The Foothill Conservancy is chartering a bus to East Bay Municipal Utilities District’s (EBMUD) Oakland offices on October 13, 2009. EBMUD will be voting on whether or not to expand Pardee Reservoir, on Tuesday at 1:15 pm. The reservoir would be enlarged by more than 1,200 acres, destroying miles of the Mokelumne River and inundating the historic Middle Bar Bridge.

If you watched Ken Burns’ “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” you’ll remember what an ordeal it was to create Grand Teton National Park. The original Grand Teton National Park, set aside by an act of Congress in 1929, included only the Teton Range and six glacial lakes at the base of the mountains. It took nearly 20 years, many ‘heated’ debates, and one of the country’s wealthiest men to purchase and preserve land in order to create what is now the Grand Teton National Park.

In 1919 the Yellowstone Park Superintendent was practically run out of town when he traveled to Jackson, WY, to promote the park’s enlargement vision. Ranchers worried that park extension would reduce grazing allotments; Forest Service employees feared the loss of jurisdiction on previously managed forest areas; and local dude ranchers were against improved roads and hotel construction. Proposals emerged to dam outlets of Jenny Lake and Emma Matilda and Two Ocean Lakes in 1919. Many in the local community did not support the idea of national park expansion, “because they wanted traditional hunting, grazing, and dude-ranching activities to continue.”

Tweet This Post

Written by Tracy

Writer, Photographer, former Waterblogged Editor

No Comments »

Of course I’ve been watching Ken Burns’ “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”  (Haven’t you?) Living at the gates of Yosemite National Park and owner of a National Parks Pass nearly every year of my adult life, I feel it almost sacrilegious to miss this television event.

It is somehow fitting that my first transcendental wilderness experiences occurred at our country’s first national park – Yellowstone. Between my junior and senior years at college, a friend and I headed west for a two-month long road trip that took us to Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Badlands National Parks, as well as such unforgettable places as Devil’s Tower National Monument, the Oregon and California coastlines, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Mojave Desert.

I grew up in a small Ohio industrial town, where our rivers and streams were murky chocolate brown-red-gray in color, and nobody I knew dared eat the catfish caught there. We were discouraged from swimming in our streams. The Cuyahoga River, not far from my hometown, caught on fire in the summer of 1969. Clearly I grew up with a distorted concept of wilderness. At night, our town was typically shrouded under an eerie pinkish-orange glow, whether from the steel mills or shopping mall parking lots, I don’t know.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tweet This Post

Written by Tracy

Writer, Photographer, former Waterblogged Editor

No Comments »