[Geysers] Snow coach Stats: Billings Gazette

[Gordon Bower]

I had two reactions to that "January use" graph in the Billings Gazette.

One, that the chart wasn't showing us what we needed to know to make an
'interesting' comparison -- yes, the new rules have cut traffic. How does
this compare to what the traffic was before the new regulations were in
place?

Two, that the numbers are all very small.

This amazing new growth in snowcoach traffic is from 120 to 140 passengers
per day.

My first winter trip to Old Faithful was in January of 1985 or 1986. There
was a huge line of snowcoaches blocking traffic outside the Stagecoach Inn
in West - seven of them, if memory serves, all stuffed to the gills. On
other trips to Mammoth, we would see and hear as many as 5 coaches a day
going south. A couple others came up from Flagg Ranch.

That all seemed to dry up and blow away sometime around 1990. The times I
was at Old Faithful in the winter in the 1990s, there were one or two TW
Services coaches each from West and from Mammoth. A small handful of
private guide service coaches too, but nowhere close to ten a day of them.
The private guide business was really starting to pick up the last time I
was there (1998, Cascade Geyser weekend).... but after all these years of
growth, *we are just barely beginning to approach the typical snowcoach
usage of 20 years ago*.

I don't know how many snowmobiles there were back then exactly... they
outnumbered the snowcoachers considerably. That's where an expanded
version of that Gazette graphic would be nice. If I took a shot in the
dark I'd guess it was 15,000 back then. There were certainly lines to pay
at the West Entrance, and jampacked parking lots at Old Faithful then.

GRB