Stuck at home due to the fake mediademic that has allowed Warden Newsom to lock down California? Looking – like I am – out the window at the orange sky as wildfires burn California’s environmentally managed lands?
Here’s a cool website to visit. It can’t get the smells, but it has the visuals and the sounds you’ll hear if you could visit Yosemite National Park: VirtualYosemite.
On this day in 1814 Galen Clark was born in Shipton, Canada East (now known as Quebec).
As a young man, he became part of the great westward migration. He first headed to Missouri, where he met his wife Rebecca McCoy, who bore him two daughters. Unfortunately, his wife waste die far too young.
It’s believed that after her death, Galen moved further to the west, settling in California during the Gold Rush to seek his fortune. After living in the Golden State for five years, Clark contracted tuberculosis at the age of 39. Consumption was a fatal diagnosis in 1853, as there was no course of treatment or antibiotics at the the time. Doctors gave him six months to live, and recommended rest and clean air.
Galen moved to Wawona, California – a small ‘census designated place’ located entirely within what would eventually become Yosemite National Park – in 1855.
“I went to the mountains to take my chances of dying or growing better, which I thought were about even.” Galen Clark.
The Mercury News published an article by Paul Rogers, titled “Yosemite National Park may ban horse, bike and raft rentals, and remove ice rink and pools.” You can read it HERE.
It’s a good article, and Paul is a good writer, and he lays everything out really well.
Personally, I have issues with the plan; I don’t believe we should be destroying ice rinks or banning bicyclists. I believe that we should, however, draw a line in the sand; take a snapshot of how Yosemite Valley is right now, and look at preserving what we have, and managing it for future generations. Which makes it sound like I’m against the Merced River Plan as drafted by the National Park Service. I kinda am, but I’m also kinda not. I like the idea behind the plan, I just think that – after the years and years of lawsuits, the fake sequestration cuts, and the political posturing by both sides – the plan is too convoluted and open to interpretation to be workable.
What I DO take exception to, however, are the so-called ‘environmentalists’ who seem to think they know better than those that would seek to conserve the land. More often than not, environmentalists are people who never visit the places they seek to ban humans from, never see the damage done to the environment by the invasive alien species of plant and animal life they seek to “protect,” and very rarely stray far from their parent’s basements – unless it’s to use the hybrid car (made with batteries that have destroyed more environment than every Hummer ever made and that will continue to degrade the planet for decades to come) to drive to the mall to pick up cosmetics or sundries tested on innocent animals so they can live a more comfortable, air-conditioned life that is far removed from the true outside world. Continue reading
