O, YOSEMITE!

Who owns Yosemite? The American people do. This is a fact that your reporter, Maura Dolan, and the environmental elitists and guerrillas she glorifies refuse to acknowledge or appreciate (“Who Owns Yosemite?” Sept. 30). Not once are the viewpoints or interests of the park’s visitors represented. Most visitors respect nature and want to be able to return to the park. The unproved assumption throughout the article was that the visitors were causing some horrible environmental damage and that the park was in imminent danger of irreversible ecological collapse unless all visitors are immediately banned.

To the contrary, comparison of The Times’ photographs with those that Ansel Adams took 40 to 60 years ago clearly shows that Yosemite has been preserved without any visible damage. This proof of the lack of damage explains the movement by the Wilderness Society and the environmental elitists to kick the Ansel Adams Gallery out of Yosemite--the gallery sells postcards of these photos to the public.

use picture from p. 11 bottom Adams, in his book “Yosemite and the Range of Light,” quotes John Muir as saying, concerning the view from Glacier Point: “Won’t it be wonderful when a million people can see what we are seeing now?” It is no wonder that the extremists want the gallery out of the valley, this bastion of photographic art and capitalism also sells books by such heretics as John Muir. To the great disdain of these selfish elitists, Adams also writes: “All of life and art are justified by communication; experiences are to share, not to hoard.”

GREG KRAMER

Camarillo