Recent comments

According to this morning's NPS Digest, Sesame Street has Oscar and Elmo and Big Bird helping out.

http://www.nps.gov/applications/digest/headline.cfm?type=Announcements&id=13975

Actually Dave and I considered the Kalispell/Whitefish/ Columbia Falls triangle, even looking at a house in Somers last July. Our retirement home is on the North Fork Road, our little spot of heaven. Getting the home as a foreclosure was the icing on the cake. We ended up with so much more bang for our buck, having enough left in our budget for some upgrades and remodeling. We are headed up to the house in *10 weeks, after my beloved finishes a round of radiation treatment. No better spot for us to relax and chill!

I would like to thank Traveler and op-ed author Barbara Moritsch for a thought provoking article. Ms. Moritsch is quite informed on Yosemite issues and, for that matter, ecological issues in general. The controversy surrounding the current Yosemite Planning effort is again very contentious, I have attended several of the public meetings soliciting input and have both met and received emails from the individuals or organizations identified in Barbara's post. As is true in so many of the debates happening politically in the country, polarization is the rule of the day, with some parties on both sides stating they are right about one issue or another, brooking no compromise. From my own perspective, the groups identified by Ms. Moritsch are particularly strident and represent, for better or worse, a no rules, privatization agenda that I do not agree with. In any case, thank you Barbara Moritsch for presenting an intelligent and informed view on the current planning effort in Yosemite National Park. I agree that the draft plan is fairly status quo, was in draft form and the final decisions will not be known until the EIS is released later this summer.

Thanks YPW. I had heard on the radio somewhere that swimming was legal but discouraged (obviously). Either way, it just seems like common sense was seriously lacking. Unfortunately, this lapse in judgement ended tragically.

This is such an interesting question. Since prior to the signing of the Wilderness Act, there have been deep and abiding questions about the philosophical and logical underpinnings of the idea of wilderness. What is it? The best I can deduce, wilderness is a romantic, 19th and early 20th century concept that is rooted in the depopulation of what is now the United States of American Indian peoples, who did not generally have any western concept of wilderness (at least in the "dangerous to humans" sense). How could you be afraid of your mother or your brothers? How could they be dangerous to you, if you knew their characters?

So, wilderness, if it is a viniette of primitive America (Leopold 196X), does that include tribes? Shouldn't they have priviledged access to National Parks and Park lands, especially if they are practicing traditional hunting and gathering? If they are part of "primitive America", does that mean they are primitive? Isn't that fundamentally racist? I think that ultimately the Wilderness Act will need to be re-written to place it on a foundation that is less racist and more informed by human-driven changes and their origins. We are changing the entire world, and the faster we face the facts that the socially-defined wilderness' are changing, too, the faster we can widen the scope of protection to help all of us continue to live on our planet. It's not just about oyster farms in "wilderness", it's about how poorly the National Park Service has performed in changing American behavior to protect our collective environment inside and outside of National Parks.

Is it really the best thing for the environment for hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners and Easterners to trek to Yellowstone every year by car, plane, and train? Aren't they supporting the very oil industry Ms Moritsch is sounding the alarm about?

I wonder if they will send a charge to the gentleman's insurance company for destruction of natural resources?

I've wanted to visit ever since Nevada Barr based one of her stories there.

Well, for starters, here is a link to Market Watch, a Wall Street Journal publication that lists ten of them.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-us-companies-paying-no-taxes-2013-03-26

And I guess I'll have to give you one. When you say our schools produce millions of illiterate low/no information voters every year, you must be right. Otherwise where would all those Republicans come from?

Again, try reading to become something other than one of those low information folks you talk about. Hedrick Smith's book is a good place to start.

And I must apologize. Dear Traveler readers, please accept my most sincere apologies for allowing myself to get sucked into yet more foolish, endless interchanges with our friend, ec.

Now, I think I'll go hike in the mountains and enjoy a delightful day.

Let's see 100 - 47 = 53% so, yes, most of us pay income taxes. And among those who don't are some of our biggest corporations and those with enough political clout to write tax codes that exempt large parts of their incomes.

You used that awful word taxes in your recent post, and thus proved my point.

And is it our public schools that set our national budgets or is it 540 something Congresscritters who have been purchased by big money? Besides, without condoms, there might be a lot more of those awful 47 percenters. But we digress here.

May I suggest a great book for you to read? Who Stole the American Dream by Hedrick Smith. Y'might learn something.

We're happy to report that we've managed to track down the Wildes, and they soon should have their Passport back. Thanks to the alert reader who found the Passport and let us know they had it.

Thank you for the reminder. We've traveled the trace a couple of times and will be back in Mississippi this summer. We'll travel it again. It's wonderful.

Thanks for this! I was debating on whether to do the Trace or head further south on my trip out west. You have convinced me to give it a try.