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Show empty. You see, these bureaucrats identified the National Park Service as "nonessential," essentially saying that perhaps we, as a nation, had better find something else-to do with our time. ; i Consider how well some of our less lonely National wonders have fared. According to World - PRO-TRAILERS S : I like trailers. The first time I ever lived by myself was in a-travel trailer, at the tender age of 17, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I worked for Grand Canyon Airlines. It was my space, I was on my own, and I was really happy there. I lived close to other people and it was OK. Lots of good people live in trailers. My aunt has lived for over 25 years in a trailer--not a manufactured home or a double wide, a 14 x 70 foot honest-to-god trailer, in Mesa, Arizona. It is what she, a single woman on a fixed income, can afford. Not everyone is liquid enough, or pretentious enough, to build or buy a 4000 square foot home, designed like a prison fortress (sorry, flashback to an excursion through Sedona yesterday), that maybe only two people live in. For part of the year. Trailers don’t tear up the land they sit on. They don’t take up acres of space. They don’t require 5 acre parcels (you know, “estate” size homesites). They don’t use mountains of resources to manufacture. You can make them uniquely your own, like the photo I saw once of a trailer in a Patagonia clothing catalog. The metal sides had been hand-painted to resemble logs, like a log cabin. I’ve often longed for an old Airstream so that I could paint it to look like an adobe structure, complete with extended roof vigas and a painted chile ristra next to the front door. Like the article says, it’s a roof over your head, the most important thing, if you have your priorities straight. I think, the more trailers the merrier--maybe the uglier the west gets, the less the self-righteous folks will be motivated to in-migrate here. Make it look like the South, and it might scare people away. It’s a thought. Robyn Slayton-Martin Writing from Flagstaff, where naturally. we still have some trailers, on the wrong side of town, THE MORE WE TRY TO DO THE RIGHT THING... Jim, ; : Reading the Zephyr is almost a replay of the growth crap we've had around here for decades. Those of us who fought growth in the 60’s only succeeded in making it a more desirable place for others to move here. In two visits to the Cedar Mesa/Dark Canyon areas this spring I entered and exited through Hanksville. No use in facing too much "civilization" too soon by going out through Moab. There was a Pronghorn in the Swell and a Bighorn in Hog Canyon. Thanks, Don Glen PARKS IZ PARKS Editor: Many people have already forgotten when the Federal Government did something remarkable in the service of its citizens, something it had never done before: In 1995, it closed down. In that same year Canyonlands National Park recorded a mere 493,000 visitors, earning it a spot in Sunset Magazine's list of "The Loneliest National Parks." The Almanac statistics, the Grand Canyon, a virtual nature mall, records over four David Feela Cortez, Colorado continued on next page... editors defined "lonely" as any. park with fewer than 500,000 tourists. Unfortunately, the editors did not understand that because bureaucrats decided whose suddenly -lights should be shut off after scaling back federal services, all the parks turned Moab area’s canoe specialists oO Pier canoe company l.c. guided trips . canoe school We're floating on fumes! - WW . sales HC 64 Box 3116 Castle Valley, Utah 84532 801-259-7722 800-753-8216 60 N. 100 West For reservations 259.4295 Visa/MC/Disc ATTY 4 Rime and a half million visitors; Yosemite and Glen Canyon check in at about four million; Yellowstone, ~ where the fountain never lets us down, along with Rocky Mountain National Park where figures are fittingly elevated, tally over two million. Compared to these blockbusters, Mesa Verde, the Southwest’s modest tourist attraction which last year counted 648,986 visitors, just barely missed Sunset Magazine’s generous definition of "lonely." Of course, a roundup of these western parks together can’t even approach the East Coast’s Blue Ridge Parkway, which claims over seventeen million recreational visits in a single year. Maybe Sunset Magazine should write a new article, recommending that the relatively sparsely visited public land west of the 100th meridian be opened for homesteading by RVs. : : _ You'd think the Feds, especially if they read magazine articles, could have come up ‘with a better word than "nonessential" to describe those services it felt the nation could do without, If I were a Park Service employee I'd get a little tense, maybe even disgruntled, like U.S. Post Office employees. But then, Post Office work is riddled with the kind of pressure that makes “essential” have a ring of truth, like the cha-chink! of a cash register. Think of the billions of business dollars that could be lost with a Post Office shutdown. In the parks, however, what with a few trees having to go without pruning and a few million trash receptacles waiting to be emptied, what else could come undone? In 2000 over 285 million recreational visits were welcomed in all areas administered by the National Park Service. I hope someone in Washington is counting. It’s as difficult for me to imagine a nation without National Parks as it probably is difficult for residents in Washington D.C. to picture our nation’s Capitol without politicians. If you spend time in one place, somehow that place feels essential. Of course, it’s also hard for me to imagine what is happening to our magnificent parks with 570 million feet tramping along the trails, doing the nonessential things people require in order that their spirits be refreshed. Natural places actually do recharge people with a kind of energy. Science hasn’t yet been able to harness this force, but it’s a combination of wind rustling leaves, the surge of water rushing along the ground in search of one breathtaking ledge or another; it’s the dirt warmed by the sun, birds playing impromptu concerts in the trees. People walk a little deeper into the wilderness, stop, breathe deeply, and sometimes they listen. Energy can be pure and simple. Unfortunately, the resource of our parks is changing, or rather, has been changing for more than the past decade. Dramatic increases in park attendance have not only put pressures on budgets and forced parks to reinvent the word "management," but these numbers have actually prompted the closing of many natural areas where human impact threatens to destroy the very places where people come to worship. At Mesa Verde, for instance, ruins have been temporarily closed or restricted to guided tours in order to preserve their physical integrity. More and more asphalt has been rolled smooth and to many tourists with only a sweet tooth for travel, these roads shine like-strings of licorice. We'd all like to get something from the wilderness before heading home, but what we take often can’t be restored. Surely these parks are essential to us, as essential as churches, as necessary as dreams are to the unconscious once we've fallen asleep and our minds attempt to shut down all the nonessential departments of our lives. As we wake we hardly remember how to continue. Maybe the best thing from the Federal government’s temporary shutdown was that moment of silence that filled our parks, a perfect isolation when even the park employees went home, and the wilderness was left to dream about its own little vacation. "THE BEST RESTAURANT IN SOUTHERN SALT LAKE MAGAZINE UTAH" |