This Land is Your Land...

Photo: Kevin and I climbing Mt. Bierstadt, Oct. 2001

Great article by Timothy Egan in the New York Times last week. Titled "My Summer Home," Egan reminds us that our national parks and other federal lands are "summer homes" for all of us.

Growing up, I looked with nose pressed against a mythic window of class at those who played in their waterfront compounds at Hayden Lake in Idaho. And when I came of age, I heard about the Hamptons and Cape Cod, Aspen and the San Juan Islands, where the zip code itself was supposed to guarantee happiness.

We had nothing to call a second home, and then I saw in a month’s travel that we had everything. Not long after I was old enough to cast my first vote, I realized that with American citizenship came a birthright to my summer home.

Read full article here.

Egan also wrote The Big Burn, a terrific book about the conservation movement during the era of Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot (first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service), told within the narrative of the young Forest Service fighting an historic fire in Idaho that was the size of Connecticut.

Photo: Stacy, Meredith, Pete and I camping in Colorado, Fall 2003. Eric and Jeff were with us, too.

I miss Colorado's public lands! (and Colorado people!)

Now everybody sing! "This land is your land..."