Letter to the Editor: Hidden Splendor access

By JOHN ANDERSON Salt Lake City

Editor,
I am a 70 year old diabetic with a bad heart and a massive hernia and cannot push a wheelbarrow uphill for five miles with a sleeping bag, food, water, pick and shovel to get to my mines anymore.
There is a 60 year old road that goes right to my mines, but I cannot use it because the Bureau of Land Management has closed my road.
For many years, I came down here with a small backhoe, and at my own expense would reopen the road each and every year, until I was denied access and the road became a field full of boulders from the yearly flash floods, and is now inaccessible.
I would like to reopen the road once again, at my own expense, if I had a chance to do so.
The Muddy River is not a trout stream full of fish and drinking water as the BLM would like us to believe. It contains very nasty alkali water in which fish cannot live. If you wade through it, it ruins your shoes. Sometimes the river is completely dry, and with the flash floods, I have seen it five-six feet deep in some places. I have always had to bring water in with me as there is no drinking water in the area.
I look at the mesas and I can still see my father with his friend, Lynn Brady, driving his old 1953 Pontiac up the switchbacks to the mines with a bicycle in the trunk, in case the car broke down or got stuck. I still have that old car in storage. Several times Lynn had to ride the bicycle many miles for help.
When Stella Guymon was the county recorder, I spent hundreds of hours in the court house researching all of the old records of the uranium mines in the county. I was treated very well at the recorders office and will always be grateful to Emery County.
I have a son in the 82nd Airborne Division that has been to Iraq three different times and I have a daughter in the Navy. I spent nine years in the Army to protect our God given rights and the BLM and the USFS deny us these rights that we are entitled to. What has happened to America?
On our way home from the protest at Hidden Splendor on Oct. 14, we stopped in Salina and were warmly greeted by some people there who thanked us for our efforts, and sympathized with us.