A bright red umbrella was a vivid splash of color in the otherwise gray-and-green landscape at Anderson Marsh State Historic Park. It caught my eyes as I traveled past the park last week on Highway 53 in Lower Lake. Clearly, someone wasn”t letting wet weather be an obstacle to using the park.
Anderson Marsh offers a year-round opportunity to observe the seasons as they change, as well as view the birds, plants and wildlife that are native to our area. Archaeological sites offer a glimpse at the earliest human settlements that called Lake County home.
Last summer, Anderson Marsh reduced access to its parking lot to Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Earlier in the year, the park had been placed on a list of sites that were slated to be closed to the public. For that matter, it proposed to close nearly every state park that I have enjoyed in northern California, except for Clear Lake State Park.
The California State Parks Foundation (CSPF) credits a showing of support in the state capital during its seventh annual Park Advocacy Day with helping to stop proposed budget reductions that would have resulted in California closing up to 220 state parks.
A later projection reduced the number of state parks that were expected to close, but in my opinion, even one park closing would represent the loss of an irreplaceable resource.
How impoverished we would be if the only way we could experience California”s state parks would be by viewing podcasts produced by the CSPF. Setting aside the insights offered by the people producing these shows, we”d be denied first-hand experience and opportunities for fresh air and exercise.
Rather than serving to enhance and supplement our experiencing parks close to home, the podcasts would instead take on an archival quality, capturing for posterity something that had been lost.
I don”t want to see that happen. When I view one of those podcast segments, I would like to know that the park it depicts will be there for me to discover and explore.
Fortunately, we can take action to help preserve our state parks. CSPF and its partners have filed a proposed statewide ballot measure to put the State Park Access Pass on the November 2010 ballot. Californians would pay an $18 surcharge on their vehicle license fees that would fund the access pass.
CSPF is organizing volunteers in order to gather signatures that would qualify the intiative for the ballot.
To learn more or sign up to help, visit www.calparks.org/takeaction/. You can also find out more about the eighth Park Advocacy Day, which is scheduled to take place on March 8 this year.
Cynthia Parkhill is the focus pages editor for the record-Bee and editor of the Clear Lake Observer American. She can be contacted at ObserverAmerican@gmail.com or 263-5636 ext. 39.
