The most overpowering sense of Yellowstone midweek in February in 1988 was its silence.

I hitched a ride with an outfitter in a snowcoach to write a story about the winterkeeper at Canyon Village, Steve Fuller. Fuller had and has the wonderful job of shoveling the snow off the roofs of the development in the middle of the park, a job he’s had since 1971.

That was the first year snowmobiles were allowed in the park and only four years after Yellowstone had began opening in the winter. Fuller, who had been a teacher in Uganda and is a brilliant photographer, thrived in the isolation.

“I feel so intellectual in the winter,” he told me. “I have time enough to think.”

Fuller showed me the Yellowstone few got to see. We skied into geyser basins only a few humans visited in the summer. The juxtaposition of hot steam and ice and the frost shattered the sunlight into silver slivers across the white landscape.

This was Yellowstone before the 1988 fires so it looked dramatically different than it does today. Yet even then it had heavy snowmobile use on weekends and especially on the President’s Day holiday.

But for most of the week in the below zero cold and windless landscape the park was silent in a way I have rarely experienced. Not only were their no people and machines but no birds, no rustling leaves, no animals, no rushing rivers.

Fuller’s photos, which can be seen today all over Yellowstone, captured winter in the park like no other. In his isolation he found a singular intimate view no one else can copy. His work is appreciated most in Europe.

Fuller ferried me out on snowmobile and I snowmobiled a lot in Wisconsin when I lived there. The quiet in Yellowstone was far different than the constant din of snowmobiles in the background while ice fishing on lakes in Wisconsin.

I returned regularly throughout the 1990s. Each time I encountered more and more snowmobiles deeper into the park even midweek.

By 1995 the din I knew in Wisconsin had come to Yellowstone. It started late morning and lasted most of the day from around Fuller’s isolated house near Canyon.

My winter trips to Yellowstone since have been limited to Mammoth, Old Faithful and Cooke City areas. The sound of howling wolves, absent until 1995, acted like an alarm one winter morning at Mammoth.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan struck down the National Park Service’s latest plan Monday to increase snowmobile use from the current daily average of 260 to 540 machines. Sullivan, in Washington D.C directed that the National Park Service to come up with a plan that requires stronger protection of Yellowstone’s air quality, wildlife, and natural sounds.

This is just the last in a long battle between snowmobilers and environmentalists over the future of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park and the place that is seen as a model for preservation and visitor services. It is same clash of values I cover all the time but it tends to be on a world stage because of Yellowstone’s status.

There are science issues here, wildlife, air quality and the like, all of which Sullivan ruled the Park Service did not follow. But it comes down to politics.

When Bush was elected, snowmobilers were among the winners and the Bush administration has done all it can to meet their desires despite negative court rulings. Environmentalists will demand if Barack Obama is elected that snowmobiles be phased out of the park.

If environmentalists and the Park Service were serious about promoting an environmentally friendly transportation system in the winter they would be promoting one in the summer, namely some sort of mass transit that would dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions. That's more than either are ready to do yet.

From a legal standpoint there is a level of snowmobiles that can be driven in the park without polluting the air, causing undue disturbance to wildlife and even preserving the silence I so cherished and enjoyed in the 1980s.

But that would take a real compromise, negotiated among the parties with the Park Service protecting its own legal balance between preservation and visitor service. I don’t know if that’s possible.

Walk into the two camps, environmentalist and snowmobiler and suggest such a compromise and what do you get?

Silence.