To the editor: All the reservation system did was reduce the ability of the public to visit the Yosemite Valley, making a lot of people unhappy (“Yosemite ditches reservations, drawing huge crowds in a free-for-all,” May 6). It did not solve the problem of the huge and growing demand to visit Yosemite. But there is a solution, and that is to develop the neighboring Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is very similar in size and beauty to the Yosemite Valley. Like Yosemite, it has many waterfalls, steep granite cliffs and hiking trails.
This solution would be political as well as expensive. That is because the city and county of San Francisco were allowed to convert the Hetch Hetchy Valley into a reservoir with a dam, completed in 1934, that provides cheap water and power to the surrounding area. Hetch Hetchy is now under 300 feet of water. At the time of its completion, the country’s population was much smaller than it is today, and very few people really cared about this environmental disaster in a national park.
In recent years, several dams have been removed to allow the salmon to spawn. It is time to remove this dam, and San Francisco should pay the cost.
San Francisco can have the water. It just needs to find another place to store it.
Larry Pearson, Burbank
