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Yellowstone National Park: No Cellphone Towers in Campgrounds or Recommended Wilderness, Limits on Wi-Fi

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Yellowstone officials: No Wi-Fi at the Old Faithful Inn. Kurt Repanshek photo.

Yellowstone National Park officials, in an effort to limit electronic intrusions in the park, are banning cellphone towers in campgrounds and recommended wilderness and limiting wireless access in some hotels.

Additionally, they say they will work to relocate the existing cell tower at Old Faithful and to reduce the visual impacts of cell equipment on Mount Washburn.

The restrictions, which some might find too stringent and others not stringent enough, come amid the explosion of electronic communications, whether by cellphone or the Internet.

"Wireless communications in Yellowstone will be allowed in very limited areas to provide for visitor safety and to enhance park operations," park officials said Monday in releasing the plan. "The plan restricts towers, antennas, and wireless services to a few limited locations in the park in order to protect park resources and limit the impact on park visitors."

Yellowstone last fall released an environmental assessment on the proposal to erect more cell towers in the park. You can find that document, which later had changes integrated to reflect public comments, at this site.

Plans addressing wireless communications have been completed or are under way at other National Park Service sites, including Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada and Arizona, and Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC.

Yellowstone's plan prohibits cell towers in recommended wilderness, in campgrounds, or along park road corridors. No cell phone service will be allowed in the vast majority of Yellowstone. Cell service is currently limited to the immediate vicinity of Canyon, Grant Village, Mammoth Hot Springs, and Old Faithful. The park would accept proposals to establish cell service for the Fishing Bridge/Lake Village area.

In Yellowstone, "Park concessioners would be allowed to offer Wi-Fi service in some buildings. In response to comments, Wi-Fi will be prohibited in the Old Faithful Inn and the Lake Hotel in order to preserve the historic lodging experience. Concession operators will be permitted to offer Wi-Fi service in other park lodging and general stores."

The plan also calls for Yellowstone to actively promote the courteous and respectful use of cell phones and Wi-Fi devices and to establish and sign "cell phone free zones" in the park.

Comments

Interesting discussion on cell service and points made on both sides. Limiting cell coverage to the developed areas of the park works for me, but expanding coverage to the back country and the "wilderness" areas, come on!
I take scouts backpacking several times a year and tell them to leave the cell phone at home as the adults on the trip will have them. We leave them in the car at the trail head as I carry a SPOT now for emergencies. Then we get into the Sierra's someplace and one of the kids is playing a game on his cell phone while we are pitching camp, doing dinner, or some other activity. I want to scream! Of course I don't, I just take the phone, remove the battery and give the phone back; never saying a word. The thought of the backcountry "wired" for cell service angers me a great deal.


What it looks like the NPS is trying to do is find middle ground in this issue. Something between the outright removal of all wireless (cell wifi) in the parks and total coverage of the entire area. I would guess that something in the middle is what will be adopted and hopefully will be acceptable to most park users. The park has changed many times. When I first came we fed the bears and anything else we wanted. We walked on areas that are now prohibited. My grandfather threw linen into the features and watched them come back up.

The NPS adopted changes in these areas and the visitors adapted and the park benefited. I think it will be so with the cell and wifi that has become so much part of our culture.


As Kurt points out, they wouldn't be able to wire the entire park for wireless even if they wanted to; the geography makes that not likely to happen.

In the various "villages," it seems kind of silly to me in areas that are already urbanized to restrict usage in some of the buildings. You're saying they can have vending machines, electricity, running water, restaurants, gift stores, etc. in the Old Faithful Inn (and telephones, too), but not Wi-Fi? That's not a middle ground; that's just a bizarro sense of aesthetics.

As for cell phone service, I was in Big Sky a couple years ago and was near the top of Lone Mountain, and I had five bars on my cell phone; it seemed disgusting to me that I could have such great service near the top of an 11,000 foot mountain. I think what it was for me is that in one sense we are more connected than ever; in a larger sense, we are less connected. We have no connection to the place we are, to the land itself. We connect with each other on national parks on a freaking web-zine, but so often when we are out in the parks, we can only think about the pictures we will take to share, the videos, or the stories we will write (I'm guilty as charged!). We lose the moment with the place.

So, I get very much our desire to scale back the technology; we just have to be honest about what we are doing and why we are doing it. If we are going to make things more difficult (I remember the good old days living in Yellowstone dorms without television - then, satellite tv came ... ugh) from a technology standpoint, don't do it half-assed and in ways that don't make sense. But, that's part of the contradiction of Yellowstone. The Old Faithful Inn, for instance, is truly a marvel of architecture and human construction, especially in the front foyer, and yet it was built so that people could stay very close to the thermal features, especially Old Faithful itself. It was a technological comfort, not a "historic" shrine. You want people to really connect with Old Faithful? Close down the Inn! In ages past, there used to be a campground - that was shut down - turn the Inn instead into a "historic" museum. But, if you are going to use it, have all these very modern amenities, make everything comfortable, and have cell phone service anyhow, then let people have Wi-Fi so they can also write about it. It's a faux denial, a faux middle ground.

Don't take this post as pro Wi-Fi; I supported residents in Gardiner who successfully fought a cell phone tower that would have been an aesthetic blight on the town. I'm pro-consistency and pro-having a serious and meaningful dialogue on what Yellowstone should be and working to implement the consequences, no matter how drastic they are, to make that happen. If anything, people should take my point as being that strange things happen when you decide to play God in Yellowstone, and this is one example of it. People do their laundry in the thermals at the Black Sand Basin one day, and they blog about what it used to be like (but not in the Inn) the next. But, we love this place; doesn't it deserve better than our farcical policy whims and processes?

Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World


Look, it is not about Emergency service or being rude to the 15k visitors a DAY in Yellowstone. Out of the thousands of acres of land in this park 95% of the visitors never go 15ft from the boardwalk. Most of the "wilderness" people are worried about doesn’t have cell phone coverage anyways, and even if it did the visitors are so few and far apart that a Chatty Cathy on a phone is no big deal. All this ban is doing is making things worse for people in the busy areas of the park. Now instead of talking to mom and dad or surfing the web on your phone you have to find something else to do for the hours a day that you are waiting for a geyser to go off. Believe me with 15k people in ~2 miles of boardwalk you are not worried about a "pristine environment" or a peaceful walk in the woods.


There are a lot of comments that imply the cell phone is a recreational device; however, I see them as communications devices. They allow you to reach someone, and be reached, whenever necessary. For example, if my car breaks down somewhere in the park I would like to be able to call for help. If I have a heart attack I'd like my wife to be able to call 911 right then. If my daughter has to go to the hospital at home I'd like to know about it then, not when I get back to civilization.

When we first stated having cell phones there was a problem with people talking in movie theaters but I don't remember that problem in quite a while.

I would like to see cell phones work everywhere possible, but, maybe, have signs requesting they be used for emergencies only. It might take some time, like it did in the movie theaters, but eventually most people would get the message. If people had to talk on their cell phone they could do it in their hotel room or the more commercial areas.


This is not a ban. They simply are not going to go out of their way to make cell phone service available. Such as it should be. How is it that millions of people have safely visited Yellowstone over the past 130 years without cell phone service? The last thing Yellowstone needs is cell towers all over the place and people yaking on phones. My nephew visited from California a couple of years ago, and all I remember was him on his phone constantly talking to work. Supposed to be on vacation! People like that should be happy that there are still a few places where they have an excuse: "Hey, I didn't have any service!!"
As it is (and will apparently continue to be) cell service IS available in a lot of areas: I get service in Mammoth, from Mammath to Blacktail, Tower Junction to Slough Creek, Pepple Creek to Cook City; Mammoth about half way to Norris, about halfway to Canyon to Canyon; parts of Hayden Valley, quite a bit around the Lake, all around Old Faithful, Grant Villiage to the Tetons (with some dropouts and dead areas, and the entire West Entrance road. I have called my wife while hiking in Pelican Valley, Hayden Valley, Snow Pass, The Yellowstone River Trail, Avalanche Peak, Trout Lake and a few other back country spots. All of this using a six year old TracPhone. The Park Service has absolutely made the right decision here.


You know what the great thing is? There is no cell phone service or internet connection at Norris Juntion. Nor is there power at the campfire circle. The rangers actually have to engage the visitors without power points or slide shows. It's great. Last summer, one of the seasonal naturalists there was a concert violinist. He brougt his instrument to his talk, one concentrating on the history of the park. Every once in awhile, he would say something like "the military was here. They always had a fiddler." Then he played a fiddle tune. Or, "the park employees put on evening programs. These are the songs they would have played." The people were captivated. I have seen scores of evening programs. This was one of the most unique I have seen.

Rick Smith


There is definitely a lot of misunderstanding of what this plan actually calls for and what the existing reality is as far as cell phone service (and it can depend on your carrier, too). The only really annoying thing to me about this remains the restriction of wi-fi to "historic" buildings that are already serviced by cell phone towers.

What I am interested in, though, is for people to talk more about the many contradictions about the Yellowstone experience. You drive 3,000 miles to Yellowstone (or 100 in my case), and then suddenly you think you can act as though you are in the middle of nowhere when in fact it takes a lot of technology and support to allow your visit to take place. We are creating something of an illusion, aren't we? So, I don't understand or am at least amused by the ways people get upset on both sides of their vision of the illusion. I mean, "Have the cell towers, but hide them into the landscape." How 21st century Frank Lloyd Wright! Great, I'm for it, but there's an absurdity just lurking in all this, in all these discussions, in all our visits, and there always has been since just before Yellowstone was founded (and I say just before because those "discovery" voyages into the park were really - for most of the participants (I wouldn't have called Truman Everts' experience lost and starving for 40 days exactly the typical tourist experience) - were grand tourist trips, cloaking the reality of a pristine wilderness that's not quite what we imagine.

We bring ourselves into Yellowstone; I think that's all for the best ... but what would be even better is if we acknowledged that and crafted policy acknowledging it (it's not what you see on the nature shows; it's not Disneyland, either -- it's all that and more). Personally, I'd like to see less of almost everything, but if we are going to have more of some things (like communications tools), I don't want to see unnecessary and pointless restrictions in implementing them toward a non-existent, fanciful ideal (like protecting the historical character of the Old Faithful Inn ... give me a break; that's been long and continually compromised and misses the whole point of the place).

Jim Macdonald
The Magic of Yellowstone
Yellowstone Newspaper
Jim's Eclectic World


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