Letter: Rock Creek needs protection

Craig Mead, "No reason to designate Rock Creek as wilderness," (Nov. 29) sets up the Wyoming Wilderness Association for fault in its observations on the encroachment of off-road vehicles on the wilderness acres inventoried in the 1984 Rock Creek area, yet fails to present any contrary facts. I personally have witnessed the advance of user-created trails and other impacts from off-road vehicles.

Mead also cites the 1960 Multiple Use and Sustained Yield Act and others as having protected the Rock Creek wildness and unique beauty. There is nothing in the 1960 act that treats public land as anything more than a commodity. Uniquely the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1984 Wyoming Wilderness Act give our wild places the status as a unique American resource and protect by public law the historic role of grazing on those lands. There is to my knowledge no wilderness act passed into law on Western lands that did not specifically protect the grazing. Wilderness designation does require that stockmen use more traditional methods in maintaining their allotments, ironically promoting those very traditions and culture that Mead implies wilderness management impairs.

Wilderness gives a window into what was and preserves what can be. The Rock Creek wilderness gives us a great perspective of what the Big Horn Mountains look like when natural processes have been relatively unimpaired for generations.

I have spent the last several years in the Cloud Peak Wilderness as a volunteer monitoring recreational impacts and stream health. The work has had me pitching a camp in many a park or glen and sharing the space with different herds on working allotments. I can tell you that grazing is alive and well in the Cloud Peak Wilderness, and will be not different when it is reunited with the Rock Creek basin.

ROB DAVIDSON, Buffalo, Cloud Peak Chapter of Wilderness Watch

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Source: http://www.trib.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_d49e4bde-419c-5f07-9335-592ac15bbfcc.html

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