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Show : THE ZEPHYR/ AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2003 Looe The Readers from Living Rivers, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Utah Environmental Congress, and many others. With all these organizations signing on, Jacques sent a formal letter to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names in January of this year, they responded telling Jacques that she should proceed with the name change effort. And now the renaming endeavor is being seriously considered by the U.S. Board of Geographical Names. The name finally chosen to replace "Lake Powell” is "Glen Canyon Reservoir.’ The name change will have a huge impact on public perception of the reservoir as a manmade creation and of the dam as a temporary obstruction of nature, the river, and the canyon. And we strongly recommend that you start using that name in every day conversation. It’s easy and fun, and will help people to understand. And it can make a difference---that’s how Denali’s name shifted from McKinley. Broad public support is the literally the last barrier impeding the realization of Respond COW POOP VERSUS DOG POOP Hi, Jim! Nancy This latest issue is really great. I haven’t finished it yet, but really appreciate your addressing that particular topic, and I particularly enjoyed your “Take It or Leave It” column. I feel as you do, that there are two sides to the cow issue. One thing that bothers me is that a lot of the environmentalists who complain about stepping in cow pies while hiking often take several dogs with them on the trails, and I prefer cow poop to dog poop on my shoes any day of the There is a great novel:by Richard Wheeler about the ranchers vs. the environmentalists vs. thoughtfully written. Maybe you've read it, or time for fiction--anyway, | recommend Keep up the good work! week! called The Buffalo Common which is the government. It is beautifully and maybe you don’t have all that much and Katie’s excellent idea. Quoting Policy VII again, "well-established geographic names should not be changed unless there is strong public support for the change.” Please start by using the new name and also by writing the U.S. Board of Geographical Names. Bill Bernat Glen Canyon Institute Flagstaff, Arizona it. MORE GREAT Hello, Jim. STORIES FROM CHUCK How surprising to see my email re the B-17 in the latest Zephyr. I noted a typo Karla Hancock Moab not noticed in the email. The bombsight was by Norden, not Nordern, sorry. The Cow WHAT'S IN A NAME? I think it was Shakespeare who said, "A man-made Lake by any other name would still smell as foul." Then again, it sounds like something that might come from our friend Katie Lee, who, along with Glen Canyon Institute (GCI) member Nancy Jacques, planted the seeds for what has blossomed into an active and vital effort to take the "Lake" out of reservoir Powell. A few years ago, Lee and Jacques were shooting the breeze and wound up talking about how the heck to rename every single "lake'-titled reservoir in the country to reflect its starkly unnatural origin. Idle chatter? Hardly. The idea might sound radical to some, but to this pair it sounded perfectly reasonable to correct such abominable inaccuracy. So Jacques went to work. A friend of hers in the USGS told her how anyone could petition for a name change. She worked on Powell, petitioned through the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to call it a reservoir, got some support for it (River Network and some others carried her message) and then kind of forgot about it, until she stumbled onto a fact that would change everything. Nancy and Dave Wegner, (GCI’s Science Director), had a contract to inventory the rivers and streams managed by BLM in Colorado that still contain native cutthroat. While perusing maps of the watershed, Jacques noticed a body of water named "Lake Powell." Not the one that Glen Canyon lies beneath, but another one. An actual natural lake that was named Lake Powell long before Glen Canyon Dam was ever conceived. The real Lake Powell is in the same watershed as reservoir Powell. And the U.S. Board on Geographic Names rules do not allow two geographic features in a single watershed with the same name. The board has a policy that reads, "The Board encourages efforts by state and local governments and local citizens to change or modify one or more duplicate names where ambiguity is likely to occur." As a board member of the Friends of the Animas River, Nancy got their support to create the "Coalition to Rename Lake Powell" and the Glen Canyon Institute signed on shortly afterward. Jacques reached out to the community and garnered support Canyon ad ad was a brought to wrote the column on page 14 (Entitled "Jim, contemplating the busts of Homer (Warren),” the parody of rembrandt’s "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.") mind a column in the Scientific American years ago by Martin Gardner who "Mathematical Games” section monthly for about 25 years. Although the was largely about math and its various permutations, it would depart occasionally from that subject. Gardner was a superb writer and | read his column with great interest each month. On the remembered occasion the column was largely about palindromes. Now it seems that not long before it was written, perhaps a few months, Rembrandt’s noted painting, "Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer,” had been auctioned off for the record price--I believe it was the first exceeding $1 million. Gardner reported that a newspaper in L.A. had printed a photograph of Aristotle Onassis in front of a house for sale in Hollywood. Onassis, a super-rich oil-tanker tycoon, lover to famed soprano Maria Callas and later husband to Jacqueline Kennedy, was standing in front of Buster Keaton’s home. The photograph’s caption: "Aristotle contemplating the home of Buster." I’m sure that you, living in and near some of the most spectacular, readily visible examples of geological formations, must be interested in the subject of geology and I wonder if you may have read John McPhee’s wonderful book, Annals of the Former World. To take a further moment of your time and in case you may not be familiar with the work, it was originally published as four long, three-part articles in the New Yorker over several years, each later published as a rather small book. These were combined in the book named a couple of years ago to receive a Pulitzer prize and kudos in the New Scientist, the New York Times and the Scientific American. The work was revised slightly to bring it up to latest date info and an essay was added about the middle of the U.S., the geology of which is little known due to the general lack of visible formations. Red River Canoe Co. Moab Area's Canoe Specialists H New for 2003 Raft Trips GROVER ; _CANOES SGbHEoaoIe redrivercanoe.com 435.259.7722 @ Ant[yr — canoe company l.c. » = Guided Trips * Paddling Instruction Daily & Multi-day Trips 1371 North Highway 191 Moab UT 84532 SS Ct Oe BLUFF, UTAH eee ot Red River Adventures RAFTS redriveradventures.com | --V Nb do), yal a eh ae 435.672.2208 877.259.4046 PAGE30 435.259.4046 |