Yellowstone ScienceA quarterly publication devoted to the natural and cultural sciences

Volume 2 Number 2

Did the media get it wrong?Profiling Park VisitorsWildlife and HumansBugs and Fire

Though much of the research thatgoes on in Yellowstone has significantsocial consequences, relatively littleresearch here is directly aimed at soci-ety. We probably understandYellowstone’s wonders a lot better thanwe understand the people who pay thebills to care for the place.

The good news is that studies of hu-man activities in and aroundYellowstone—archeology, anthropol-ogy, ethnography, demography, eco-nomics, history, sociology, and soon—seem to be catching up a little. In this

issue, for example, we highlight somerecent studies that analyze how thepark’s resources and their managementare perceived and enjoyed by the Ameri-can public.

Alistair Bath gives us an intriguinglook at visitors: who they are, wherethey come from, and what they thinkabout what they see. Gail Comptontakes the investigation a step further,focusing on the startling breadth of atti-tudes visitors have about park wildlife(and about their fellow visitors). ConradSmith, in perhaps the most provocative

Social Studiesinterview we’ve yet published in Yel-lowstone Science, explores the windingand occasionally perilous path that in-formation must travel to get from thepark to the public.

As the greater Yellowstone area be-comes more and more settled and usedby humans, studies like these take onever greater importance; how well weunderstand the human element of theregion’s ecology and economy will de-termine how well we care for the wholesetting.

PS

Yellowstone ScienceA quarterly publication devoted to the natural and cultural sciences

Volume 2 Number 2 Winter 1994

Table of Contents

Yellowstone Science is published quarterly, and submissions are welcome from all investigatorsconducting formal research in the Yellowstone area. Editorial correspondence should be sent tothe Editor, Yellowstone Science, Yellowstone Center for Resources, P.O. Box 168, Yellowstone

National Park, WY 82190.

The opinions expressed in Yellowstone Science are the author's, and may not reflect eitherNational Park Service policy or the views of the Yellowstone Center for Resources.

Copyright © 1994, the Yellowstone Association for Natural Science, History & Education.

Support for Yellowstone Science is provided by the Yellowstone Association for NaturalScience, History & Education, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to serving the

park and its visitors. For more information about the Yellowstone Association, includingmembership, write to P.O. Box 117, Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190.

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See page 2

Aquatic Insects and the Fires of 1988How did the fires affect species diversity?

by George Roemhild

Visitors and WildlifeA study of public attitudes poses questions of educationand safety, and responsibility.by Gail W. Compton

Yellowstone and the NewsDid the media fail in the fires of 1988?

interview with Conrad Smith

Who Visits Yellowstone?A recreational profile of park visitors: what do they want,and how many find it?by Alistair J. Bath

News and NotesNational Biological Survey established • New Yellowstone curatorselected • Claims of research suppression debated • Yellowstonefire bibliography published • Cinnabar Symposium to focus onwilderness • Rare Animal Report System overhauled • Ranger BobMahn dies

On the cover: Park visitor EllenThompson Sessions, who will be cel-ebrating her 88th birthday this Au-gust, enjoying park wildlife in the1930s. See the articles on pages 5 and15 for research on visitor attitudestoward the park and its wildlife. Photocourtesy of Renee Evanoff.

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5

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Editor

Paul SchulleryArt Director

Renée EvanoffAssociate Editor

Sarah BroadbentEditorial Assistant

Peggy Thorpe OlliffResearch

Mark JohnsonPrinting

Artcraft Inc.Bozeman, Montana

George Roemhild

Yellowstone Science

Did the fires affect species diversity?

and this is probably very close to thetotal number. The name of one, Aedesexcrutians, gives us a clue as to whythey have been given priority attention.For the same general reasons, we knowthat there are 36 species of horse flies inthe park.

In a more pleasant vein, however, wealso have an extensive, and, I expect,quite complete list of the butterflies ofYellowstone; almost 250 species of thesebright and pleasing insects live in thepark.

The group of insects that holds myattention are those born of water.Aquatic insects are important to all of usfor several reasons. A most importantuse of this group is as indicators of

water quality. Insect species are parti-tioned into their respective ecologicalniches because their needs are best ful-filled in those particular circumstances.If the environment is changed, by pollu-tion, for instance, the species in thatniche will change because their needsare no longer satisfied under the changedconditions.

Another reason these insects matterto us is because of their intimate rela-tionship with fishes. They are oursportfishes’ favorite food, and fisher-men have utilized that relationship tobuild a whole industry based on pre-senting a fish with an imitation insecthiding a hook.

A third reason for caring about and

by George Roemhild

In 1890, Dr. William Forbes collectedthe first aquatic insects that we knowwere collected in Yellowstone NationalPark. A lot of people have continued hislead, and we now have a bibliography ofmore than 130 papers describing andlisting the insects of this area. Alto-gether, we have records of about 800terrestrial and 400 aquatic insects. Thissounds like a lot of bugs, but it is cer-tainly only a small percentage of theactual number of species living andbreathing in America’s oldest park.

The insects that seem to get the mostattention are those that have some eco-logical, economic, or esthetic impor-tance. For instance, we know that thereare 23 species of mosquitoes in the park,

Aquatic Insectsand the Fires of 1988

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Winter 1994

Table 1. Numbers of species of three common aquatic insect orderscollected in Yellowstone National Park before and after the 1988 fires.

Number of Number of Number of Total of Theoreticalspecies species species species total numbercollected collected common to collected species1979-1991 in 1991-1992 both collection in both

periods periods

Stoneflies(Plecoptera) 47 58 40 65 68

Mayflies(Ephemeroptera) 28 32 21 40 43

Caddisflies(Trichoptera) 74 69 38 104 142______________________________________________________________________

Totals 149 159 99 209 253

studying aquatic insects is the samereason we study geysers or grizzlybears—we need to understand our co-dwellers on this planet. Canada came tothis conclusion about ten years ago,and has since conducted a biologicalsurvey to document what is around them.It is my understanding, and my hope,that the United States will undertake asimilar project in the near future.

I first collected aquatic insects inYellowstone National Park in 1979, withlesser efforts in 1980 and 1981. All themajor streams were sampled: Yellow-stone, Madison, Firehole, Gallatin,Snake, Lewis, Gardner, and Lamar Riv-ers, and Specimen, Bacon Rind, Gray-ling, Campanula, Lava, Slough, Pebble,Soda Butte, Elk, Cascade, Aster, Otter,Obsidian, Thumb, Tower, Dunraven,Elk Antler, Weasel, Arnica, and othercreeks. Ponds, lakes, and pools werealso sampled. All specimens from thesecollecting efforts are in the MontanaState University Collections.

From that time until 1992, I identifiedbottom samples for the U.S. Fish andWildlife Service project in the park.These samples were mostly from smallbackcountry streams, in which thesefisheries researchers were interested.As a result of my involvement in thisproject, in 1991, it was decided to col-lect and build up a representative col-lection of insects for the YellowstonePark Museum Collection.

Essentially all the same spots weresampled in 1991 and 1992 as weresampled in my earlier survey. Thesesamples, about 1,000 of them, are in theMuseum Collection at Mammoth HotSprings. More sampling is being doneduring 1993.

About the end of 1992, we decidedthat some useful information might berevealed if a comparison were madebetween the species of insects found inthe earlier survey and those collectedmore recently, after the extensive andinfamous fires of 1988. The majorquestion: had the fire changed every-thing, or was the aquatic environmentrelatively unaffected?

My hunch was that there would belittle change, since the samples I hadtaken for Fish and Wildlife Service per-sonnel had shown few obvious changes,

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that body of water, then the total num-ber of fish in the body of water can becalculated by means of this formula,where N stands for the total fish popula-tion:

N= Number of fish caught and marked Xnumber caught in second sample

-----------------------------------Number of marked fish in second sample

The reason we need groups of insectswith large numbers of species is be-cause we modified the above formula,substituting a whole species of insectfor an individual fish. For the purposesof this exercise, a species is one unit ina population of stoneflies, mayflies, orcaddisflies. If a species was taken inboth the early and the postfire samplingperiods, then it was considered a recap-ture. This allows a comparison of spe-cies and, in addition, an estimate of thetotal number of species of these groupsin the park. As far as I know, a recaptureformula has not been used like thisbefore, but the results appear plausible.

What are the changes that the 1988fires imposed on the aquatic environ-ment? First, as the data in the tablesuggest, there don’t seem to be largechanges in the number or diversity ofthe insect populations over the park as awhole.

Second, we can expect local changes

and I had found that those samples takenafter the fires contained large amountsof charcoal; this was actually activatedcharcoal that had been red-hot when ithit the water. I think that it had acted asan effective absorbent of noxious gasesand chemicals created by the fire, withthe result that the aquatic insects ap-peared as abundant and diverse as be-fore the fires.

To test my idea, it was decided tocompare the species taken in earliersamples to those present in the postfiresamples. Three groups were selectedfor this comparison: stoneflies, may-flies, and caddisflies. These groupswere chosen because they are ubiqui-tous, easily collected, and easily identi-fied, and each group has a large numberof species.

Having a large number of species wasimportant to our study because we in-tended to use a technique that fisheriesmanagers use to estimate the total popu-lation of fish in a given body of watereven though only a small percentage ofthe fish are captured for the study.

It works like this. A number of fishare caught, marked (usually a fin isclipped), and released back into thewater. A few days later, a second sampleof fish is caught from the same water.Some will be marked, and some won’t.If the second sample represents a trulyrandom sample of the fish population in

Yellowstone Science

Other Aquatic Invertebrates in the Park

Our surveys turned up large numbers of other speciesbesides stoneflies, mayflies, and caddisflies. Thesecome from several orders besides the insects.

Amphipoda. This group includes the scuds and sideswimmers (known as shrimp to some fishermen). Twospecies were identified, mainly in aquatic vegetation.

Gastropoda. We suspect the park has six species of these aquatic snails,and we have identified four of those.

Pelecypoda. There are probably about six species of fingernail clams inthe park, and two species of Margaretiferidae mussels.

Insecta. As mentioned in the text, there are about 400 species of aquaticinsects known. The table on page 3 lists the totals for the stoneflies,

mayflies, and caddisflies,but many others are found in the park.

The Hemiptera, which include water boatman,backswimmers, water striders, shore bugs,creeping bugs, and others, are representedby about 25 species.

The Odonata, or dragonflies and damselflies, are represented by about 45 species.

The Coleoptera, or beetles, have not been widelycollected in aquatic environments, and about 20species are known in the park.

The Diptera, or true flies, are represented by more species than are allother aquatic insects combined. We have more than 200 named dipterans,mostly mosquitoes, craneflies, horse flies, ephyrids, black flies, and others.But an extremely large group of dipterans, the Chironomidae (or midges)remains uncollected and unidentified. One authority on midges has statedthat “natural lakes, ponds, and streams have at least 50 and often more than100 species.” The midges are also numerous as individuals as well asspecies; pond bottoms may support as many as 50,000 per square meter.Given Yellowstone’s diverse aquatic habitats, we can easily visualize 500or more species as resident in the park. Only a few people in the UnitedStates are versed in “Chironomidae-ese” well enough to identify species.Thus we have generously left a big piece of research for future entomolo-gists.

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NPSRenee Evanoff

to occur because we have an enormousshift in the types of food resources avail-able to insects in specific locations.

For example, some insects are “graz-ers” that feed on algae, diatoms, andother green plants. These foods occur instreams or ponds that are open to sun-light that allows the plants to photosyn-thesize and grow. Another group ofinsects feed on dead plant matter in thestream, because there is no sunlightreaching the water to grow green plants,a situation typical of shaded streams.Obviously, we have fewer shadedstreams now than before the fire. Weshould, therefore, lose some of the leaf-and log-feeders, and have an increase inthe grazer-herbivore group.

Come to think of it, that’s about whatwill happen in the terrestrial environ-ment.

George Roemhild, Professor Emeri-tus of Entomology at Montana StateUniversity, is well known both to ento-mologists and to fishermen for his longcareer and many publications relatingto aquatic invertebrate population dy-namics, community succession in ponds,mountain lake limnology, and othersubjects. Among his many publicationsis the volume Aquatic Insects of Mon-tana.

Winter 1994 5

The more than three million visitorsto Yellowstone National Park each yearcould be considered part of the parkecosystem because they have substan-tial effects on all other elements of theecological setting. We know relativelylittle about these important effects, orabout the attitudes of these millions ofvisitors. For the last two years, EasternMichigan University has studied visi-tors to Yellowstone National Park todetermine their knowledge and attitudesabout human-wildlife interactions in thepark.

In June of 1992 and 1993, groups ofstudents conducted written surveys andface-to-face interviews with 1,213 parkvisitors. The purpose of the studies wasto determine possible courses to ensurethe safety of both visitors and wildlife.

The visitors surveyed were equally

divided between males and females andsimilarly distributed by age. They werefrom 50 states and 15 foreign countries.An interesting picture emerged andsome useful and tentative assumptionscan be made.

The surveys and interviews were con-ducted at Tower Fall, Canyon, OldFaithful, and Mammoth. There wereno differences in the results from theinterviews and surveys, nor was there asignificant correlation between age,gender, or state or country of residence.The results for both years were gener-ally consistent, except in some caseswhere slightly different information wassought.

The following is a summary of theresults of the two studies combined.

1. How many times have you been to

fancy dressers feeding deer

Yellowstone (including this trip)?

The majority (57 percent) were ontheir first visit, with 78 percent on theirfirst or second visit. Fifty-nine respon-dents had visited the park ten or moretimes.

2. How much time will you spend inthe park?

About half of the visitors would be inthe park for two or fewer days. Seventyof the 1,213 visitors would stay ten ormore days. Seven percent of the re-spondents were to be in the park for lessthan one day. The large majority ofthese respondents were surveyed at OldFaithful; it seems that some come to thepark only to see this one famous parkfeature.

by Gail W. Compton

New information on attitudes, risk, and responsibility

Visitors and Wildlife

NPS Photo Archives

Yellowstone Science6

6. When away from your vehicle, whatdo you think is an appropriate distancefor viewing animals other than bears?

This question was also asked in dif-ferent ways in the 1992 and 1993 stud-ies. In the 1993 study, when given the“don’t know” option, 64 percent indi-cated that they did not know the parkregulations. Of the 36 percent whochose to indicate the distance, morethan half indicated a distance closer

bear feeding at dump

present-day bear watchers (slide)

Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee/Center for Wildlife Information

than the park regulations’ 25 yards.In the 1992 study, which asked for

appropriate distances without provid-ing the “don’t know” choice, 73 percentknew the appropriate distance for ani-mals other than bears. But this leaves27 percent misinformed, with an alarm-ing 5 percent who believe that ten feet issufficient. More than ten percent be-lieve that 25 feet or less is appropriate.Again, it seems that there is a poten-tially dangerous misinformed minority.

NPS Photo Archives

Public fascination with Yel-lowstone wildlife dates fromthe park's early years, whenvisitors discovered thatunhunted animals wouldtolerate much closer inter-action with humans. Bearswere usually the foremostattraction, partly becausetheir appearance at parkdumps was so reliable.Today's visitors have inher-ited a legacy of confusionover their relation with wildanimals, a legacy partly theresult of more than a cen-tury of experience in Yel-lowstone.

3. Do you think animals pose a risk tohumans in the park?

Seventy percent believed that ani-mals posed low or no risk. Another 21percent considered the risk moderate,while only seven percent of the visitorsconsidered the risk extreme. It is inter-esting to note that while most of themessages aimed at visitors stressed per-sonal safety, few visitors perceive asignificant risk from wildlife in the park.

4. Which animals in the park do youthink cause the most injuries to hu-mans?

Of the visitors who responded to thisquestion on the written survey, a major-ity (57 percent) chose bears, the ani-mals generally perceived as the mostdangerous, while fewer than 18 percentchose bison. Four visitors believed thatthe wolf caused the most injuries!

5. When you are away from your ve-hicle, what do you think is an appropri-ate distance for viewing bears?

This question was asked in differentways in the 1992 and 1993 studies. In1992 the question was asked as phrasedabove, while in 1993, respondents weregiven the option of checking “don’tknow.” When asked in the 1993 studyif they knew park regulations for theappropriate distance to maintain forbears, 66 percent chose “don’t know.”Of the 34 percent who did indicate adistance, more than half indicated adistance closer than the park regula-tions of 100 yards. More than half ofthat group indicated less than 30 yardsas being a safe distance!

In the 1992 study, visitors were askedthe appropriate distance for viewingbears without providing the “don’tknow” choice. A majority (64 percent)knew the appropriate distance is 100yards or more. But that leaves an alarm-ing number (36 percent) without thecorrect information. More than 20 per-cent believed that 100 feet is sufficient,while more than nine percent indicated50 feet or less. Twelve people appar-ently felt safe within ten feet of a bear!

Winter 1994 7

bear info sign (slide)

slide of visitors photographin

slide of vehicle "jam"

This question was asked in two dif-ferent ways. In one, visitors were askedto indicate whether six specified sources(park signs, visitor centers, park rang-ers, park pamphlets, park newspaper,and prior research) were very helpful,somewhat helpful, not helpful, or notused. Park signs was the source ofchoice, with 95 percent of the respon-dents indicating they were helpful. Visi-tor centers and park rangers, when used,were indicated very positively. It issignificant that almost 17 percent ofrespondents either did not find the parknewspaper helpful, or did not use it.

Even more interesting were the re-sults of the 1993 study in which an

IGBC/CWI

NPS Photo Archives

people with bear cub

Interpretive exhibit on grizzly bears.

Top: Park employees in the 1930s withcaptive bear cub. Middle and below:modern "bear jams" testify to our con-tinued fascination with wildlife.

7. Do you think humans cause harm toanimals in the park?

Seventy-six percent answered yes tothis question, while the remaining 24percent chose no. The most commonhuman behaviors indicated as causingharm to animals were, in order of fre-quency, feeding, getting too close, teas-ing, yelling, scaring, destroying habi-tat, littering, and improper trash dis-posal.

This finding is significant because itindicates that a large majority of parkvisitors are concerned about the safetyof the wildlife, apparently more thanthey are concerned about the safety ofvisitors. Messages aimed at protectingwildlife seem to be a fertile area foreducation.

8. What are your sources of informa-tion for proper viewing of animals inthe park?

IGBC/CWIopen-ended question asked visitors theirsources of information. For this ques-tion, in which there was no promptingof possible sources, only 25 percentvolunteered the park newspaper, withapproximately 15 percent each choos-ing park pamphlets, visitor centers/parkrangers, park signs, park pamphlets,and other literature.

9. Why do you think others get tooclose to wildlife in the park?

In an attempt to get more honest andcomplete answers, visitors were askedto speculate about the motivation ofothers who get too close to animals. Itis interesting to note that there was littlehesitation in answering this question,indicating that everyone is aware ofpeople getting too close. Sixty percentsuggested that the motivation was curi-osity, to photograph, and because theyappreciate animals—generally noncriti-cal reasons. Twenty-one percent attributed the be-havior to ignorance or stupidity. Somefive percent believe that some visitorsthink the animals are tame or that Yel-lowstone is a zoo.

10. What could the National Park Ser-vice do to protect the safety of visitorsand animals?

Some 47 percent indicated that theydidn’t know, that there is nothing to do,or that the Park Service is doing a goodjob. Others suggested more education

IGBC/CWI

Yellowstone Science

(16 percent), more enforcement of rules(10 percent), more signs (6 percent),more rangers (5 percent), and limit visi-tors (3 percent).

Conclusions

Problem behavior of park visitorsaround wildlife seems to have twocauses: lack of information and im-proper attitude. This study clearly indi-cates that a potentially dangerous mi-nority do not have the information theyneed. Especially worthy of note is thatonly a small percent of visitors perceivethat they are at risk from wildlife, whilea substantial majority believe that hu-mans present a risk to the animals.

Visitors’ responses about their sourcesof information are enlightening. Whilethere is substantial and important infor-mation in the park newspaper, there isreason to doubt whether the informa-tion has the desired effect. One of thehandicaps of the newspaper is that assoon as visitors receive the materials,they enter the park and are bombardedwith the incredible sights and experi-ences of Yellowstone. It is not surpris-ing that no one in the vehicle wants tomiss that experience by reading the pa-per.

In addition to the sources of informa-tion, the content of information mightbe changed because of this study. Mostof the appeals are to people to be cau-tious for their own safety. Yet with 75percent who believe that humans harmwildlife, there seems to be an excellentopportunity for appealing to that con-cern. If the message is communicatedthat those who approach wildlife tooclosely are endangering this nationaltreasure, then social pressure may bebrought to bear on behavior.

Problem attitudes are difficult, butnot impossible, to change. In general,this is a country that admires and en-courages risk. Thus, visitors who leavethe road to pursue animals may be atleast partially motivated by the chal-lenge and by the assumption that ob-servers are admiring them. The fact isthat if one visitor approaches and theanimal moves away, all the rest of theobservers are deprived of the opportu-nity to enjoy the animal. Combining

bears in camp

Man feeding bison calf

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that idea with the general perceptionthat humans pose a risk to wildlife, itwould be possible to design messagesthat would use peer pressure to encour-age proper behavior. Thus, a visitorwho approaches too closely may beaware that others are disapproving in-stead of admiring. A campaign to pro-mote such attitudes could be effective. The findings of this study indicate theimportance of studying the human as

NPS Photo Archives

well as the natural elements of the eco-systems, and merit further study by re-searchers in many disciplines.

Gail W. Compton is Professor of Com-munication at Eastern Michigan Uni-versity, Ypsilanti, Michigan. He wasassisted in carrying out this study by 19honors students from the same univer-sity, and by the Center for Wildlife In-formation.

Top: Risks of overfamiliarity with wildlife are a long-standing park problem.Below: As park management has gradually evolved to be less manipulative ofwildlife populations, scenes like this have become rare.

Winter 1994 9

Yellowstone Science Interview: Conrad Smith

copies of the Bozeman and Billingsnewspapers, and for years and years Icarted those papers around with me,because I planned to do something withthem. I finally lost them one time whenI moved.

But one thing I remember is that oneof the accounts of the number of deathssummed the observations of three dif-ferent people who had flown over thearea. Rather than make it clear thesewere the same bodies being countedthree different times, they just added itall up and got a nice impressive deathtoll. I had no idea I was going to end upteaching journalism; I ended up with anundergraduate degree in physics. I wasalways fascinated by this kind of thing

newscasters in fire

Yellowstone and the NewsWhat went wrong in the fires of 1988?

In 1988, Yellowstone managerslearned just how much the Americanpublic cares about the park. As the firesof that year grew, and as media atten-tion increased, a public and politicalfire storm developed like nothing elsein the history of Yellowstone, perhapsnot in the history of the National ParkService. The public learned almosteverything they knew about the firesfrom the media, who learned most ofwhat they said from a variety of infor-mation sources. Somewhere in the pro-cess, many people now agree, some-thing went wrong.

Conrad Smith is a professor of jour-nalism at Ohio State University with aspecial interest in environmental is-sues. As the summer of 1988 pro-gressed, his curiosity about the way thefires were being reported led him into aprogressively more involved study ofhow the media responds to “naturaldisasters.” This work has resulted in anumber of papers, as well as his bookMedia and Apocalypse, published in1992. The following interview tookplace on September 20, 1993, during abreak in the fire conference. Ed.

YS How did you get interested in Yel-lowstone and the fires? What made youwant to undertake this study?CS It started way back with the Hebgenearthquake in 1959. I was nineteen, andwas camping with my parents up on theBeartooth Plateau and we woke up onemorning and heard that there was anearthquake near the park that had beenfelt for 500 or 1,000 miles. We hadn’tfelt anything. I was kind of curiousabout the discrepancy, and my father,being a geologist, packed us all up andwe drove over to West Yellowstone. Hechartered a plane, and I flew with himand a CBS reporter to look at the slidethat had buried the campground andkilled people. After that I collected

Conrad Smith, September 1993

Jim Peaco/NPS

NPS

Yellowstone Science10

because my geologist parents talkedabout how the media did a relativelypoor job of reporting this or that storyabout some geological issue.

Another experience increased my in-terest. In 1987 I had been in the north-ern California Siskyou Mountains. Af-ter I left, I read about these terriblewildfires that burned hundreds of squaremiles where I had hiked. So I went backin 1988 and climbed Preston Peak, thehighest mountain around, expecting tosee all this terrible ravishment of fire. Icould see Mount Shasta about 80 milesto the southwest. I could see thePacific Ocean 35 miles to theeast. But in all of that vista Icould just see one ridge a fewmiles away that looked burned.I couldn’t make sense of this.The press had said hundreds ofsquare miles had burned. I couldsee about 10,000 clearcuts, but Icouldn’t see any evidence at allof fire.

Then, in July I was with agroup of volunteers that did trailwork on Avalanche Peak inYellowstone. It happened to beJuly 13 through 23, which coin-cided with the big growth of thefires. In fact, July 23 was whenGrant Village was evacuated andwhen the fires first became na-tional news. At night we wouldgo over to the saddle on Ava-lanche Peak and look at what isnow known as the Clover MistFire. One night three of us slept on thetop of Avalanche Peak, and even atnight we noticed that you could see thefires. It was kind of like fireworks;they’d brighten up and die down, againand again.

When I got back home I followed themedia account. It started out just ascuriosity, but I’d been to Yellowstonelots of times and I kind of knew the area,so I noticed some minor mistakes. Anarticle in the Chicago Tribune, for ex-ample, referred to Craig Pass as thehighest point in the park’s road system.I happened to know that other passes arehigher. That was no big deal, but itmade me wonder: how about the rest ofthe story? How many factual errorswere there?

I was curious enough that I found thenames of about 100 sources, newssources that were named in stories aboutthe fires, and I sent questionaires tothem. I was curious if they saw the clipof the story in which they were named,and what their reaction was to the waythe reporter used the information they’dgiven them.

Then I got the names and addresses of89 reporters whose by-lines were onstories about the fires, and I sent them aquestionaire about how the fires werecovered, and I got back 20,000 words of

Jim Peaco/NPS

about 12 people—five incident com-manders, three or four fire behaviorexperts and fire ecologists and so on——to evaluate each of the television sto-ries in terms of accuracy and complete-ness in a numerical score between oneand five.YS Any surprises there?CS The stories during the peak cover-age period, that is the stories that madethe the front pages and the leading tele-vision news, were rated much less accu-rate, significantly less accurate than sto-ries produced when there wasn’t quite

so much deadline pressure andquite so much drama involved.This has interesting implica-tions, because if it holds forother stories, it means that thestories coming out when thenews is hot are much less likelyto be accurate. This suggeststhat the higher on the publicagenda a news item is, the lessaccurate it is, which is kind ofa scary phenomenon, if it holdsover a broad range of stories. Idon’t know if it does.YS In your analysis you ob-serve that stories did get moreaccurate as the fires went on,and after they were over.CS I think two things weregoing on there. I think somereporters who kept covering thefires began to learn something.Eventually, if a reporter is curi-ous, and good journalists by

definition are curious, that reporter isgoing to get a broader base of knowl-edge and is going to have more of acontext. I think most reporters had nocontext at all. Fire burned warehouses,they burned national parks—what’s thedifference? But as the reporters keptcovering the story, and talked to peoplewho knew something about fire outsideof the urban context, I think they be-came more educated and were moreable to write good stories.

The other thing is, if the fire came toOld Faithful today, there would be tre-mendous pressure to get a dramatic storyright now. If I’m doing a retrospectivestory in the spring, it doesn’t matter ifit’s published today or next week, sothere’s more time. I think that even very

unsolicited comments. This is unheardof in a mail survey. It just doesn’thappen. So obviously there was intenseinterest, both on the part of the mediapeople and on the part of the sourcesnamed in their stories, in how the fireswere reported. There was also a fairlystrong feeling on the part of many thatfires had been very badly reported. Whatstarted out as kind of idle curiosity endedup being a major research project.YS Your analysis of all of that waspretty quantitative. Can you describethat?CS I sent out the survey to reportersand sources, and then I assembled whatI called panels of experts. For exampleI got all of the television reports and putthem on VHS cassettes. I persuaded

Winter 1994

journalists who are really just ambu-lance chasers; they do it for the excite-ment and not for curiosity in the ana-lytic sense, which I think motivates thebest of journalists.YS As a teacher of journalism, how doyou inculcate the right values? How doyou enlighten the potential ambulancechasers?CS I teach aspiring television journal-ists. One of my colleagues says that theterm “television journalist” is an oxy-moron. There is some really good tele-vision journalism on the environment—ABC News, with Barry Serafin and NedPotter reporting environmental stories,does a better job than the other twonetworks—but there’s also a great dealof bad television journalism.

I find that the students who enroll inthe broadcast news classes that I teachat Ohio State University often are moti-vated by what they perceive to be theglamor of being a television reporter,something in the way that you went toHollywood and Vine to be discoveredby MGM in an earlier lifetime. They’realso motivated by the illusion that mosttelevision reporters make a great deal ofmoney. My colleagues in the printmedia assure me that many of theirstudents come with equally suspectmotivations.

It’s very difficult to overcome. De-spite the fact that I got into this businessfor idealistic reasons, thinking that Icould singlehandedly in a small waychange the quality of television journal-ism, mostly think I fail to inculcatethese values. If you do not have anintense native curiosity about every-thing in the outside world, if you are notinsatiably and almost obsessively curi-ous, I do not believe you can be a goodjournalist.

I found one very depressing fact inmy surveys of journalists and sources.Because I had information on both, Icould look at the background of jour-nalists as a function of how accurate thestories were. I found out that the report-ers who had formally studied journal-ism were considered less accurate bytheir sources than the ones who neverhad.YS Let’s assume that practically every-one involved in an event like the

11

good journalists often do bad work ontight deadlines, especially if they’recovering a beat that doesn’t give themmuch context. I don’t know any re-porter in the country, before 1988 orafter 1988, who covered wildfires as abeat, though some did cover Yellow-stone as a beat, much like Bob Ekeyfrom the Billings Gazette, who did somevery good reporting. Some coveredenvironmental issues as a beat. DianeDumanoski from the Boston Globe of-ten does well in that area.YS How would you describe the kindsof mistakes that were made? What werethe significant kinds of mistakes thatwere made?CS I can do that with one word: con-text. No context, insufficient context.You might get a tremendously accuratedescription of how many acres wereincluded in the burn area, but what doesit mean? The fire made a 3,000-acre runtoday. That may be completely accu-rate, but does that mean everythingburned? Does it mean some of it burned?Does it mean that it’s going to changethe forest forever? Does it mean it’s notgoing to change the forest at all? Whatare the implications of it? Is this bad, isthis good? Should the fires have beenallowed to burn? Should the fires havebeen extinguished? Could the fires havebeen extinguished? What ways couldthe fires have been extinguished?

There are so many questions that gounanswered if it’s purely descriptiveinstead of analytical, and most report-ing, being an immediate account of re-cent events, is descriptive. But that’sthe greatest flaw of reporting, and Ithink in the Yellowstone fires it was aneven bigger flaw because most report-ers didn’t have the background to gobeyond how many acres burned andwere accustomed to reporting fires inthe context in which they are alwaysbad, and destroy things.YS In one of your papers you say theycame here to report on the disaster. Intheir minds, it was a disaster before theygot here to look at it. That was a given.CS Of course it was a disaster story.Yellowstone burned down. Terribledisaster. First national park, the crownjewel, Old Faithful! In fact, there was aheadline in the Chicago Tribune, “Old

Faithful will never be the same,” as ifthe fires evaporated the source of all thewater and the geyser is dried out now.YS You’ve broadened your study be-yond Yellowstone. Your book com-pares media coverage of the Yellow-stone fires, the Valdez oil spill, and theLoma Prieta earthquake. In all of thatbroader arena, do you see any change,any cumulative improvement in theaverage quality of environmental re-porting, and if so did the Yellowstonefires in some measurable way contrib-ute?CS There have been more stories that atleast mention the ecological aspects offire after the Yellowstone fires thanbefore. I recently looked at newspaperstories that mentioned fire and the word“ecology” in the three years before 1988and the three years after 1988, not re-stricted to Yellowstone but in any con-text as wildfire. I found that about threetimes as many stories that appearedafter the 1988 fires at least contained theword ecology. Of course, that’s a prettysuperficial test.

I think that some individual reportershad their consciousness raised. In theExxon Valdez oil spill, for example,there was a reporter named CharlesWohlforth. He got better and better. Helearned a great deal just by the processof being curious and asking questions.Over a period of six months or a year heacquired a great deal of expertise. So Ithink the really curious reporters, whoare really interested in the subject mat-ter, do have their consciousnesses raisedby events such as the Yellowstone fires.

I also suspect that there are manymore reporters who didn’t learn verymuch. I remember walking into theVillage Inn in Valdez, Alaska, when allof the national media came back be-cause Exxon closed down its firstsummer’s cleanup. They were tellingwar stories about Yellowstone and abouthow they almost got burned up andabout how dangerous it was and howbig it was, and I can assure you that noneof the comments showed any great in-terest in the fires in any philosophicalsense. That’s very anecdotal and it maynot mean anything. They were inter-ested in the fires as journalistic warstories. I suspect that there are a lot of

Yellowstone Science

satelite link

12

Yellowstone fires, whether journalistor source, is fundamentally honest, andthat they’re all trying to do the rightthing. Why does it seem to so many ofus that it went so wrong? What hap-pened? Why did we end up with somany sources feeling like they’d beenabused, and so many reporters feelinglike the sources had failed them?CS In the first place it had to do with theculture we’re all raised in. Fire is bad.Our culture doesn’t distinguish betweenone fire and another. It’s just one of thethings we take for granted. I guess I’dcall that category one.

Category two is logistics. There weresome logistical problems. Say thatyou’re a reporter assigned here. Youcheck into a motel in a gateway commu-nity around Yellowstone and you find ithas no telephone. The area is huge. Thefires were burning in an area at least ahundred by a hundred miles. You can’tget to them. There are no roads. Youcan’t fly to them because the smoke istoo thick. You can’t get any hard infor-mation. So there were all kinds oflogistic problems. The television peoplehad to get to their satellite trucks. CBShad a satellite truck parked over at RedLodge, Montana, and Bob McNamarawould drive about 90 miles an hour overthe Beartooth Highway from Cooke Cityto get the tape there. In an urban area,the logistics are very easy. But this wasso diffuse; there were fires all over theplace.

Sources are the third category. Therewere two types of source problems.One, the reporters did not know whatsources would be the most helpful, andtwo, there were problems with the orga-nized effort to get out the information.Something that was astonishing to me,looking at all of the sources named inthe stories I read about the Yellowstonefires, is the extent to which reportersused easily available sources and notnecessarily the sources with the mostexpertise. For example, Stephen Pyne,who wrote the book about the culturalhistory of wildfire in this country, wascontacted five or six times during thewhole summer, and in his one televisioninterview, on CBS “Nightwatch,” theywanted scandal, not information. Therewas a tremendous lack of enterprise.

stone had an information center. As oneof the reporters said, there were a fewpeople who were very knowledgeable,and many who were not knowledgeableat all. I think that the press quickly lostrespect for a large part of the formalinformation system.YS How does that get fixed?CS I’m increasingly convinced that theonly way you can get good coverage ofanything you’re doing, and that includesscience, is if you make an organized,orchestrated effort to court the media,and not during the big story, like Yel-lowstone, but years before. My ex-ample is the U.S. Geological Survey,(USGS) which has an office in MenloPark, California, that’s been courtingmedia attention for 25 years. If thatkind of relationship had existed, I think,between the media and the Forest Ser-vice, or the Park Service, or the FireReseach Lab in Missoula, I think thecoverage would have been very differ-ent.YS This Public Information Office inYellowstone deals more routinely withmore media than any other park onearth.

For example, theIntermountain FireSciences Lab, inMissoula, is wellknown in the firecommunity as doingsome of the best re-search about wildfire,but partly because re-porters thought ofthis as a disaster storyrather than as a sci-ence story, no re-porter ever seems tohave called up the In-termountain ReseachLab and said I’d liketo interview some-body. Some of theindividual fire labpeople, like DickRothermel, were in-terviewed, but hardlyat all, and all kinds offire experts, like BobMutch of the ForestService, who pio-neered natural fire inthe national forests, were here in Yel-lowstone, but they just weren’t con-tacted by reporters.YS Could that have partly been thesource’s fault?CS That’s what I was coming to next.That’s part two. There were three dif-ferent kinds of information available.Each fire had an information system,the park had an information system, andthe command center in West Yellow-

Jim Peaco/NPS photos

Winter 1994

Sec. Hodell and Bob Barbee

13

Jim Peaco/NPS

CS But routine is the important wordthere. I don’t think it had dealt with firein anything but a very small, very rou-tine way. I’m talking about the scien-tific context.

Start with the Intermountain Fire Sci-ences Lab. Maybe a relationship couldhave been courted with the press, theway the USGS courted public attentionbecause it wanted to get out the earth-quake preparedness message. If for 25years the Fire Sciences Lab had beencourting the press in a very deliberatemanner to get out the message, I think itwould have gotten a lot more attentionin this situation. The park’s PublicInformaton Office wasn’t set up to dothat; it was set up to handle the routinethings, like car crashes and bear inci-dents.YS There was this idealistic view amongsome people after the fires. In essence,they said to the agencies, “Well, ifyou’d developed some kind of tremen-dous incident command system, youcould have rolled in here and takenover.” But how would you ever main-tain that kind of operation in the federalgovernment where you don’t haveenough Yellowstone fires to justify it?CS I don’t think you could.YS That’s the point. How do you stayprepared to handle so many media, hun-dreds of media, six satellite vans behindthe administration building at once, allthat demand for attention?CS It’s awful easy to see things that noone could have seen at the time. Forexample, I think the biggest mistakewas bringing in all kinds of people whohad no experience dealing with themedia, and some who apparently had noknowledge of wildlfire. I think that thatreally hurt the credibility of the park.Even at that, the credibility was stillstrong until after Black Saturday, Au-gust 20. I think that was when every-thing unravelled. The media coveragebefore that point wasn’t that critical, onthe whole. This idea that the fire policywas the reason so much burned didn’toccur very much until after Black Sat-urday.YS That really got entrenched.CS Well, it’s a great story. The ParkService committing arson? That’s agreat story.

YS It certainly sold well. But let’s getback to your reasons things went wrong.CS In the traditions of journalists, con-flict is a story. You will never read astory about how today in the UnitedStates 6,000 commercial flights landedsafely. They just don’t do that. Scandalis a story, and all things being equal,scandal is interesting, and conflict ismuch more likely to be news than lackof conflict.

The fires were seen as a disaster story,and the conventions of journalismcaused strange things to happen. In thefirst place, you had to have a victim; youcan’t have a reportable disaster withoutvictims. So you’d interview the personwho owns the motel in the gatewaycommunity such as Cooke City, andsince victims are presumed not to haveany axe to grind, what the victim saidwas taken at face value because victimswere assumed to be impartial, to haveno axe to grind. So the victim’s com-ments about policy, or about the parkbeing destroyed, were immune to an-other convention, which is journalisticbalance.

Too often, the convention of “bal-ance” only means that you get “bothsides of the story,” as if it’s presumedthat the story only has two sides. But the

tradition of balance in journalism couldhave at least countered a motel ownerwho is very angry, with a commentfrom someone in the park, explaininganother perspective. Often that justdidn’t happen, because victims are ex-empt, apparently, from this journalistictradition of balancing the story by re-porting the different perspectives. Andso these unbalanced comments fromangry merchants in effect had the forceof being factual rather than the strongopinions from some people who wereexperiencing a great deal of stress.YS Obviously every element of thisvery complex story can’t be in everynewspaper article. But when your firstpapers were being published about this,with the analysis of the high error ratesand how the public was misled by thejournalism, the response was that peopledon’t just see one story, they see tenstories, and gradually they get the wholepicture.CS There’s a highly respected journal-ism scholar named James Carey, at theUniversity of Illinois, who said thatjournalism is a curriculum and if onestory is flawed it doesn’t matter becausethe initial stories are just the first class.The curriculum is not completed untilyou get all the newspaper stories and the

Yellowstone Science14

magazine stories and the books aboutthe topic. It’s really a very well-writtenessay, but it is describing a very moti-vated, insatiable media consumer, notthe typical person who probably fol-lows news events pretty casually. Theidea of news as curriculum has becomea great copout for journalists.

The problem is that sometimes otherstories don’t follow the flawed one, andeven if they do, people will form animpression based on the first story be-cause they may not see the second story.So I don’t think that idea about journal-ism being cumulative is a very gooddescription of how the typical newspa-per reader or television watcher followsevents.

A student who goes through a typicaljournalism program, including the onein which I teach, is going to be lookingat a lot of standard kinds of stories.They learn about the police beat, how tocover an urban fire, how to cover a trial,this kind of thing, but in most journal-ism curricula, students do none or veryfew projects where they go past an800-word story about subject X, whichyou do today and then tomorrow it’sforgotten. We do a poor job of whettingstudents’ curiosity about the context ofeverything.YS Why does it seem so hard to getjournalists and scientists together?CS There’s a lot of distrust betweenthem. I think that scientists are terrifiedthat journalists will get it all wrong, andjournalists, many of whom are kind ofscared of science, are afraid that theywon’t understand. And so it’s often

difficult for scientists and journalists towork comfortably together, and alsothere’s also a kind of a tradition inscience of not seeking out the press.You’re supposed to go through thepeer-review process, and you’re notsupposed to talk about your work, andyou can lose credibility among yourscientific peers if you seek out the press.Yet the single thing that would do themost to improve the quality of sciencejournalism is if scientists routinely, ac-tively, sought out the media. I don’tthink it’s going to happen.YS So the reality is, we have insuffi-cient sources of information, and insuf-ficient ability to find what informationthere is. In the real world, what can bedone? What kind of advice can you giveto the new journalist coming to Yellow-stone, or to any environmental story,and what kind of advice can you give tothe beleaguered source?CS To the journalist, I would say, try ifyou possibly can to spend a day beforeyou go off to this location trying to getsome background information. You’remuch more able to do it sitting in youroffice at the newspaper than you aretrying to find a working pay telephonein the middle of a hurricane or an oilspill or whatever.

You’ve got to do some homeworkahead of time. If you can’t do that, andsometimes you can’t, then you need totry to persuade one of the reporters backat the paper to be working behind thescenes to support you while you’re outin the field. The reason that the Wash-ington Post was the only paper that

didn’t get an enormously inflated deathtoll from the earthquake in northernCalifornia was because it had someonein D.C. making the calls to support thereporter out in the Bay Area.

When I first heard about the Yellow-stone fires, I called the natural resourcesdepartment at my university and askedwho’s doing research on wildfire. Theytold me about the Intermountain FireSciences Lab in Missoula. I calledMissoula and was talking to Steve Arnoin about five minutes. If I could do thatfrom Ohio, it seems to me that a reporterwho really was interested in gettingsome context could do that from a work-ing pay telephone at Old Faithful. It’seasy to be a critic, of course. I’m notsure how much better I would havedone if I’d been working under thoseconstraints.

As to the sources dealing with thereporters, the first thing you have tounderstand is you may talk to the re-porter for half an hour and may get onesentence or no sentences in the story,because a good journalist is going totalk to a lot of sources. Then, if youexplain the topic the way you would toa scientific colleague, that’s just notgoing to fly. The reporter’s job is not towrite an article that would appear inScience magazine. You have to do thebest job you can to give a lay descrip-tion, and you must expect even most ofthat not to show up in the story. You justhave to keep trying. You have to putyourself in the mind of the reporter, whomay have to have a 1,000-word storydone an hour from now.

Winter 1994

A Recreational Profile of Yellowstone National Park Visitors

of the Yellowstone visitor than previ-ous studies.

In their 1990 study, researchers Rob-ert Mings and Kevin McHugh suggestedthat visitors to Yellowstone NationalPark combined a trip to Yellowstonewith other parks in the Rocky Mountainarea. My study tends to agree; manyvisitors stated they were just drivingthrough the park, spending relativelylittle time there. Yellowstone was not adestination point for them, but only oneattraction on a western tour.

Many visitors did not realize the sizeof the park, and were not prepared tostay for any great length of time. In a1989 study, Montana State Universityresearcher David Snepenger found thatalmost 88 percent of all visitors stayedone (48 percent), two (24 percent), orthree (15 percent) days. My study sug-gested that the length of stay was evenshorter, with a large number of indi-viduals just driving through.Snepenger’s findings may have beeninfluenced by his surveying heavily atthe Old Faithful area. Mings and

WhoVisitsYellowstone?

by Alistair J. Bath

close up visitor & flower

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One of the least studied of all mam-mal populations in Yellowstone NationalPark is the modern human one. Weknow surprisingly little about currentvisitors, an unfortunate situation thatsome recent investigators have workedhard to improve. Alistair J. Bath has inrecent years conducted extensive sur-veys of visitors and others interested inYellowstone. In this article, he presentspart of his Ph.D. dissertation research,which examined public attitudes toward,and knowledge about, fires and firemanagement in Yellowstone. We lookforward to hearing more from Alistairabout Yellowstone visitors. Ed.

This study is based on data collectedwhile I lived in the park from April1989 to July 1990. I gathered informa-tion from approximately 4,000 visitorsand more than 1,200 residents of Mon-tana and Idaho. All respondents wererandomly selected and chosen to berepresentative of summer, fall, and win-ter Yellowstone visitors during 1989and 1990.

Where do they come from?

Visitors to Yellowstone National Parkcome from all parts of the world, butmost are from the United States. In thesummer and fall many visitors also comefrom Canada, former West Germany,Switzerland, Britain, Australia, andFrance. Virtually all winter visitors arefrom the United States with only a fewfrom Canada, and one each from Brazil,New Zealand, South Africa, Britain,Switzerland, and former West Germany.Throughout the entire year, individualsfrom many other countries (i.e. Ven-ezuela, Norway, Israel, Czechoslavia,Spain, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, Hol-land) visited the park.

In this article, the patterns of visita-tion are discussed using data collectedonly from United States visitors. Socio-demographic characteristics, however,are discussed using data from all visi-tors. As my study randomly sampledvisitors at gate entrances proportionalto visitor numbers, it may be more accu-rate in documenting the characteristics

Jim Peaco/NPS

Yellowstone Science

McHugh, who surveyed visitors stay-ing at the Canyon Lodge, found thatthose visitors whose home state wasfarther away from the park travelledless frequently, but stayed longer than

visitors who came from near the park.In 1987, The President’s Commis-

sion on America’s Outdoors reportedthat the American public at large tendedto travel shorter distances and recreate

16

more frequently. I found the same to betrue for Yellowstone’s visitors. Most ofthe visitors, proportional to state popu-lation, were from the immediate area.Through each season (summer, fall,winter), most visitors came from Wyo-ming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah. In thewinter, due to easier snowmobile ac-cess through the north and west en-trances compared to the east and southentrances, more visitors were fromMontana than Wyoming, proportionalto population. Such results indicate theimportance of Yellowstone NationalPark as an area for regional and localrecreational use.

Mings and McHugh found that thenumber of visitors appeared to be posi-tively related to population size of statesand inversely related to distance fromthe park. They also found that popula-tion size of states and distance to thepark accounted for 76 percent of thevariation in visitation (that is, one couldpredict visitation from a given statebased mostly on its size and its distancefrom the park). Similar findings wereencountered in this study, at least for thesummer and fall periods. Most visitorsin the summer and fall came from Cali-fornia, and most other visitors camefrom the surrounding region (Montana,Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado).

In the winter, however, the pattern ofvisitation was different. California wasnot one of the top five states in wintervisitation to Yellowstone Park. Mostvisitors came from Montana, with manyfrom Minnesota, Washington, Utah, andWyoming.

Have they been here before?

Many visitors to Yellowstone Na-tional Park in 1989-1990 were repeatvisitors. During the summer, 45 per-cent of those visitors interviewed werefirst time visitors, while the remaining55 percent had been to the park at leastonce before, but not necessarily recently.Similar results were found with visitorsinterviewed in the fall and the winter.

In the winter, the differences betweenfirst time and repeat visitors were moreevident. Of those visitors interviewedin the winter, only 22 percent were firsttime visitors. Most (78 percent) had

Dramatic shifts occur from season to season in the origin of Yellowstone visitors.California provides more summer visitors than any other state, but virtuallydisappears from the statistical compilation in winter.

Winter 1994 17

been to the park at least once before. Asimilar pattern was noted when examin-ing data from visitors exiting the park.Although a large percentage were re-peat visitors, most interviewed visitors(79 percent summer, 74 percent fall, 51percent winter) had not seen the effectsof the fire. Most respondents to themail-back questionnaire that we sent toMontana and Idaho residents also statedthat they had not seen the effects of thefire.

Why did they visit?

Reasons for visiting YellowstoneNational Park varied. Most visitors inthis study, in each season, stated thatsightseeing was their primary reasonfor visiting the park. In the summer andfall, the next most frequent responsewas driving through. Wildlife viewing,viewing the effects of the fire, and geo-thermal (geyser) viewing were alsomentioned by summer and fall respon-dents. Mings and McHugh also foundthat viewing fire effects was a commonresponse, especially for those who livecloser and make more frequent trips.Snepenger found that the most popularleisure activities were geyser viewing,viewing wildlife, sightseeing, and view-ing the fire burn.

Winter visitors had different reasonsfor visiting the park. Althoughsightseeing was still the primary reasonfor visiting, snowmobiling, skiing, wild-life viewing, and geothermal viewingwere also stated. Viewing the effects ofthe fire did not rank in the top fivereasons for visiting the park in the win-ter. Visitors saw snowmobiling as arecreational activity within YellowstonePark, rating it highly as a reason to visitthe park in the winter. This importanceplaced by the visitor on thesnowmobiling experience may be dis-turbing to park resource managers, whoview the snowmobile strictly as a modeof transportation by which to view andexperience the park’s natural attractions.

Who were they?

For summer, fall, and winter visitors,data were collected on sex, education,and age. Data on the number of indi-

viduals and the number of children (un-der 18 years of age) per visitor groupwere also collected. Most visitors toYellowstone National Park had moreeducation than the general public, were

predominately male, travelled in groupsof two to four, and did not travel withchildren.

Approximately 82 percent of all visi-tors in this study had some postsecondary

States nearest to Yellowstone Park generally sent the highest percentage of theirpopulation to visit. Montana visitors outnumbered Wyoming visitors in winter dueto easier access for snowmobilers through the north and west entrances.

Yellowstone Science

education. In his 1989 survey,Snepenger found that almost 80 percentof all visitor groups had one or morepersons with at least some college edu-cation. This finding was also supportedby Mings and McHugh. Most visitorsin this research had higher educationlevels than the Montana and Idaho gen-eral publics. For example, 26 percent ofwinter visitors had masters or doctoratedegrees, versus only 10 percent of theMontana and Idaho statewide generalpublics.

There were differences in sex and agecharacteristics of visitors and Montanaand Idaho statewide general publics.There were more male than female visi-tors in all seasons (summer 65 percentmale, 35 percent female), and espe-cially in the fall (82 percent male, 18percent female) and winter (80.5 per-cent male, 19.5 percent female). In thefall, hunters (hunting is predominantlya male activity) came into the park toview wildlife. Many were hunting insurrounding forest lands. In the winter,many groups of single males came intothe park to snowmobile. These resultsare in contrast to those of Snepenger’s,who found an equal breakdown of maleand female visitors. Again, this couldbe attributed to the nonrandom sam-pling done by Snepenger in the OldFaithful area.

Most visitors to the park in all seasonswere between 30 and 41 years of age. Inthe fall, there was a large percentage ofolder visitors (age 54-65), while in thewinter there was a relatively small num-ber of older visitors. A similar agedistribution was found in the Montanaand Idaho statewide general publics withthe only noticeable difference being agreater proportion of respondents over

Above left: the Old Faithful area fromabove on a busy summer day. Right: awinter crowd of snowmobiliers at theNorris Geyser Basin. Below: a winterscene in the park back before there wasa winter season.

Jim Peaco/NPS

18

NPS Photo Archives

Jim Peaco/NPS

tween six and ten individuals. Fewchildren visited Yellowstone NationalPark during any season, but especiallyduring the fall and winter. During thesummer, approximately 35-40 percentof visitor groups included children, whileonly about 10 percent included childrenin the fall and winter.

What did they think?

There was initially some concernabout future visitation to YellowstoneNational Park after the fires of 1988.These fears are not substantiated in thisstudy. Most visitors in the summer (94percent), fall (92 percent), and winter(99 percent) stated they would like toreturn to Yellowstone National Park,rating their trip between 7 and 10 on a 1-to-10 scale where 10 was “fantastic.”Wildlife viewing was cited as the mostenjoyable experience, while viewingfire effects, road conditions, and crowdswere stated as the least enjoyable expe-rience.

Viewing of the fire effects in the parkdid not reduce the overall satisfactionrating of most visitors. In fact, manyvisitors came to see the effects, andmost visitors hold positive attitudes to-ward the fires. As Snepenger and hiscolleagues projected, visitation to Yel-lowstone National Park has continuedto increase since the fires of 1988. Thepark will remain highly visited and trea-sured by all those who see it.

Alistair J. Bath is an assistant profes-sor at Memorial University of New-foundland, who has published severalscholarly papers on public attitudestoward Yellowstone, with special em-phasis on fire and wolves.

65. This is typical of mail question-naires, where a higher response rateusually occurs from those respondentswho are retired.

Although visitor group sizes variedgreatly (1 to 60), most groups werebetween two and four individuals. Themost common group size for all seasonswas two persons. In the fall, approxi-mately 60 percent of all visitor groupsto the park consisted of two individuals.Due to group snowmobile tours in thewinter, there were larger group sizesthen. For example, 20 percent of thewinter groups surveyed through hand-outs, and approximately nine percent ofthose interviewed in person, were be-

Winter 1994

&notesNEWS

19

Many Yellowstone researchers willshare Yellowstone's sorrow over thepassing of East Entrance Ranger RobertMahn, who died in a snowmobiling ac-cident on January 17. Ranger Mahn wason a routine snowmobile patrol to assesssafety conditions on the East EntranceRoad when he apparently went over a70-foot embankment about five mileswest of the East Entrance.

The incident occurred between 7:30and 8:00 a.m. on Monday, January 17,during a period of low visibility, highwinds, and blowing snow. When RangerMahn failed to check in by radio, an-other East Entrance Ranger began a pre-liminary search. At 8:45 a.m., he lo-cated the area where Mahn's snowmo-bile left the road, and requested assis-tance. He located Mahn at about 9:20a.m., and began CPR and emergencymedical first aid, which was continuedby various personnel throughout theevacuation process. Mahn was trans-ported to West Park Hospital in Cody,Wyoming, where he was pronounceddead at 1:09 p.m.

Bob Mahn had been with the NPSsince 1973, and also worked at NationalCapital Parks, Canyonlands, and GoldenSpike Natonal Historic Site. He was, inthe words of Yellowstone Superinten-dent Bob Barbee, "a legend in and aroundYellowstone." He came to Yellowstonein 1976, and had been at the East En-trance since 1982. He is survived by hiswife Grace Nutting.

Susan Kraft has been selected ParkCurator, replacing Cyd Martin, whorecently moved to Alaska. Susan is aparticipant in the National ParkService’s Resource Management In-take Trainee Program, and has beenassigned to the North Atlantic RegionalOffice since June 1991.

Prior to entering the intake traineeprogram, Susan Kraft worked atSaint-Gaudens National Historic Site(N.H.), Independence National Histori-cal Park (Pa.), Valley Forge NationalHistoric Park (Pa.), and Salem Mari-time National Historic Site (Mass.).Since entering the trainee program, shehas served as project coordinator of theNorth Atlantic Region’s Collection Ac-countability Program, and has spent thepast year in charge of museum collec-tions at Acadia National Park (Maine).

Though Yellowstone will be Susan’spermanent duty station, she will con-tinue her involvement in the intaketrainee program until June 1994. Overthe coming months she will thereforeoccasionally be on assignment to otherparks as part of her training in museumoperations and management.

The Yellowstone museum collectioncontains more than 26,000 artifacts andobjects representing the park’s culturaland natural history, as well as morethan 60,000 historic photographic im-ages. The collection and curator’s of-fice are located in the Horace AlbrightVisitor Center at Mammoth HotSprings, and are part of the Branch ofCultural Resources in the YellowstoneCenter for Resources. We plan to pro-file the collection in a future issue ofYellowstone Science.

Ranger Robert Mahn Dies

New Yellowstone Curator Selected National Biological Survey Official

On November 11, 1993, PresidentClinton signed the Department of Inte-rior Appropriation Bill, creating the Na-tional Biological Survey. F. EugeneHester, formerly of the National ParkService (NPS), is serving as ActingDirector of the new agency. As re-ported in previous issues of Yellow-stone Science, a number of NPS re-search staff in Yellowstone have beentransferred to the new agency, and willnow be directly supervised through theNational Ecology Research Center inFort Collins, Colorado. Their researchassignments in Yellowstone remain thesame for the moment.

Claims of Research SuppressionDebated

Two former NPS research scientistsin Yellowstone, both employees of thenewly created National Biological Sur-vey (NBS), have recently made the newsby saying their research findings weresuppressed by their supervisors becausethose findings disagreed with “official”views of the subjects they studied. Ar-ticles on this controversy have recentlyappeared in several newspapers, includ-ing The Los Angeles Times (November22, 1993) and High Country News (No-vember 29 and December 27, 1993) aswell as local papers in the greater Yel-lowstone area.

Richard Keigley, a research scientistwho began work in Yellowstone Park in1991, has been studying the way inwhich northern range cottonwoods havebeen affected by ungulate browsing.Keigley believes that his research hasbeen thwarted, that his research assign-ment was changed, that his researchfunding has been withheld, and that hisattempt to publish his findings has beenresisted, because his findings lead to therejection of the long-standing "naturalregulation" hypothesis that has largelyguided management policy on the north-ern range for the past 25 years.

David Mattson had been a member ofthe Interagency Grizzly Bear StudyTeam (IGBST) for about 10 years.Mattson believes that his study of thegreater Yellowstone grizzly bear popu-

Mickey Anderson

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lation has been terminated, that hiscomputer files were deleted and hisnotes confiscated, and that he has beensubjected to harassment and transfer,because his interpretations of IGBSTdata disagreed with his supervisor’spublications and statements claimingthat the population was experiencingan increase.

Keigley’s former NPS leaders inYellowstone, Superintendent RobertBarbee and Yellowstone Center forResources Director John Varley, aswell as his former NPS supervisor andnow his immediate NBS supervisor,Don Despain, disagree with his accu-sations. They maintain that prior toKeigley’s relatively recent arrival inYellowstone, a variety of agency andindependent advisors established thatthe park’s most pressing riparian re-search need was a study of willow, andthat Keigley was assigned such a studyfrom the beginning, but that he hasignored that research assignment topursue his own interests. They furthermaintain that his findings about cot-tonwoods are in good part old news topark researchers, who have long knownabout elk impacts on cottonwoods. DanHuff, NPS Rocky Mountain RegionalChief Scientist, who recommended thatKeigley revise his paper before sub-mitting it for publication, believes thatKeigley’s one year of data collectedfrom a limited study area was notenough to justify such a sweeping "re-jection" of the natural regulation hy-pothesis.

Mattson’s immediate supervisor wasRichard Knight, who has been IGBSTteam leader for about 20 years. Knightmaintains that in studying grizzly bearpopulation dynamics, Mattson was op-erating outside his field of expertise(habitat analysis) and was analyzingpopulation data gathered by Knightand others without having asked forpermission to do so. Thus, accordingto Knight, he was merely protectinghis own data when he stopped Mattson'suse of it.

Unlike the Keigley case, the Mattsoncase has reached a sort of resolution.Barbee and Varley intervened in thedispute and arranged a mutually agree-able transfer of Mattson to the Univer-

sity of Idaho National Biological Sur-vey/Cooperative Park Studies Unit.There he will pursue a Ph.D. and com-plete the grizzly bear habitat work hestarted as an IGBST employee.

As of early January, there was noprogress toward settlement of any of thescientific disputes involved, and no like-lihood of that in sight. Nor were anylegal or formal administrative actionsknown to be underway regarding thevarious positions taken. All parties con-tinue to maintain they are right, andnone seem at all persuaded by the argu-ments of their opponents.

from the IAWF at P.O. Box 328,Fairfield, Washington 99012-0328. Formore information on the bibliographyand the IAWF’s other fire-related pub-lications, including a current list of booksthey sell, contact them at the aboveaddress or call 1-800-697-3443(FAX509-283-2264, e-mail jgreenlee@igc.apc.org).

The International Association ofWildland Fire (IAWF) has published a70-page bibliography containing ap-proximately 1,000 titles relating to thefires of 1988. This bibliography, whosefirst edition was premiered at the fireconference in the park last September,is a collaborative effort of IAWF andNPS specialists, and at press time isbeing prepared for a second enlargededition. The IAWF, which maintainsan extensive research library on fire,can make available almost all of thematerials contained in the bibliogra-phy.

The bibliography is available in pa-perback for $20.19 U.S. ($20.44 othercountries), and may be ordered directly

Yellowstone Fire BibliographyAvailable

Cinnabar Symposium to Focus onWilderness

The seventh annual Cinnabar Sym-posium will be held March 25-26 at theMuseum of the Rockies in Bozeman,Montana. The symposium, entitled“Sustaining the Wild in Wilderness,”will bring together some of the country’sleading environmental philosophers,scientists, and policymakers to discussthe concept of wilderness.

Program organizers say that the sym-posium "will take a fresh look at thefundamental principles underlying wil-derness preservation: what constituteswilderness, why is it worth saving, andhow can the values with wilderness besustained?"

Speakers include Daniel Botkin, Di-rector of the Program on Global Changeat George Mason University and authorof Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecol-ogy for the Twenty-first Century; J. BairdCallicott, Professor of Philosophy at theUniversity of Wisconsin; T.H. Watkins,editor of Wilderness magazine; andKaren Sheldon, General Counsel forthe Wilderness Society. RogerKennedy, NPS Director, will give thekeynote address on Friday evening,March 25.

Admission is $10. For further infor-mation, contact the Montana State Uni-versity Yellowstone Center for Moun-tain Environments, (406) 994-5178, orthe Education Department at the Mu-seum of the Rockies, (406) 994-5282.

The annual Cinnabar Symposium, apublic forum devoted to interdiscipli-nary discussion of wildland and wild-life issues, is sponsored by MontanaState University and the Museum of theRockies, with funds from the MontanaCommittee for the Humanities, the PEWCharitable Trust, and the Cinnabar Foun-dation.

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Rare Animal Report SystemOverhauled and Computerized

Prior to the 1930s, observations ofrare animals within Yellowstone Na-tional Park were recorded primarily inpersonal and employee journals, Armyscout diaries, Army station records, andmonthly and annual reports from thepark Superintendent. During the 1930s,the NPS began a more systematic wild-life reporting system, with wildlife ob-servations being recorded on WildlifeObservation Cards. The system wasfurther refined in 1986, with the imple-mentation of the Rare Animal SightingForm System.

Although these observations con-tained very useful and important infor-mation, the large noncomputerized da-tabase made data analysis, sorting, re-trieval, and summaries a very tediousand time-consuming process. In aneffort to make data analysis faster andmore efficient, the Yellowstone Centerfor Resources (YCR) updated and com-puterized the Rare Animal SightingReport System in 1993.

The new computer database breaksdown each sighting into 56 separatepieces of information (or fields) thatcan be quickly sorted and retrieved.The new computer database can be usedin conjunction with the parks Geo-graphic Information System (GIS). Inaddition, the database is completelycompatible with the U.S. Fish and Wild-life Service’s Wolf Reporting Systemand the National Heritage Project’s Con-servation Data System.

The new program will make the sight-ing reports much more useable for re-search biologists, management biolo-gists, and resource management coor-dinators, as well as for visiting andcontracting researchers. For example,the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service canuse the Rare Animal Sighting ReportSystem as a tool to help determine if andwhen wolf packs become established inthe Yellowstone ecosystem.

In another example, researchers maysoon start a red fox research projectwithin the park. As part of their pre-liminary work, they will be reviewingthe existing data on red fox sightingswithin the park to determine study area

boundaries. The red fox data can bequickly retrieved from the Rare AnimalSighting database and locations mappedthrough the park’s geographicinformaton system.

Data from 1986 to the present havebeen entered into the computer data-base. This database consists of morethan 1,000 records, ranging from spe-cies as small as amphibians and flyingsquirrels to as large as gray wolves andmountain goats. Wildlife observationrecords prior to 1986 will still be avail-able for use manually, through the Wild-

life Observation Card System.The YCR encourages all park visi-

tors, employees, and researchers to re-port sightings of uncommon animals aswell as unusual animal behavior or atypi-cal locations of common animals. Rareanimal sightings can be reported at allranger stations and visitor centers in thepark, or to the Bear Management Of-fice. To obtain sighting forms or fur-ther information please contact the BearManagement Office, P.O. Box 168,Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming,82190, (307) 344-2162.

Yellowstone Science

Aquatic Insects ......................................................................................................................................................................4Visitors and Wildlife ..............................................................................................................................................................7

Yellowstone: What went wrong in the fires of 1988? ........................................................................................................ 11

News and Notes ...................................................................................................................................................................21