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Federal money doesn't flow as freely as it used to, and the agencies that manage public lands are starting to feel the pinch. The U.S. Forest Service has responded by setting entrance fees in some popular areas -- that is, charging us to walk on our own land.
But this may not be enough to do everything the Forest Service needs to do, given that its other revenue stream -- timber sales and grazing leases -- runs rather sporadically, depending on lumber demand, beef prices and lawsuits from environmentalists.
So where might the Forest Service turn for additional revenue?
Let us elevate ourselves, for the moment, from the deep morass of federal public-lands policy. We will instead ponder the supernal elevations of Mt. Elbert, at 14,433 feet the highest point in Colorado, and indeed the supreme summit in all 3,000 miles of the Rocky Mountains.
Elbert is not the only peak on its massif. On the south side, a saddle dips about 500 feet, then rises to a 14,134-foot eminence a mile from the supreme summit.
This secondary summit shows up in many mountaineering
guidebooks as South Elbert,
along with a discussion
as to whether it can be deemed a separate peak.
But South Elbert
is not its official name. This
summit -- if it rose in any state except Colorado, Alaska,
or California, it would be the highest point in the state
-- has never been formally named.
Residents of nearby Leadville discovered this nominal
deficiency one morning this winter when they read of a
petition to the U.S. Board of Geographic Names. The request
came from Thomas Jefferson's alma mater in Virginia, and it
asked the Board to name the peak Mt. William and
Mary.
The force behind the college's petition was a professor
of kinesiology there, Dr. Kenneth Kambis. He climbed the
last summer, and observed that nearby Sawatch Range summits
bore academic titles: Harvard, Oxford, Columbia, Yale,
Princeton. So why not William and Mary
for the
mountain formerly but unofficially known as South
Elbert?
The Board of Geographic Names will consider the request later this year, and local officials will be consulted before any decision is made.
Let us begin our return to the Forest Service's financial problems. Other public agencies suffer from tight budgets, too -- among them big cities which build arenas for sports teams. They've discovered a way to recover some of their costs: naming rights.
A big company will shell out big bucks to put its name on something prominent. That's why Candlestick Park in San Francisco is now 3Com Park, and why the Superbowl was in Qualcomm Stadium. Denver officials believe the naming rights for a new football stadium could bring $20 million.
By now, the solution to the Forest Service's financial problems should be obvious -- sell some naming rights. Colorado alone has hundreds of prominences which either lack official names, like South Elbert and North Eolus, or else carry duplicate names -- more than a dozen Sheep, Quartz and Bald Mountains. Any detailed gazeteer of the other mountain states will produce similar results.
What corporate marketing director could resist the opportunity to place the company name, not on a mere human artifact like a stadium, but on a majestic natural summit?
One possible complication is that the marketers, charged with keeping the company's name before the public, would generally insist on prominent peaks, and most of them are already named.
Although there are many mountains, there aren't that many South Elberts left. It's hard to believe that anybody would spend more than chump change on a Mt. Toyota, Chevrolet Point or a Trump Peak if it sat amid many other summits and wasn't visible past the next valley.
But why restrict this to the unnamed peaks? Even prominent mountains, visible from far away on the Great Plains, have changed names over the years: 14,264-foot Mt. Evans, west of Denver, was originally Mt. Rosalie, and 14,110-foot Pike's Peak, perhaps the best-known mountain in America, was officially christened James Peak in 1820.
The bidding for the naming rights to these -- along with those other Western high points named for obscure surveyors, like Wheeler in New Mexico and Gannett in Wyoming -- should be quite spirited.
A Mount Microsoft or an Intel Peak might irk some purists, but is it really any worse than naming the highest mountain in the Rockies for a hack politician like Sam Elbert?
Further, only one letter would have to be changed to progress from unprofitable Pike's Peak to big-money Nike's Peak, so the costs should be rather negligible, especially in comparison to the money that could roll into the public treasury from that source.
The Forest Service shouldn't just sit around, waiting for college professors and the Board of Geographic Names to revise the map. It needs money, the money is out there in exchange for naming rights -- as the saying goes, just do it.
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