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Wednesday, June 20, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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The Last Resort
By Jim Cornelius
Editor in Chief
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let-
ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be
no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday.
To the Editor:
I’d like to follow up on my recent Opinion
piece in the Nugget. I apologize if the tone
was overly angry. It was the wrong tone to use
when raising this contentious issue again. If
my use of the term “bicyclists” seemed overly
broad I apologize. I referred to “pathies,” once
again I’m sorry if I offended.
The McKenzie Pass Highway should be
managed as it has been historically, and just
like Cascade Lakes Highway in Bend is man-
aged today. Plow it open as soon as possible
in the spring, bikes get a week to themselves,
then open it to all traffic. Cascade Lakes
Highway has been open to all traffic for a
month or more already. Why not here? Why
is traffic gated out of 242 every year in favor
of bicyclists? Plow it open as soon as possible
in the spring, bikes get a week to themselves,
then it’s open to all traffic.
Like many of our residents, weekenders
and tourists, I use our local national forests,
and our state highways to access them, hun-
dreds of days a year, year round. I take my
access to our public lands very seriously. I’m
unwilling to accept any effort to unfairly lock
me out of it, any of it. I hope you are, too.
I’m working (trying to) with ODOT to pub-
licly abandon this unfair closure policy, and
to open our precious McKenzie Pass to ALL
OF US as soon as possible every year. You can
help by contacting ODOT in Bend with your
support of access for all of us. It would be a
big help and greatly appreciated.
Glenn Brown
s
s
s
See LETTERS on page 30
Sisters Weather Forecast
Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon
Wednesday
Thursday
PM Thunderstorms Sunny
83/54
82/49
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Sunny
Sunny
Sunny
Sunny
79/47
79/48
89/51
79/45
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Who will provide the
grand design, what is yours
and what is mine?
’Cause there is no more
new frontier, we have got to
make it here…
— Glenn Frey/Don
Henley, “The Last Resort”
By Jim Cornelius
“The small community of
Camp Sherman located on
the slopes of the Cascades
in Central Oregon, is expe-
riencing growth pains. Once
the site of a handful of
homesteads, the U.S. Forest
Service estimates approxi-
mately 250,000 visitors to
the Camp Sherman Store
each year, with more than
200,000 vehicles going to
and from Camp Sherman
annually and an average
daily count of more than
1,000 vehicles during the
summer season.”
That’s from a report by
Eric Belden in the July 2
edition of The Nugget…
from 1980.
The anxieties of growth
and change are nothing new
in Sisters Country. They are,
as Craig Rullman points
out in The Bunkhouse
Chronicle this week (page
23) part of the bigger story
of the American West —
indeed of frontiers every-
where. What’s happening
in Sisters is a phenomenon
I call The Frontiersman’s
Paradox: We come to a
wild, free, beautiful place,
seeking an untrammeled
life and a bit of economic
prosperity — and our every
action changes what we
love.
This has been going on
for a very long time, and
in many places we have
deemed a paradise. In the
18th century Kentucky
was seen as a land of milk
and honey. A backwoods
preacher told his congre-
gation: “Oh, my honeys!
Heaven is a Kentucky of
a place!” Settlers poured
in. The Shawnee and other
native peoples did not give
up this fine hunting ground
easily. Men and women
were willing to fight for
their piece of paradise —
and for a good 25 years
Kentucky was a bloody
battleground.
Ted Franklin Belue
closes his study, “The
Hunters of Kentucky,” with
a depiction of the aged fron-
tiersman Simon Kenton
— who did as much as any
single individual to wrest
the land from its native
inhabitants — gazing with
bemusement at the civiliza-
tion his work had wrought
on a land he had entered
when it was a kind of hunt-
er’s paradise:
“When old Kenton
returned to Kentucky briefly
from Ohio to visit, he
hitched a wagon ride a few
miles south of Limestone
to take a sack of corn to
a Washington gristmill.
As David Hunter’s team
topped a rise, Hunter reined
in momentarily. Kenton,
musing and drawing on his
pipe stem, gazed at the land
before him, all clapboard
cabins and barns and green-
ing pastures and cattle and
horses where once there
were buffalo rattling in the
canebrakes.
“‘What a change. What a
change’ Kenton exclaimed,
shaking his head in
amazement.
“As the leather snapped
and the wagon eased on,
passing a certain spring
flowing on land claimed by
Hunter’s father, Hunter’s
venerable passenger
grinned and spun a few
yarns about his adventures
with (Daniel) Boone, but
in the end, Kenton realized
that the fabled island in the
wilderness he once knew,
explored, hunted, trapped
out, and helped wrest from
the Shawanoes was no
more.”
For decades, restless
frontiersmen simply moved
on when the land became —
thanks to their own actions
— too settled for their
tastes. We no longer really
have that option. “We have
got to make it here.”
We the people of Sisters
know it’s at a watershed
moment (see related story,
page 1). “Making it here”
in the coming years is
going to require balancing
sometimes-competing val-
ues — vibrancy vs. peace
and quiet; economic activ-
ity vs. traffic and popula-
tion growth; affordability
and accessibility vs. pres-
ervation and exclusivity.
Sisters isn’t what it used to
be. It wasn’t what it used to
be in 1980, either. We can
only determine what we’re
going to be — and only
if we take on the work of
planning, negotiating, and
compromising required if
we — and maybe our kids
— are going to make it
here.
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.