EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. — As the airboat skimmed across the shallow water, scattering blue dragonflies and launching a heron into the air, Keith Price squinted into the sun and relished the isolation of Florida’s unrivaled river of grass.

Then he cut off the deafening motor, making the silence in the park all the sweeter, turned his one working ear my way, and asked, “Isn’t this beautiful?’’

No answer was required, but the question itself was a kind of lament. Private airboating inside the pristine Everglades National Park, a pastime that stretches back decades, will officially end with Price and others like him. For Price, 62, it is the latest broadside against the unique but dwindling culture among devotees of the park known as Gladesmen, their traditions curbed over time by restrictions on hunting and camping, development booms, and other modern-day intrusions.

“This is the only part of the park where you can ride your own airboat,’’ said Price, who calls himself a “citizen of the Everglades’’ and is the president of the 65-year-old Airboat Association of Florida. “Why wouldn’t I want to pass this on to my kids and grandkids?’’

Beginning this year, federal park officials will restrict airboat use to those who, in 1989, used them regularly in the eastern part of Everglades National Park near Miami. That was the year Congress passed a far-reaching law to protect and expand the park by nearly 109,000 acres, and to help it recover from engineering projects that had left the Everglades starved for water.

In keeping with that mission, the law called for the use of airboats in the national park to be phased out. Regulators say the boats can destroy the saw grass prairies and disturb wildlife with their ear-piercing noise.

Airboat owners who were 16 or older in 1989 will most likely be grandfathered and, for the first time, given a permit, said Justin Unger, the park’s deputy superintendent. But the permits expire when their holder dies, guaranteeing the eventual demise of private airboat use inside the park. Unger said he expected to issue hundreds of such permits, if not more, mostly on an honor system, adding that the park wants to be as generous as possible.

The four commercial airboat concessions that ferry tourists around the park will also be affected. The three that own their land will have to sell it to the federal park, but all four can continue to operate under new park rules, Unger said. The owners are unhappy about having to sell their land and eventually hand over their concessions.

“We are trying to enforce the law in the most evolving, respectful way, while still honoring the heritage that exists in South Florida,’’ Unger said.

In addition, private airboat riding is allowed in several hundred thousand acres of the Everglades that are outside the park’s boundaries, and in stretches of the neighboring Big Cypress National Preserve.

But there is something special about Everglades National Park. Folded inside the country’s largest subtropical wilderness, it is a flat 1.5 million acres of marshland, hardwood hammocks, tangled mangroves, and cypress domes on the tip of Florida. A shallow sheet of water flows slowly south from Lake Okeechobee across the saw grass and into Florida Bay, attracting a multitude of wading birds, snakes, alligators, fish, and frogs.

“There are no other Everglades in the world. They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth; remote, never wholly known,’’ Marjory Stoneman Douglas marveled in her book “The Everglades: River of Grass’’ published in 1947.

Teeming with mosquitoes and tough to penetrate or tame (even the grass will cut your fingers), the swampy Everglades has long been inhospitable to all but the hardiest. Airboats, built to skim atop the calf-deep water with their flat bottoms and back-seat propellers, helped crack open the door.

“You can’t see the Everglades if you can’t get in the Everglades,’’ said Jesse Kennon, owner of Coopertown Airboats, one of the four concessions inside the national park.

When the Everglades protection law passed in 1989, members of the Airboat Association of Florida lobbied so effectively to save their land that they got to keep it and their clubhouse. Of the remaining 200 or so members, most are weekenders who use the club’s ramp, hang out in the clubhouse and regularly host visiting Boy Scouts. They view themselves as stewards of the park, and say they will fight the law as long as commercial airboats, which they argue are much larger and more damaging to the park, are allowed to remain.

Price, who goes by his onetime trucker handle, Sawgrass Cowboy, and who could double as Walter Sobchak, a character from the film “The Big Lebowski,’’ said small, well-driven airboats do not harm the saw grass. And the wildlife adapted to the noise long ago, he said.

“The airboat sound matches my wife’s angry voice,’’ joked Price, who grew up near the park and said he took his first steps here as a baby.

His friend Cecil M. Pierce, 71, who has been airboating for more than three decades, said America has just “too much government,’’ a common grievance among the club’s members. A few minutes later, Price snatched a tiny apple from a pond apple flower on park property. Pierce pointed to the sky and said, “There’s a little drone up there watching you.’’

By afternoon’s end, the airboaters navigated back to the club for a beer, happy to have skirted the hustle and bustle of another day. “Some people like the ocean,’’ Price said. “We like the Everglades.’’