If you like snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park and Jet Skis buzzing off national seashores, you're going to love the weighty document by which the U.S. National Park Service (N.P.S.) may soon be transformed. A first draft of the new N.P.S. management policies was leaked last summer, to a chorus of horrified reactions from park superintendents and U.S. senators on both sides of the aisle. Conservation was no longer deemed the parks' top priority. Now recreation had equal weight—recreation that included motorized fun in all forms—unless superintendents could show it had an "unacceptable impact." The parks' new bible, it turned out, was the handiwork of a cowboy-hatted political crony named Paul Hoffman, an N.P.S. deputy assistant secretary, who had formerly headed the Cody, Wyoming, chamber of commerce, where he championed more snowmobiles in Yellowstone and worked for then congressman Dick Cheney. Hoffman's swagger and close ties to the snowmobile industry may have led wiser heads at the Department of the Interior to sideline him after the uproar over his proposals, and career N.P.S. staffers have done damage control ever since, producing a "Hoffman Lite" draft, then a third version they feel is de-Hoffmanized altogether. But the document now goes up for review. Secretary Gail "wise-use" Norton, at least, is gone. But her designated successor, Dirk Kempthorne, former governor of Idaho, has a discouraging record: he spearheaded the effort to strike down President Clinton's 2001 Roadless Land rule, which protected 58 million acres of roadless federal land.

Throughout, a remarkable group of more than 250 former N.P.S. officials called the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees has led the fight to kill the worst of the new policies. Even more remarkable, in an administration that brands candor as disloyalty and acts accordingly, is the one current superintendent who's speaking out: J. T. Reynolds, of Death Valley National Park, who has nearly 40 years of Park Service experience. He says the Hoffman policies would subvert the 1916 Organic Act, which established the N.P.S. in order to preserve the parks for future generations. "This is the issue," he says, "that many of us are willing to fall on our swords for."