Letter by Roger Williams
August 98 Edition – September 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Fences trap many critters, including humans
Editors:
The August edition inspired lots of comments. I’m glad the Royal Gorge line will be running; will check out their web page, if the state hasn’t washed away yet (dire warnings on NOAA Weather Radio about the North Fork of the South Platte River, just now). I was amused those paw prints led to, or near, a skunk.
Jim Ludwig’s proposal that government entities should dispose of land they hold is inexcusable. I was appalled. Fortunately, this nightmare is unlikely to come to pass. What wild lands we have left are overrun as it is (sure, we don’t have an overpopulation problem…) without more land being closed to public access, posted, fenced (though much public land is fenced already due to running of livestock on it, another controversial practice).
Too many forests are full of trophy homes and ranchettes that prevent the let-burn policy we should have been using instead of rigorously putting out wildfires that were natural to and improved the land.
Atlas of the New West — Interesting; might read it if I ever find one of those elusive round tuits.
Killer fences: driving back to I-80 after being turned around from climbing Elk Mountain, Wyoming, by that confounded road “Closed to public access by order in Federal District Court” [Why?] and ranch hands that turned up at just the wrong time, a pronghorn appeared ahead of me. It kept running along instead of veering off across open land to the left; it just had to go right, straight into a fence running along the road, while I tried to go as slow as I could. It bounced off it and was down. I went to it, tried to lift it–it was too heavy–and finally left it; I hope it was only dazed, recovered, and made off.
It wasn’t tangled in the barbed-wire fence, but running into it certainly did it no good. I felt sorry for it, as well as for people that block other people from climbing mountains.
Roger Williams Boulder, Colo.