NEWS

HIGH SIERRA MOUNTAIN EXPLORER NORMAN CLYDE DEAD AT AGE 87

Norman Asa Clyde, age 87, noted High Sierra explorer, mountain climber, author and photographer, died Saturday, December 23 at Big Pine Sanatorium. There were no funeral services. Interment was at Tonopah cemetery.

NFS PREPARES TO DISMEMBER GILA WILDERNESS

The Forest Service has proposed to reclassify parts of the Gila Primitive Area and to make minor revisions in the boundary of the existing Gila Wilderness. The new Gila Wilderness as recommended by the service would encompass some 514,678 acres. Conservation groups are dismayed that the Forest Service recommendations would continue the long, sad history of dismembering the Gila Wilderness. As originally established in 1924 the wilderness covered some 750,000 acres, but a series of boundary changes in 1938, 1944 and 1953 substantially reduced the area protected as wilderness. The Forest Service proposal would eliminate another 67,000 acres. Conservationists are asking for retention of most of the 67,000 acres plus the addition of other contiguous, qualifying lands--which would result in a Gila Wilderness of some 614,000 acres. New Mexico Sen. Clinton P. Anderson said at the dedication of the Aldo Leopold Memorial in 1954 that citizens have "an obligation to see that the work of one generation shall not be sacrificed by those that come after."

CALMING DOWN THE RACKET IN GRAND CANYON

The National Park Service announced a new management plan for controlling the impact of the ever-increasing thousands of people taking float trips through the Grand Canyon. The plan calls for limiting visitor-use-days to the 1972 level of 89,000 and reducing that to 55,000 in 1977. The plan would also eliminate the use of motors on the river by 1977, and would include the river in the wilderness by then. The plan would also limit the size of individual trips to 40 persons, and limit the number of people who may depart any day from Lee's Ferry to 200. In 1977 these numbers would be reduced to 30 and 100, respectively. Maximum trip speed is set at 40 miles per hour. Six areas along the river are now closed to camping. Credit for the new restrictions goes largely to pressure by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater and Assistant Interior Secretary Nat Reed.

TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CRIME

In January 1963 the waters of Lake Powell began to rise. Few people ever knew much about the canyon .... all the spectacular canyons will go under. Lake Powell will fill them to their brims .... Powell, before it fills and drops will probably be the most beautiful reservoir in the world, even though the best has gone under. Lake Powell will needlessly waste enough (water) to supply all the arid-land cities of interior America, and it irrigates nothing .... for a replaceable commodity we spent an irreplaceable grandeur ... remember these things lost .... no man, in all the generations to be born of man, will ever be free to discover for himself one of the greatest places of all. This we inherited, and have denied to all others - the place no one knew well enough.


  Eliot Porter
Glen Canyon - The
Place No One Knew
 
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