To the editor: All of the reservation system did was scale back the power of the general public to go to the Yosemite Valley, making lots of people sad (“Yosemite ditches reservations, drawing huge crowds in a free-for-all,” Might 6). It didn’t clear up the issue of the large and rising demand to go to Yosemite. However there’s a resolution, and that’s to develop the neighboring Hetch Hetchy Valley, which may be very related in measurement and wonder to the Yosemite Valley. Like Yosemite, it has many waterfalls, steep granite cliffs and climbing trails.
This resolution could be political in addition to costly. That’s as a result of the town and county of San Francisco have been allowed to transform the Hetch Hetchy Valley right into a reservoir with a dam, completed in 1934, that gives low cost water and energy to the encompassing space. Hetch Hetchy is now below 300 feet of water. On the time of its completion, the nation’s inhabitants was a lot smaller than it’s right now, and only a few individuals actually cared about this environmental catastrophe in a nationwide park.
In recent times, a number of dams have been eliminated to permit the salmon to spawn. It’s time to take away this dam, and San Francisco ought to pay the associated fee.
San Francisco can have the water. It simply wants to seek out one other place to retailer it.
Larry Pearson, Burbank
