Congressman Holt is right to seek ban on snowmobile use in parks

This is in regard to the (column) by Greater Media Newspapers Executive Editor Greg Bean, "Mind Your Business, Rush, and Don’t Be Minding Theirs" concerning Yellowstone National Park and snowmobiles. I visited Yellow-stone the winter prior to the original snowmobile ban date. Yes, I even went on a snowmobile tour.

I had written Congressman Holt about the issue prior to the visit, agreeing that these machines should not be in our national parks. Well, after going on the tour and taking a look for myself, I had to further agree that these private and tour group machines have no place in Yellowstone or any other national park.

They truly are an environmental menace. They are also noisy, smelly and not a generally nice machine to be near. Sure it was fun riding the sled, but after noticing the congestion at the main lodge parking lot, the exhaust fume clouds, the gasoline smells and the noise, I had to agree that the park was being overwhelmed by these machines.

Our tour guide followed all the rules as to speed, but when we tried to get some pictures of the local bison, they wanted no part of the machines and were so far from the road as to be un-photographable with anything other than a 20 power zoom. I strongly believe that all recreational motorized vehicles, whether they be snowmobiles, personal water craft, dirt bikes or other forms of ATVs, do not belong in any parks, especially in our national parks.

Our parks are for us to enjoy naturally and quietly by hiking, biking, canoeing and perhaps other forms of human-powered travel. They should never be a motorized amusement park.

The reason dirt bikes were banned in all New Jersey park land was due to abuse by the operators, noise, pollution and land erosion damage. Snowmobiles are nothing more than another form of these annoying devices and do not belong in our parks.

People like Congressman Holt are right in supporting such issues, even if they do not live in Wyoming. I wish all the representatives were as proactive as he. He supports popular opinion on this issue and not the ATV equipment lobbyists. The park service has statistics that over 80 percent of the people that have contacted them want snowmobiles banned from Yellowstone.

And now a lobbyist group called the International Snow-mobile Manufacturers Assoc-iation has initiated another legal maneuver to delay the ban for another year. The Park Service and the people of the Untied States approved this ban two years ago, by the way.

Congressman Holt gets my vote for being a leader in such environmental issues.

He has become an active protector of our national parks and environment, and we need people like him now more than ever to fight the environmentally unconscious policies of the Bush administration.

Ralph DeMartino

Freehold