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As a civic-minded soul and as a greedy participant in various Salida ventures into capitalism, at first I felt annoyed that not one of the 21 official Colorado Scenic Byways passed through here.
For that matter, few of my favorite highway panoramas made the list. Where was Poncha Pass, southbound with the San Luis Valley just beginning to spread out, the Sangres on the east sawing away at the sky, San Juans looming in the haze? Or Promontory Divide, between Westcliffe and Gardner, another southbound delight with the Blanca massif rearing up ahead, Spanish Peaks protecting you from the Great Plains, conquistador trails climbing the Huerfano?
Upon sober reflection, of course, I realized that omission is a blessing, for two reasons.
One is that publicity results in destruction.
Consider the canyonlands of Utah, a favorite haunt of the late Edward Abbey, who wrote eloquently of the stark grandeur of slickrock country. This harsh land had to be protected, he argued, from road builders, dam erectors, uranium miners, grass-crazed ranchers and similar threats.
Now ponder the current state of Moab, Utah, and environs. I haven't been there since 1987, but all reports indicate that Moab, once a backwater, is now the Aspen of fat-tire biking, and that you've got a better chance of finding serenity and solitude on the 16th Street Mall.
Edward Abbey, in his passion to protect the land he loved by writing about it, ultimately did more to destroy it than the combined efforts of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Public Roads, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Utah Cattlemen's Association.
Or in yesterday's Post, a report from Rangely. The local chamber of commerce issued a brochure which listed some ancient Frémont Indian rock art as a local attraction.
Locals had known about the sites for years, so why not share this lore? Because once word got out, the petroglyphs were vandalized.
Whose fault? A BLM archeologist said Rangely was to
blame for publishing a brochure that highlighted these
things so that even more people knew where to find
them.
But publicity could help, according to Pat Wales of the
Colorado Archeological Society, because public awareness
leads to protection.
She seems certain that her
enlightened fellow urbanites would never commit such
outrages, and so it must be local rubes who trash the
site.
If I understand this logic correctly, then the more that sophisticated urbanites visit a site, the less likely that the local yokels, too dense to appreciate it, will trash it.
Such thinking appears elsewhere. Not long ago, I ran
across a book called Waterfalls of Colorado.
The
author and photographer apologized for their explicit
directions, but The political reality, however, is ...
Money talks. Where is the money? In the cities. The only
way Colorado's precious natural lands ... will be preserved
is if people in the places where the money is care enough
to pay to preserve them. Our fervent hope is that if more
people know about these hideaways, more people will care
about, and protect, them.
Which apparently means that there's no role for those of us who don't live in moneyed cities -- as nearly as I can tell, we must be the threat that the waterfalls need to be protected from.
That's insulting -- the implication is that this
countryside is much too good for you hicks
-- and that
leads to the second reason I'm glad that no Scenic Byways
wend through Salida.
I watched the KUSA byway special last week and heard much commentary about an empty countryside. The implication is that Colorado contains all manner of pristine unpopulated landscape, ready to be occupied.
The land is in fact inhabited, but if you make the inhabitants invisible, then urban invaders will not suffer from pangs of conscience as they drive out the ranchers, loggers, miners, trailer trash, bears, weasels, mountain lions, ravens and other uncouth riff-raff who might annoy the new pioneers as they sip mineral water on the redwood decks of their trophy homes.
You also have to wonder at phrases like pristine Wet
Mountain Valley
with the undeveloped, unspoiled feel
that pervades the landscape.
That valley offers the residues of more than a century of heavy industry -- mining, starting with a silver rush in 1874 when Silver Cliff was a contender for being the largest city in Colorado. A collateral was intensive logging for pit-props and smelter charcoal.
All those ranches in this undeveloped
landscape?
Hayfields, fences, irrigation ditches, barns and corrals do
not sprout by themselves -- they're human developments, and
on a continental scale. The beef industry in the American
West may be the largest landscaping enterprise in the
history of the world.
Maybe I can persuade the authorities to list our roads as non-scenic routes leading past toxic Superfund sites and hideous vistas marred by power lines, road cuts, mine dumps, slash heaps, manure piles and the like.
On second thought, what it would take to be left off the maps and guidebooks altogether?
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