The Past 30 Years in Yellowstone, Part 4: Mike Finley

EDITOR’S NOTE: Concluding our four-part interview series with the last four superintendents of Yellowstone National Park, Mike Finley (1994-2001) touches on his experience in Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Yosemite, the latter of which he also served as superintendent. Finley discusses national parks, wolves, visitation issues and the day he had to turn off his car in Grand Teton because he couldn’t find a parking space. 

This past September, Mike Finley visited Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks with his grandson.

Finley, who worked in both parks over his career in the National Park Service, has been back to Greater Yellowstone numerous times since retiring as Yellowstone’s superintendent in 2001, but this trip stood out. First, the timing was intentional: mid-September isn’t traditionally as busy with tourists: kids are back in school, the summer rush and Labor Day have passed. But it wasn’t the case this time. Finley said it felt like peak summer in Yellowstone.

“I found it shocking. I found it frustrating,” Finley said in a recent interview with Mountain Journal. “It’s unbelievable to me. The types and the number of people; campers towing cars, tour buses, tour groups. I believe the superintendents are both going to have to come to grips with this.”

Finley mused that it reminded him of Yosemite, where he was stationed as superintendent before holding the same job in Yellowstone beginning in 1994.

“That’s where I experienced the crush of this unbridled visitation, and I didn’t enjoy it,” Finley said of his time in Yosemite, noting that tour buses and congested visitation were overrunning the park’s facilities. “It was one of those things that if you don’t control it, it will go out of control. It was eroding the visitor experience.”

On his way back to Bozeman, Finley stopped in Mammoth Hot Springs and shared his experience and advice on managing visitation with current Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Mountain Journal, Finley reflected on that trip, his experience dealing with out-of-control visitation in Yosemite, how wildlife management has changed over the years, and shared his thoughts on the future of Yellowstone. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mike Finley: The congestion at noted features … was incredible in both parks. I dealt with gridlock as the superintendent of Yosemite [and] the only way to manage it is at the gates and not let people in. That’s what we’re facing: gridlock in both Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

A laissez-faire management of those two parks is marginally working. It’s frustrating to many visitors. There are a lot of places that you used to be able to park that no longer have parking because of risks of resource damage. The parks are responding by restricting parking. Eliminating parking, to me, it's a lose-lose situation.

The law that created the National Park Service said you’re supposed to manage parks to ‘leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.’ Unimpaired for future generations. That’s the responsibility of the Park Service. That’s directly the statute from Congress. It doesn’t say slightly dented or temporarily degraded. It says unimpaired for future generations. What’s impairment? Is sitting in a traffic jam for two hours idling and polluting the air impairment?

The Roosevelt Arch in Gardiner says: “For the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” We understand benefit, and we have all kinds of laws that regulate wildlife management, camping and all sorts of things. But enjoyment has to be a judgment call and how you manage visitation to provide for that enjoyment is critical to your success as an agency. You can choose not to manage and diminish the enjoyment of hundreds of visitors, maybe even thousands, every day.

In the commercial establishments in and around the parks, often—not all the time but a lot—income is the driving factor in their decisions. More people means high sales and that is not acceptable if you're really going to embrace the tenets of the law. What I see now, what I saw in Yellowstone and Teton is laissez-faire, and it can’t go on with the trend line [of increasing visitation] from when I was superintendent.

M.F.: I was with my grandson on a Sunday. I told him we would drive out to String Lake, which is a chain of lakes right below the Teton mountains, about 20 minutes from park headquarters, maybe 30. It had traditionally been easy to find a place to park. It was used mostly by locals, and maybe a few visitors.

It was extremely difficult to find a place to park. I drove around waiting, stalling, polluting the park. I would turn off my car, so I wouldn’t burn fossil fuels. I waited about 40 minutes to get a parking place at a location that never in my experience had been hard to get to. [And] it wasn’t limited to that location. It was many locations in Grand Teton National Park that I knew as well as I knew Yellowstone.      

M.F.: Considering my experience at Yosemite, and working with all the cities on the gateway to Yosemite, there are communities around the park from Mammoth Ski Area to Fresno to Merced. They’re all promoting themselves as gateways to Yosemite. They’re building new conference centers and new hotels.

I wrote [all the communities near Yosemite] letters and said in the interest of fairness to your investors, I don’t think it’s wise to continue to promote yourself as the gateway to this park with the intensity that you’re using in your information. We would have gridlock. Traffic could not move for two hours. You can’t tolerate that if you really care about people’s enjoyment of Yosemite.

M.F.: Yes, I was there five-and-a-half years. We dealt with major fires, we did a lot of prescription burning. We worked on a lot of restoration of meadows [and] got the old historical garbage dump off the banks that had been eroding into the river.

The biggest thing we dealt with was visitation. We established a mechanism at the gates that when three or four cars went out, three or four cars could go in. You’d be behind a string of cars, waiting to move up. We asked them to turn off their engines while they waited. Before Memorial Day, I sent out press releases to surrounding communities as far as Los Angeles, warning them it might not be the best time to visit because of the crowds. I didn’t want people to waste their vacation time. You look forward to a trip to Yosemite at some point. You want quality time, you want a change of pace. The last thing the Park Service should want is to have to maintain the same types of urban pressures that you’re fleeing.

So, visiting Yellowstone, I took off my ranger hat and just took some notes. At one point from Norris Junction, it took two hours to get to Old Faithful. It was just unmanageable traffic. There was no place to pull off. Many of the traditional old places that were beat in have been rectified or hardened. They keep people from continually encroaching off the road. I don’t think they have a sophisticated management scheme for managing visitation. It’s not easy to do because political pushback is hard. I get it. For local entrepreneurs, if you cut back on the number of tour guides and you cut back on concession permits, you perceive that as personal damage to you. You are damaged and you go to your congressman and senator. That gets down to park management.

Part of this is a huge educational program for the three governors and six senators of the states that are located within Yellowstone National Park. The counties are not too sensitive at all. [In Wyoming] sales tax is applied. There are huge bed taxes for every room sold in the parks. For Teton County, for Park County, that is a huge source of revenue for no cost. You don’t have any cost, no roadwork, no policing, you’re not fighting fire, but you’re pocketing all that revenue, so that complicates the mission of the National Park Service. There’s an old saying about a horse: that some won’t take the bit very well. Unbridled visitation doesn’t take the bit very well.

M.F.: That’s exactly right. If you get tax money, you’re in fat city. If you're not, you’re not. But residents of Gardiner benefit from park visitation. I worked diligently to make sure we cleaned up that boundary between the park and the town of Gardiner. That’s just the way the lines were drawn, the political boundaries that were bound by the states.

M.F.: One of the most important steps that was taken was the reintroduction of the wolf. I think the science bears it out. Wolves were wrongfully removed from Yellowstone National Park—with the involvement of the Park Service. There was a period when [Yellowstone employees] themselves were killing wolves. Wildlife management has been controversial since they closed the dumps that fed grizzlies because of the Craighead [Institute] studies and trying to stop the unnatural food sources. The park now works to provide opportunities for them to live a natural life within the park.

When I arrived in Yellowstone in November 1994, I remember walking through the northern range, near where one of the wolf dens was … through aspen groves that were thigh high to me. They were shrubs, they could not grow beyond what’s called the ‘grazing zone.’ Because there were no wolves then, the elk were overpopulated, and everyone was concerned about the decline of aspen. Twelve years later, I went back with [Bill Ripple], a scientist from Oregon State [University], who was studying them, and the trees were growing unabated.

The wolves kept the elk moving, so they didn’t just establish an area and stay. Before, they just browsed the willows down and the aspen down. They had been grazed down to be most ineffective for providing habitat for beavers. In November 1994, there were three beaver colonies on the northern range. When I went back [with Ripple], there were 11 beaver colonies. That’s because of the reestablishment of the willows and the beaver dams. The dams created lakes or ponds. That much water recharged the aquifer, and provided [habitat for] waterfowl, ducks, geese, and other birds.

That’s why wolves matter so much. If you consider all of these impacts imposed on the park by an abundance of elk, it was beyond a natural dynamic between predators and prey. If you look at Isle Royale National Park, which is an island [in Michigan], it has very little immigration of wolves and moose. Those two species have lived at an equilibrium. If the wolves are too successful and there are less moose, the wolf population declines and vice versa. These natural dynamics have been noted for years. Now they’ve been restored to natural dynamics that existed prior to humans interfering with the population dynamics.

M.F.: When it came to bison and brucellosis, I got tired of the hyperbole. The [Montana state veterinarian] at the time said we had to vaccinate our bison, or they’d have to kill them. I brought out the National Academy of Sciences—the best scientific minds certainly in the nation. I asked them to do one thing: Help figure out if this is a real issue or if this is political hyperbole. I said, ‘I’m not asking for an opinion. I want to resolve this.’

I still remember the final conclusion, and you can look it up: While the issue of transmission in the wild of brucellosis from bison to cattle is not zero, it is almost zero. These are the best minds on population dynamics, epidemiology and veterinary medicine in the country. And yet the Park Service is being called a bad neighbor. Yellowstone was established before the states were established. Yellowstone is not the bad neighbor, the states are the bad neighbor. They’re shooting grizzly bears and holding hunts that are way too high.

The park is a gold mine economically and regionally … It’s not changed. They’ve failed to really listen to the National Academy of Sciences report. Wenk got them to update it, and it said the exact same thing … I doubt it changed opinions and minds in Montana … I think they don’t want to listen.

There has never been a carrying capacity study for bison. The 3,000 number was a disease management number, not a carrying capacity. Unless there’s been a really valid scientific study on carrying capacity, you can’t talk about too many bison because you don’t know.

The Secretary of Ag and the Secretary of Interior both authorized the purchase of additional land for Yellowstone wildlife in that area. That hasn’t been completed. For example, if Cam was able to purchase the Church Universal and Triumphant land, that would be a small ameliorating benefit: all that grazing for Yellowstone wildlife, including bison. On the other side of the river, the same authority applies … A lot of this issue could be solved if Montana could just recognize the intent of Congress: that authority was given for the increase of federal lands in Montana.