Public Image Singed : Yellowstone Seeks to Retain Tourist Dollar

As colder weather snuffs out the last smoldering hot spots from Yellowstone’s record fires, the fight is now shifting to a new and perhaps even more challenging ground: repairing the singed public image of the world’s premier national park.

With a fortune in tourism dollars at stake in three states, efforts to promote the “New Yellowstone” are both costly and creative.

Whirlwind European Tour

At the forefront is a traveling show starring the park’s beleaguered superintendent. In his ranger uniform, Bob Barbee is making a personal appeal to the European media and travel industry on a whirlwind visit to England, France and West Germany this week, taking along fire videos, maps and other officials to back up the premise that everyone is banking on:

Yellowstone is alive and well.

Over and over, the park’s good-will ambassadors use the same careful word to describe what Yellowstone looks like after its worst fire season in 300 to 400 years:

“Interesting.”

To those flying over the park, the mosaic pattern of the fierce fires is evident in the checkerboard of black, brown and green. Singed ridge tops overlook pristine valleys. Black moonscapes brush up against dense pine forests.

“It’s neat,” said Len Carlman, public lands specialist with the Jackson Hole (Wyo.) Alliance conservation group. “The vegetation, frankly, up to now had been boring. Nobody is going to Yellowstone to look at trees. It’s not like the California redwoods.”

Carlman got a bird’s-eye view of the park during a recent flight with Project Lighthawk, a nonprofit environmental air patrol based in Santa Fe, N. M.

“I was worried,” Lighthawk pilot Bruce Gordon said. “This is my favorite spot on the whole planet. From what I’d read, I thought it was going to be devastated.”

Countering Misperception

That misperception--that Yellowstone was destroyed--is exactly what officials hope to counter with a massive campaign to educate and reassure park visitors. They plan to use special museum displays, nature trails through burn areas, films, wayside exhibits and other fire-related programs. There is even talk of a post-fire Yellowstone calendar.

“We’re trying to reach out and get beyond the basic Bambi story,” said park spokesman Joan Anzelmo, whose public relations office fielded up to 250 media calls a day--some from as far away as Japan--during the worst of the summer firestorm.

Telephone surveys and visitor questionnaires will assess public perceptions of the “New Yellowstone” to help the park and state tourism officials focus their promotional campaigns.

Deadwood Hauled Away

The 2.2-million acre park, which is over 98% wilderness, is getting some post-trauma cosmetic surgery as burnt trees and deadwood are hauled away from many roadsides, picnic grounds and campsites.

Overall, the rehabilitation of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem--including conducting the current marketing campaign--is expected to cost at least $25 million. The National Park Service is budgeting an estimated $2 million to $4 million, Anzelmo said. Officials from Yellowstone and neighboring Grand Teton National Park are also asking Congress for $23 million.

The governors of Montana and Wyoming together asked for an additional $3 million in federal aid, and more millions to promote Yellowstone are being earmarked by state and private groups.

Montana and Wyoming depend on the park for a sizable share of their tourist revenues. Idaho is taking a more opportunistic approach, assuring potential visitors that Yellowstone survives but noting that Idaho has similar, unburnt attractions.

Not everyone is happy about the situation.

$50-Million Cost Seen

Bill Schilling, director of the Wyoming Heritage Society, a nonprofit state chamber of commerce, complains that the “New Yellowstone” scramble could end up costing $50 million.

“The federal agencies and the coordinating officials are now busy putting together plans, hiring people to analyze, forming committees to figure out ways to present the ‘New Yellowstone’ look,” he said, adding that they “have in effect created a whole new layer of government with programs in response to a natural disaster that could have been controlled at a much earlier stage.”

Schilling, a critic of the Park Service’s controversial policy of letting some wildfires burn naturally, said that the “government is great when it comes to intervening afterwards.”

In addition to governmental funds, Yellowstone is collecting big checks from corporations and coins from school children; and people are sending everything from pine cones to chain saws to help restore the park they loved and almost lost. Kindergartners in Vail, Colo., sent $101.31 from a bake sale. The Royal Order of the Moose pledged $1 million.

Little ‘Severe Burn’ Found

Meanwhile, scores of scientists are beginning to study the fire damage and forest regeneration, and a federal task force is reviewing national fire management policy in the wake of blazes that charred an estimated 440,000 acres in the Yellowstone ecosystem. Of the total acreage, early mapping indicates that less than 2% is “severe burn,” in which all life is wiped out and the ground left sterile.

With October visitation at a record high, officials are hoping curiosity about the fires will give Yellowstone its best season ever next summer.

“As we see it, if the image of Yellowstone were to be significantly damaged, it would be a very major blow to Montana tourism,” said Steve Shimek, publicity coordinator for the state’s Department of Commerce. “The gateway communities are where the bucks are made.”

Although 97% of Yellowstone is in Wyoming, Montana has three of the park’s five entrances.

Yellowstone, which averages 2.5 million visitors a year, still expects to hit 2.2 million for 1988.

Heavy Losses for 2 States

Montana and Wyoming lost an estimated $140 million in tourism revenue because of the fires, John Wilson, state tourism director for Montana, estimates. The two states have produced a 17-minute “fire video” on Yellowstone for travel agents and community groups, Wilson said, including several minutes of firefighting footage so the film won’t look like “a public relations whitewash.” The video features tourists’ statements and shots of grazing wildlife.

“It kind of puts everything into historical perspective,” Shimek said. “It says Yellowstone is a wild place. It’s a place of giant geological forces. It’s a place of truly wild wildlife and a place where natural forces reign supreme. And that’s what Yellowstone National Park is . . . . It’s not a contrived pastoral environment.

“And, so, when the fires are put in that perspective, (the destruction) is a facet of the wildness of the park.”

On a recent Indian summer weekend, visitors seemed to take the patches of blackened forest and moonscape meadows in stride, marveling at the bison nibbling tufts of golden grass left on an ashy range.

Photos of Devastation

Jan H. van Laere, from the Netherlands, stopped with his wife to shoot pictures of a particularly devastated finger of forest beside the Madison River on the park’s western edge.

“It’s a horrible sight, of course,” he said, “but not so horrible as the wall of flames they showed on TV. From that point of view, the whole of western America appeared to be on fire.”

Evelyn Johnson and her two teen-agers had driven to the park from their home in nearby Idaho Falls, Ida., and pulled off the road to watch a herd of elk bask in the noon sun.

“It’s very sobering to see the black trees,” Mrs. Johnson said. “We’ve come up here off and on for 25 years. There’s still beauty. I think we can thank God that he left what he did.”

Researcher Lisa Romaine contributed to this article.