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Outside Magazine October 2001
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Environment
Silence of the Lands
Jet-ski, Ski-Doo, and air-tour firms move to cut the racket
By Bruce Barcott and Jason Paur


"YOU GET OUT there in the wildest of the wild, and agggh!" wails Dick Hingson. "There's this sense that you're on the main runway at LAX." Hingson, the chairman of the Sierra Club's Noise and Aviation subcommittee, is railing against the greatest violators of peace and quiet in the Grand Canyon: the 88,000 plane and helicopter flights that dip below the rim each year.

Hingson is not alone in his frustration. While noise-reduction advocates have in recent years won federal restrictions on aircraft in the Grand Canyon, snowmobiles in Yellowstone, and jet skis in some national parks, manufacturers are now staging a counteroffensive on behalf of motorized outdoor recreation by marketing machines outfitted with various sound-damping technologies.

In October, the chopper-tour business will roll out its first "quiet" helicopter, the Eurocopter EC130—a $1.6 million machine that runs at 84.3 decibels—8.5 decibels below the International Civil Aviation Organization's quiet standard. It's still loud, just not brain-rattling loud. And later this fall, Arctic Cat plans to ship its new 4-Stroke snowmobile to dealers. Because a four-stroke engine burns straight unleaded, as opposed to the typical two-stroke's oil-and-gas mix, it's not only less polluting, but sounds more like a Lexus than a chainsaw. "From 50 yards away, you can't even hear the thing," claims company spokesman Jay Lusignan. Meanwhile, Polaris Industries plans to test its first four-stroke snowmobile at Yellowstone rental shops this winter, where powersleds are still legal thanks to the Bush administration's decision to scuttle a proposed snowmobile ban in the park. Although none of these engines is silent, everybody should still be pleased, right?

Not exactly.

Outdoor Adventure Image Adventure Tourism Adventure Travel Photography
Quiet salvation? The EC130 in action
"You just can't bring the noise down enough to make a significant impact," says Noise Pollution Clearinghouse director Les Blomberg. His Montpelier, Vermont-based group's studies show that quieter jet skis alone won't solve the problem. (The impact of hushed engines is offset by the rising number of machines on the water, he says, and dampers won't solve what he calls the craft's "mosquito" problem—a tendency to run in circles with their incessant thumping and high-pitched whining.) And over at Yellowstone, eco-activists still aren't sold on the four-stroke sled. "Hallelujah that they've come up with better machines," says Jon Catton, of the conservationist Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "But that absolutely does not address the wildlife issues." Four-strokes will still stress out the buffalo and elk trying to survive the harsh Rocky Mountain winter, he says.

For now, the Grand Canyon remains ground zero in the war for silence. In May 2000, noise-reduction advocates won restrictions that capped the number of tourist flights at 88,000. In June of this year, at the urging of the Las Vegas-based flightseeing industry, Nevada senators Harry Reid and John Ensign introduced a bill that would exempt "quiet technology" operators from those restrictions. And that, of course, sets the Sierra Club's Hingson to worrying that the new birds might open up other areas, like Grand Teton National Park, that are currently off limits to overflights. "The air-tour industry wants to grow," says Hingson, who hopes to block Reid and Ensign's proposal. "And this so-called 'quiet' technology is their great white hope." Gentlemen, start your lobbyists.


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