don’t run anything. I’m not in charge of the Park Service, but I can make suggestions, and my staff is actively involved in a lot of those issues on my behalf.”Footnote ³⁴

Involved—very actively—they were, for in late 2007 park managers changed their mind, deciding to allow the pass to remain open under more guarded conditions. Park managers held a series of closed meetings with Cody interests, perhaps experiencing some of the typical pressures applied by hostile politicians against NPS managers, such as threats of budget cuts or forced transfers or inaction on NPS policy proposals in Washington. The record may be silent as to what exactly happened, but the outcome is clear: park managers agreed to continue using the howitzer to keep the pass open, just as they had been doing before the controversy erupted. Wyoming interests agreed to a shorter season and to procure additional safety equipment for park personnel conducting avalanche control, but park employees would still have to travel under the uncontrolled avalanche zones for the foreseeable future.Footnote ³⁵

As revealed in some statements by Wyoming officials at this time, defending the perceived identity of Cody and Wyoming was one underlying motivation. For example, Colin Simpson wrote the following to park staff: “Buffalo Bill Cody started the East Gate, established the route up Sylvan, obtained authorization for the East entrance and put up $50,000 of his own money for the road. He . . . greatly enhanced the ability of tourists to visit YNP through the Ease [sic] entrance. . . . Year round motorized travel over Sylvan Pass is a cultural resource to YNP that will be impaired by the preferred alternative.”

Nothing in the first sentence about Buffalo Bill (the town’s founder) constructing the East Entrance or its route is true; U.S. Army engineer Hyram Chittenden and an early 1900s Cody mayor, George Beck, pioneered the route to and over Sylvan Pass. Simpson’s historical gaffe—not unimportant, as he represented the town politically—bears witness to what Wyoming’s U.S. representative Barbara Cubin wrote more succinctly at the same time, “The closure of the East Entrance to snowmobile use is an attack on Wyoming’s way of life.” Creation myths seem to be more powerful than accurate history or employee and visitor safety—and in Wyoming, more powerful than the NPS itself in matters concerning public park access. Ultimately, concerns about restrictions on economic concerns and public access led powerful Wyoming politicians to roll the NPS, again. For the fourth time in five decades, NPS managers conceded to an agreement that did little to reduce the problems they were experiencing.Footnote ³⁶

CONSEQUENCES

While these case studies may be the most recent or obvious examples of local communities overpowering park authorities in their policymaking, they are hardly the only examples. In the early 2000s, for example, Jackson, Wyoming, residents and Senator Craig Thomas succeeded in compelling Grand Teton National Park managers to build a lengthy bike trail through important wildlife habitat. Similarly, from the 1960s to the 1990s, entrepreneurs in West Yellowstone, Montana, aggressively promoted snowmobile access to Yellowstone, with ample assistance from their senator Conrad Burns. Burns also assisted Montana ranchers near Gardiner in preventing park bison from ranging onto private lands. Seeking snow-free forage in winter, the bison were instead captured and held in large pens or sent to slaughter because they have brucellosis, a harmful disease to which the ranchers do not wish their cattle exposed.Footnote ³⁷ Everywhere they turn, then, Yellowstone and Grand Teton managers find a common voice pressuring them to sacrifice their resources or employee welfare so that local economies and public access are enhanced.

Clearly, these days powerful local interests regularly exert more influence over NPS policymaking than the federal agency itself does. All occurring under standard government policymaking procedures, the resulting compromises indicate that such procedures are as vulnerable to economic domination as Layzer argues that collaborative efforts are. National park managers, then, have few places to turn if they determine that resource protection means curtailments of public access or dampening of economic activity. Ultimately, compromise—for both NPS policies and park resources (or employee safety)—is the result.

In general, local interests should have some say in how parks are managed, for they provide important goods and services to the parks and their visitors. However, when such influence transforms into control, impairs the very resources the parks were established to protect, or threatens the safety of visitors or employees, the influence goes too far. Cody’s influence over Yellowstone policymaking is exactly that. In so doing, it is the best (but not the only) example of the NPS being manipulated by local interests and their congressional representatives to compromise on resource protection and employee safety. Unfortunately, this situation seems the norm today, not the exception that it was back in Superintendent Garrison’s day.

The implications of these power imbalances are not especially good. While Yellowstone managers have been able to alter some of these compromises to protect park resources more effectively, they have only been able to do this while Wyoming’s power figures were looking the other way. Such a backdoor manner of policymaking is unlikely to be effective in the long run, as the zoning and winter use controversies demonstrate: park resources suffer continued abuse and employees take continued risks.

If standard policymaking processes will not prevent economic bullying any more than collaborative processes, what are park managers to do? It seems they have little choice but to refrain from proposals that would threaten public access or economic enhancement, especially in Wyoming. They can call upon Congress to mitigate this kind of undue influence on NPS policymaking, but their history of domination by Wyoming politicians indicates that such a discussion will not happen soon—and may never be successful. Unfortunately, given the agency’s weakness relative to gateway communities and their political representatives, the NPS may never fully be able to achieve the preservation half of its mission. Accommodating visitors will take precedence, even if resources are impaired. Motorboat noise, inappropriate developments, and avalanches will continue to harm park resources and employee safety. Ultimately, the world’s first national park may well become—if it is not already—Cody’s Yellowstone City Park, managed more by the town and Wyoming than the National Park Service itself, and preserving less than remarkable resources.