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Like millions of our fellow Americans, we cheered when Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne made a widely reported vow last June 19 that on his watch the National Park Service will put conservation first in all decisions.

Today, however, the National Park Service is proposing to allow hundreds of snowmobiles to cruise Yellowstone's roads each day - significantly more, in fact, than the current average - in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence that this would degrade the park's environment.

We decided four years ago that we could provide a valuable public service by keeping our eyes on a National Park System that we know intimately and love dearly. Our purpose has been to speak up constructively and with a focus on facts in support of needed funding, sound resource protection based on science and, above all, for maintaining the highest standards of conservation that have been the keystone of the national parks from their start.

In keeping with this, we'd like to highlight these facts.

What the American public has said repeatedly: Tens of thousands of Americans sent comments to the National Park Service in the latest comment period on winter use in Yellowstone, which ended recently.

Since 1998, well over half a million citizens have given their input on this one national park issue, and more than 80 percent have urged replacing snowmobiling with greater opportunities to access and tour Yellowstone on modern, environmentally friendly snow coaches, which operate like snowmobiles but are built like tour vans. They cost only half as much to ride to Old Faithful as snowmobiles do.

Public comment under the National Environmental Policy Act is not a vote. But it is instructive that so many Americans over so many years have underscored accurately that proposals to continue snowmobile use in Yellowstone are at odds with scientific findings about how to provide the best protection of Yellowstone, and with laws and policies that direct the National Park Service to put conservation first.

Secretary Kempthorne reaffirmed the overarching importance of these policies last year. The policies instruct the National Park Service to "perpetuate the best possible air quality in parks," use the "least impacting" vehicles and transportation systems and protect visitor opportunities to enjoy natural sounds and quiet "to the greatest extent possible."

These are vitally important policies. The current proposal to continue snowmobile use in Yellowstone would violate all of them.

What the science has demonstrated repeatedly: The National Park Service has been instructed to study the snowmobile issue four times since 1998. The total cost to taxpayers from conducting these redundant studies has ballooned to $10 million, at a time when the national parks are desperately short of funding.

Every study has produced the same fundamental conclusion: To make it possible for tens of thousands of visitors to access and enjoy Yellowstone's snowy interior in the middle of winter, while also protecting the park's wildlife, keeping noise to a minimum and keeping exhaust out of Yellowstone's air as much as possible, snowmobiles aren't the answer. Snow coaches are.

Local businesses are buying more snow coaches. Visitors have responded to them favorably. Yet this administration is still pushing snowmobile use at a level three times higher than the park has seen since 2003.

This is the one-year anniversary of Kempthorne's pledge to uphold the conservation-first emphasis of the 2006 National Park Service Management Policies.

The secretary was right to make that pledge, and the country understandably cheered. Americans need to know, a year later, whether it is being honored and implemented.