Join us for the Tehipite Chapter Annual Awards Banquet where Don Neubacker, recently appointed Superintendent of Yosemite National Park, will be our guest speaker.  There will be an no host bar at 6:00 p.m. during which time you'll be able to meet local National Park and National Forest representatives and talk with fellow Sierra Club members.  Your choice of a tri-tip, chicken piccatta or vegetable con capellini dinner will be served at the tables by 7:00 p.m.  After dinner and over dessert awards will be given and Superintendent Neubacker will bring us up to date on what's happening in Yosemite.

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
— John Muir

Sierra Club members need to know about a huge PG&E transmission project that will likely soon impact the Sierra Nevada foothills from Kern County to Fresno County, where a large substation will be built either near Humphreys Station or in Watts Valley. If this project is built, it will change the Sierra forever, in my opinion not for the better...

Tehipite Chapter members need to be aware of a new bill that has been introduced in Congress, which will impact the Mineral King portion of Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, as well as the Redwood Canyon area. This bill would designate new Wilderness areas in Mineral King and Redwood Canyon. At first glance, the bill may seem to honor former Congressman John Krebs’ leadership in the 1970s by naming the new Wilderness in the Mineral King area as the “John Krebs Wilderness.” But there is a problem. It turns out that the current proposal would dishonor John Krebs by stripping from the Mineral King area protections which it presently has. Questions have been raised as to the Sierra Club’s position...

The expression “making a mountain out of a mole hill” is a familiar one. Unfortunately, its opposite may become familiar to us if R.M.C, a sand and gravel corporation headquartered in London, is able to muscle its way to a Fresno County conditional use permit to produce gravel and aggregate products from a Fresno County landmark mountain...

The Ferguson Slide, just a few miles from the entrance to Yosemite via the Merced River Canyon, thoroughly covered a portion of Highway 140.  At present, the obstruction is bypassed with two temporary steel bridges.  The two bridges are connected by directing traffic along a one-lane road.  (This is Incline Road, which is on the old railroad grade.)  Since the detour is one-lane, access is regulated with traffic signals.  Caltrans considers the present arrangement to be temporary, and has issued a Draft EIR/EIS which proposes a "permanent" solution.

The middle sized blue oak at left is at least 30 feet from PG&E’s Helms-Gregg 230 kilovolt transmission line on the left. Yet PG&E officials say this tree and thousands of others must now be removed to guarantee system reliability. The line has been here for 26 years and the trees have not caused a problem during that time. So why do the trees need to be removed now?