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The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees includes more than 610 members who are former national park directors, regional directors, superintendents, rangers and other career professionals who devoted an average of 30 years each to protecting and interpreting America's national parks on behalf of the public.

In our advocacy for protection of the national park system, we are conscious that within our complex governmental system there are key moments when attention paid to a single decision can produce watershed benefits - for example, reinforcing the public good that accrues from applying, rather than ignoring, scientific findings and from upholding, rather than circumventing, the overarching responsibility of the National Park Service to conserve the parks' irreplaceable resources.

Such a moment is at hand.

We respectfully urge readers to understand the good that will come to the country's national parks, if their two highest-ranking guardians, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and National Park Service Director Mary Bomar, do what they promised the public and the Congress they would do: ensure that the top priority of the National Park Service is to conserve the resources for which the parks were established.

It is time to close a six-year chapter at Yellowstone National Park, in which millions of tax dollars have been spent studying the damage caused by snowmobiles, only to have those scientific findings, the recommendations of the parks' resource experts and the majority of public input ignored and snowmobile use continued at levels harmful to wildlife and disruptive of the park's natural quiet.

In addition to the studies that will be ignored to the detriment of Yellowstone's famous wildlife - and unless Kempthorne and Bomar insist that conservation be given top priority - the park's superintendent, Suzanne Lewis, is poised to allow a doubling of snowmobile use from recent averages, from 250 snowmobiles per day to 540 per day, knowing that this would exacerbate snowmobile noise problems that already are exceeding park standards and interfering with the enjoyment of other visitors.

Indeed, according to the National Park Service's latest study, the current 21 square miles of Yellowstone in which visitors hear the noise of over-snow vehicles for as much as half of the visiting day would expand nearly threefold, to almost 63 square miles, under the proposal that the park's Public Affairs Office is claiming will "better address sound impacts."

Newton B. Drury, director of the National Park Service from 1940 to 1951, captured what is at stake in decisions such as that which is now before Kempthorne and Bomar. Drury said: "If we are going to whittle away at the parks, we should recognize at the very beginning that such whittlings are cumulative, and the end result will be mediocrity."

The public deserves better than mediocrity in Yellowstone. It deserves an end to the disruption and damage caused by snowmobile use.

The National Park Service has verified in four separate studies over the past 10 years that providing public access to the country's oldest national park on increasingly popular snow coaches would provide the best protection to Yellowstone's air quality, quiet and wildlife.

In addition, snow-coach access is half as expensive for visitors as equivalent snowmobile trips and, since 2003, has led to a boom in interpretation. More winter visitors than ever are learning about Yellowstone's wildlife, geothermal features and history as they travel to and from the park's attractions on modern, heated snow coaches.

Kempthorne and Bomar were right to promise to the country that conservation will continue to be the overarching priority of the National Park Service. Now, in Yellowstone, they need to fulfill their promise.

Kempthorne and Bomar need to phase out Yellowstone snowmobiling and replace it with additional modern snow-coach access. They need to cap snowmobile use at the current average of 250 snowmobiles per day. Above this level, repeated studies have made crystal clear, Yellowstone's wildlife would likely be harmed, and the enjoyment of other visitors would be compromised.