Re: Wildsight not interested in what is fair…

March 18, 2010 at 10:13 pm #18223
young_local
Participant

"A place for quiet recreation set aside forever"

Quiet recreation? Glacier National Park has just under 2 MILLION visitors annually. How is that a QUIET place for recreation? Come on, you know that if a park in our part of the Flathead is approved then it opens the door to major developement in that area. Take a look at photos of glacier BEFORE the park, and tell me that it doesn’t look better as a natural, beautiful place without a massive amount of visitors each year. So what I want from Wildsight, is for them to guarantee that by fighting for a park in the proposed part of the flathead, there WILL NOT be the development of paved roads, rest stops every 2 km, sight-seeing buildings built at the most beautiful viewpoints around, permanent bathroom facilities, etc, etc, etc…. If you can guarantee this, then you would have MUCH more of the local support.

Ryland- what is better for the wildlife of the Flathead:
a) the outfitters that have been successfully managing the land for a hundred years.
b) permanent structures built along the way and connected to glacier/waterton, exposing it to over a million visitors each year. (and obviously having effects on the wildlife) On my "trip to the sun" last year, I only saw two mountain goats- they were licking the salt off of my tires. WOW! natural, beautiful… no- it was actually quite upsetting.. if that development hadn’t been there, we could have drove up an old dirt road, and hiked the rest of the way- to see the goats in their natural habitat.

I know you enjoy skiing early season pow in Harvey Pass, so let me ask you this.. if the park was proposed to cover that area, you’d be pretty upset right? Knowing that most likely you’ll never be able to ski those big lines again, and that if there is skiing allowed, you’d have to share it with a hundred times more tourists than the odd Albertan that you see now.
So now take that situation, and think about you skiing those early season lines as a career, and every line you ski puts a meal on the table for your wife and children. But wait, now there’s a park there, and you can’t ski it. No food on the table, so you might have to move out of Fernie and go somewhere to find a job to support your family.

Sounds pretty bad, hey? Now make that a reality for the guides/outfitters that work in the part of the proposed park area.