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Commentary: Stop to figure the impact on the Cottonwood canyons

Hays Gorey | Courtesy Hays Gorey of Vienna, Virginia, took a day to ski at Alta Ski Resort while visiting family in Salt Lake City recently and snapped this shot. "It was a cloudy day... until this," he wrote.

As the Cathedral of Notre Dame burned earlier this month, it caused me to pause. It was in that long dark canyon, constructed 800 years ago, that I had prayed for an acquaintance who passed in 1972.

Each of us has special places which evoke memories of people and things past. Some of these places are man-made, the Parliament, the U.S. Capitol Building, a church, a synagogue, a temple or a special place of meditation we have frequented or observed. As humans we like to think these human constructed places will last forever. However, the only constant in the universe is change.

I remember in 1962 walking through the Roman forum in Rome and seeing where the Roman Senate met 2,000 years earlier. Yes, the stones of the Coliseum and Forum were still in place, but they had lost their living vibrancy.

In the West, I believe, many of the special places are not man-made, they are natural configurations constructed over millennium by nature – wind, rain, snow, fire, earthquakes and geological drift, to name a few. Part of the beauty of where we live is that many of us have experienced that “Polaroid moment” when our minds eyes captured a natural setting, its geology, biology, smell, sound and overall blanket of sensory profusion. It is simply the unparalleled natural beauty a desert landscape or mountain terrain.

For me the special place is Alta and Little Cottonwood Canyon. My grandfather delivered the mail from Park City to Brighton and then to Alta in the 1890s during the summer. I began skiing at Alta in 1956 when there was only one lift – Collins. My wife Debbie and I were married in Alta in 1980. When I pass my ashes will be spread at Alta. When I stand at the Alta Lodge and look at the Higher Rustler run, it is the same geology as my grandfather would have beheld 129 years ago. Yes, there are many more conifers now than then, but the sense of awe over natures’ creation remains.

Bill Levitt, then the mayor of Alta, his wife Mimi and I started the Alta Defense Fund 39 years ago. ADF was to stop development in Little Cottonwood Canyon and Albion Basin. In 1966 one could buy one acre in Albion Basin for $500. The same lot now costs more than $1 million dollars. In 1980 many of the condominium developers of Park City eyed Alta and Albion Basin as their next big money-making development.

Once the Alta Defense Fund had sufficient donations to legally battle prospective developers, we became Friends of Alta. During the intervening nearly four decades, Albion Basin remains largely as my grandfather and I have seen it. However, there is a new threat in the form of an effort to eliminate “the Red Snake” a.k.a. traffic congestion.

The Utah Department of Transportation has received $66 million to try to decongest traffic in Little Cottonwood Canyon. UDOT is obligated to do an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the proposed improvements and safety designs for the decongestion. During the last two years there has been a concerted effort — driven by the ski resorts, developers and transportation engineers — to limit the scope of the EIS to only the highway component. This narrow vision would not allow for a needed scientific analysis of the impact of the proposed highway project and increased visitors to the vital watersheds in Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons. In Salt Lake County alone, 1 million people receive their culinary water from the Cottonwoods. Yet, the money-driven project to decongest the Red Snake is not willing to spend $1 million of the $66 million to analyze what the visitor capacity of the Cottonwood Canyons is.

Zions National Park faced another congestion problem and, like other efforts driven by highway engineers and developers, the Zion designers chose to improve only “transportation.” Now that these transportation improvements have been made, significant ecological and environmental damages are impacting Zion.

Before this happens to our Cottonwoods, we need to take the time to do the analysis and protect our vital watershed. We need to act to protect the quality of water we receive and to maintain a legacy for future generations. As citizens, please demand that the Central Wasatch Commission, UDOT and others do the necessary visitor capacity study before we inadvertently destroy a vital, natural special place.

Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune Pat Shea, president of Friends of Alta talks with The Salt Lake Tribune's editorial board, April 23, 2019.

Patrick A. Shea is an attorney in private practice and a research professor of biology at the University of Utah. He received assistance on this essay from Kyle Maynard, executive director of Friends of Alta.