Letter to the editor

Dear HCN, I am quite upset about the selective quotes from me in the article about program cuts at the University of Washington by Kathie Durbin (HCN, 11/13/95). The manner in which my remarks were used makes it appear that the faculty and staff of the Center for Streamside Studies blame Weyerhaeuser Company for the […]

Dear HCN, Your Oct. 2 article about the jet noise in a Colorado wilderness made me realize that I might be able to help after fighting the jet noise from San Francisco Airport for 25 years. First, start by learning everything about the way the Federal Aviation Administration handles takeoffs and landings in every type […]

Dear HCN, Ganados del Valle is not an organization which “attacks reputations’ and smears them in our valley’s “red brown mud” (HCN, 10/16/95). Over the past five years we have had several opportunities to tell the story of the history of the lawsuit brought by the attorney general of New Mexico against the Sierra Club […]

Dear HCN, I was disappointed and extremely saddened after reading “In the heart of the New West, the sheep win one” (HCN, 10/16/95). Disappointed that with so many other environmental problems facing this country, the Sierra Club Foundation has chosen to pick on a small rural cooperative to the tune of $2.5 million. It seems […]

Dear HCN, I was delighted that Jon Christensen did an article on Elko County, Nev. (HCN, 10/30/95). I just wish he had done so while I was still living there. I worked as an engineer for one of the gold-mining companies in the area until I decided to leave after being informed that my political […]

Dear HCN, I noticed in a recent article by Elizabeth Manning that the residents of Catron County, N.M., support Dick Manning and his anti-government proclamations (HCN, 10/30/95). As a resident of Catron County I can assure you that is not true. At least half, if not more, of the residents think he is a loud-mouth […]

Dear HCN, Hooray for Tom Casey who wants to preserve the nuclear power plant structures west of Olympia, Wash., according to HCN’s Heard Around the West column Oct. 16. They are an honest representation of our cultural heritage, and, like charming 1800s brick buildings, their presence on the landscape tells us, over time, just where […]

Dear HCN, Regarding the anonymous letter, “Where Credit is Due” (HCN, 10/2/95), I’d like to clarify the litigative history that led to the “saving” of Mono Lake. As the letter correctly noted, the first limitation of water diversions from the Mono Basin was the product of lawsuits filed in 1984 by California Trout. The Mono […]

Dear HCN, I was very pleased to see the article about the efforts of Skip Edwards in the Westwater Wilderness area (HCN, 10/16/95). Our ranch, the Mountain Island Ranch, is the only BLM grazing permittee on the east shore of the Colorado River through the Westwater Canyon. Skip and I have had our differences of […]

Dear HCN, Ray Ring’s otherwise excellent article about whirling disease and trout in torment (HCN, 9/18/95) missed a critical part of the fisheries picture in the arid West: livestock. One of the key reasons why the Idaho Watersheds Project and eight regional environmental groups filed a listing petition for the desert redband trout with the […]

Dear HCN, High Country News took a cheap shot to deliver a hot opening line in your article about troubles in the Endangered Species Coalition (HCN, 10/16/95). You would get the idea that the National Audubon Society just woke up one day and fired the coalition staff out of pique. Not true. We were forced […]

Dear HCN, As Colorado State Professor John Loomis shows, contingent valuation can be a useful tool to demonstrate how much we value “goods’ like clean air or dam-free rivers (HCN, 9/18/95). Since the valuation we ordinarily look to is that established by parties in mutually beneficial transactions, goods that are not bought and sold may […]

Dear HCN, Two freshmen Republican members of Don Young’s House Resource Committee from Arizona are working day and night to extend that committee’s endangered species listing moratorium (HCN, 7/24/95). If these men had their way, they would be publishing menus for cooking the endangered Mount Graham red squirrel. Arizona congressmen John Shadegg and J.D. Hayworth […]

Dear HCN, I lived and worked in and near Zion Canyon for 12 years, and during that time the two old pioneer towns at the mouth of the canyon experienced rapidly rising population pressures, both from visitors and new residents. Most of the work available in the canyon entailed contact with a portion of the […]

Dear HCN, I was starting to get bored reading another superficial diatribe – Stephen Lyons’ “Have a Kokopelli Day” (HCN, 9/18/95) – against the new colonizers of the West and indigenous imagery. I perked up, however, at the reference to the picture in the Patagonia catalog of Norbu with his donkeys “laden to the hilt, […]

Dear HCN, I’d like to respond to William Corcoran’s attack on guidebook critics like myself (HCN, 10/2/95). Mr. Corcoran says I should spend more of my energy on Planned Parenthood “instead of preaching perfection to an imperfect world” and in part he’s right. The fact is, there are just too damn many people out there. […]

Dear HCN, The article on competing water usages for Sierra Vista, Fort Huachuca, and the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area opens the door for more general consideration of the dramatic geologic and ecologic changes that have affected the San Pedro River over the past century (HCN, 6/12/95). The paired “before” and “after” pictures (pages […]

Dear HCN, Your essay “How to get rural people to stand proud and tall” perpetuates the myth that the Mono Lake Committee “saved” Mono Lake (HCN, 9/4/95). The record clearly shows that the increased flows into Mono Lake of the past several years – thanks to decreased diversions out of the Mono Basin by the […]

Dear HCN, Thank you for your insightful issue on the ethics of revealing sensitive wilderness locations (HCN, 9/4/95). I have a favorite place in the wilderness: a high mountain lake, right up at the Continental Divide, always half-frozen. The water sparkles there like a million diamonds. The silence is broken only by the sound of […]

Dear HCN, “Fiddling while Rome burns’ should have been the subtitle of Christopher Smith’s stories concerning guidebooks and wilderness usage (HCN, 9/4/95). It’s sad to see wilderness advocates decrying people visiting the Colorado Plateau while the Utah congressional delegation legislates Utah wilderness out of existence. Hiking in the Swell with Steve Allen persuaded me to […]