This article by Jimmy Tobias first appeared in the High Country News on March 16, 2020
Last September, Jim Stanford climbed onto a big flat raft, shoved off from shore, and paddled into the swift current of the Snake River in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. It was one of those early Western mornings when winter lets you know that it will soon arrive. Squat clouds sat in the sky. A crisp frost clung to the foliage. And six tourists shivered in their seats beside Stanford as his boat picked up speed.
The visitors had traveled across the country for this two-hour voyage into the heart of the park. Stanford, a grizzled 49-year-old river guide, was determined to dazzle them with the land’s magic. As the boat turned a bend, a bull elk materialized out of the morning mist, its body slumped, its face submerged, its massive rack jutting above the current like the splintered mast of some sunken ship. It was dead.
Stanford’s clients clamored to the boat’s edge and pulled out their smartphones to snap photos of the scene before the river ushered them downstream. And from there, it was but a few more moments before one of the visitors had progressed from taking pictures to scrolling through his screen, struggling in vain with the park’s very spotty service. There were zero, one, two bars of coverage at best — not enough to send a text or upload a photo. The tourists had little choice but to experience the park in analog fashion.
An hour later, the float trip ended and Stanford’s boat came to a stop near Grand Teton headquarters. The visitor who had been fiddling with his smartphone during the voyage now took the opportunity to share his thoughts about cell coverage at Grand Teton. “Service at this place sucks,” he said. And then he explained his circumstances. “Even on vacation they expect you to be accessible at all times,” the man lamented, speaking of his IT industry employer. “Some people expect the electronic handcuffs on you at all times.”
As it turns out, the National Park Service is paying close attention to such sentiments. In fact, it is presently pursuing a massive expansion of cellular and broadband facilities at Grand Teton National Park. Working in tandem with major telecom companies like AT&T and its agents, the agency is planning to permit the installation of more than 60 miles of fiber-optic cable, as well as at least nine new cell tower sites scattered throughout the park. The plan, which is awaiting a final permit, would blanket much of Grand Teton with new and stronger coverage. It is shaping up to be the largest single expansion of telecommunications infrastructure in national park history.
Some see these proposed cell towers and the better coverage they promise as a positive development that will assist search-and-rescue missions and improve access for an American public increasingly reliant on digital technologies. But others view the proposal as a serious threat. Stanford, the river guide, is among them. He relishes the remote corners of Grand Teton where his cellphone signal fades. He likes living close to “wild land” where Facebook, Twitter and Instagram hold little sway. There’s something comforting, he says, about places that haven’t been absorbed into the ever-expanding coverage maps of Verizon, AT&T and the other telecom conglomerates that control this country’s wireless waves.
“We need to unplug, and we need places we can unplug, and if not here, where?” says Stanford, who also serves as a councilman in the nearby city of Jackson.
There aren’t many places people can go these days to escape completely from the ubiquitous influence of social media, smartphones, Big Tech and telecom companies. The blank spots on the coverage maps are constantly shrinking, though not equally, and not everywhere. In many cases, the expansion of broadband coverage is necessary; telecom providers too often underserve rural areas, tribal nations and Black and Latino communities, for instance. Their exclusion from reliable coverage has a negative impact on everything from local economies to public health.
“We need to unplug, and we need places we can unplug, and if not here, where?”
The United States is struggling to remedy these inequities. At the same time, there are also spaces — national parks, wilderness areas and other public lands — that some believe should remain refuges from the digital world. Such places provide a final opportunity to preserve small pockets of smartphone-free open space in the United States — landscapes where you can still escape the electronic handcuffs. But they are beginning to disappear.
The telecom giants — AT&T, Verizon and more — are pushing to build out infrastructure on protected public lands across the country. These corporations hope to extend their reach into some of the most iconic and remote corners of the United States. And they have found a close collaborator in the federal government, which is working alongside industry operatives to open many national parks and other public lands to commercial wireless service. With a sprawling network of cell towers soon to be installed within its boundaries, Grand Teton National Park is a testing ground.
In 1996, America’s media landscape experienced a seismic transformation. That year, President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law, putting an end to the New Deal-era legal regime that governed the country’s radio, TV and telephone providers. An enormous piece of legislation heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists, the new law helped spur industry consolidation and officially opened federal lands to cellphone towers and similar projects. It actively encouraged the expansion of telecom infrastructure on public lands, requiring agencies like the National Park Service to consider applications from corporations that want to install wireless facilities on the federal domain. It was the beginning of an industry bonanza. Yet there were always meant to be some limitations.
In a report published in 1995 by the House Commerce Committee, which played a central role in crafting the Telecommunications Act, Congress recognized that some federal lands, like parks and wild areas, should be off-limits to wireless infrastructure. The “use of the Washington Monument, Yellowstone National Park, or a pristine wildlife sanctuary, while perhaps prime sites for an antenna and other facilities, are not appropriate and use of them would be contrary to environmental, conservation and public safety laws,” the committee wrote.
Don Barger, who led the National Parks Conservation Association’s Southeast office for many years, relied on such arguments when he led a brief campaign to block the construction of cell towers in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the mid-’90s.
“There was a proposal for three towers along the only road that runs through the middle of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” Barger told me recently. “ I… contacted my representatives and senators… two of them sent a letter to the Interior Secretary, basically saying: ‘This is the stupidest idea we have ever heard.’ ”
Eventually, Barger prevailed: The proposal was withdrawn.
Skiers out for an afternoon ski near Grand Teton National Park’s Taggart Lake Trailhead in Wyoming. Parked cars stretch a half-mile down Teton Park Road from the trailhead parking lot, which gives visitors direct access to groomed cross-country ski trails along the park’s interior road and easy access into the backcountry.
But political, economic and social circumstances are very different these days. In recent decades, the U.S. has witnessed the rise and consolidation of enormous media conglomerates like AT&T, Verizon and, just last year, a proposed $26 billion merger between Sprint and T-Mobile. At the same time, smartphones and social media companies have revolutionized digital communications and created insatiable consumer demand for high-speed wireless coverage. Mobile data traffic has been on a rocket-fueled ascent. We increasingly depend on Big Tech and the telecom companies, using their devices and data for banking, shopping, navigation, transportation, work, socializing, even sex. And so, there is an ongoing bipartisan push to expand broadband coverage into the corners of the nation where politicians and corporations alike perceive a higher demand, including many protected public lands.
The Trump administration, in concert with telecom lobbyists, has made the installation of new cellular and broadband infrastructure a priority. Among other things, President Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission has limited the authority of local governments to stop such development. The administration is also working to “streamline” environmental reviews and speed up the permitting process that lets companies build telecom facilities on federal land. A 2018 Interior Department report stated the government’s objectives explicitly: “By making it easier for private industry to co-locate or build out new broadband infrastructure on public lands, the (Department of the Interior) can play a strong role in increasing connectivity throughout the United States.”
The impact of such policies is already apparent in many national parks. In Yosemite, agency officials have quietly sanctioned six new cell towers in recent years. In Sequoia, Verizon recently received permission to erect a 138-foot cell tower designed to look like a tree. At Mount Rainier, the big telecom providers are pushing for the construction of a wireless antenna atop a popular visitor center. At the Grand Canyon, the Park Service is proposing to permit as many as five new telecommunication towers along the canyon’s rim. And in Yellowstone, proposed infrastructure improvements would “multiply the park’s wireless capacity by 38 times,” according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
But no park better illustrates this trend than Grand Teton, where agency officials want to build a string of cell towers that will run most of the length of the 45-mile-long park. The proposed facilities will be confined to developed areas like Jenny Lake, Colter Bay and Flagg Ranch, but maps of the project show that broadband coverage will spill into significant swaths of the park’s backcountry, including some of the most remote corners of the continental United States. If the plan comes to fruition, Stanford’s clients will no longer have to struggle so hard to send emails or upload Instagram photos during voyages down the Snake River.
Jimmy Tobias is a contributing writer at The Guardian and a contributor at The Nation. Since 2017, his accountability reporting has helped spur federal investigations into three different political appointees at the Interior Department.
This coverage was supported by the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism and by contributors to the High Country News Research Fund.
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