Park Maintenance Should Be a Priority
Re “San Gabriel River Backers Push for National Ranking,” July 22: “The National Park Service is a quality act,” says the chairman of the Sierra Club’s San Gabriel Valley Task Force regarding Rep. Hilda Solis’ (D-El Monte) plans for the San Gabriel watershed.
This disheartens me, having recently fished the San Gabriel River’s West Fork, which is in the Los Angeles National Forest. It is one of the few Southern California wild trout preserves. It still gets an occasional migratory steelhead trout from the ocean, which has to swim through El Monte and Whittier. Other creatures like deer and red-tailed hawks make their homes here. Unfortunately, it also has great heaps of garbage at every picnic site, soiled diapers next to the water ready to wash into the reservoir next winter and extensively tagged rocks, trees, signs, trash bins and portable toilets. This time it even had one of the toilets pushed into the river. One of the locals told me that it had been cleaned by volunteers only two weeks before. By noon the river was full of swimmers. What puzzles me is, if they enjoy it so much, why are they destroying it, and where are the park rangers?
Do we need to create more parks on this watershed when we aren’t doing the job with this one?
Thomas E. Kolanoski
Costa Mesa
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