PATCHWORK QUILT DEVELOPMENT ON DONNER SUMMIT

The Winter Tahoe Quarterly has a nifty silkscreened illustration for its lead piece, Showdown on Donner Summit.  As a textile enthusiast, it caught my eye immediately- a little pro-developer guy, holding a picket, proposing a vision of houses in trees looking exactly the same as the existing community, opposed by a local's picket proposing only trees.

Well, catchy and cute as the picture is, it's also unfortunately the pictorial equivalent of embroidering with statistics.  You see, the current community of very individualistic single family cabins tops out at 800.  The developer is proposing up to 1000 more corporate designed densely packed units, plus hotels, plus ski lifts, plus ski runs, and commercial space, and mountain-top restaurants, and private clubs,  and viewing towers, and parking lots. Lots and lots of parking lots.  Oh, and did I mention much of those units will be in the form of 3 and 4 story condos, which Mike Livak,  Royal Gorge director assures us will be in the "tree canopy". Hello?  If they're in the tree "canopy", they're fire risk #1 (note, please discount anything RG says until you've run it through their "intent" factor--what they've "intended" to do, and what they have actually done--see earlier posts for explication) 

Also, please note that there is only one road in and out of Serene Lakes, which has Placer County's lowest rating- F.  If your child got that grade in a class, you'd know they'd flunked.  Our one egress flunks also--it crosses a river, an intercontinental railway line, and, worse, a road letting out  3 ski-resorts that all close at approximately the same time. Los Angeles gridlock has nothing on Soda Springs Road on a winter weekend afternoon. If fire threatens our community, we're already in very dire straights.  According to Mike Livak in a recent television interview, the single egress that is inadequate for our present community will be perfectly adequate for all the visitors to 1000 more units--a chilling thought.  Does Royal Gorge LLC care about the safety of residents, and their future purchasers, or do they just have a firm eye on their bottom line?  LOS-F, the county's designation for our one egress road apparently has not made it onto their radar.

And these condos, time-shares, fractional ownership units--the name changes, but however they're sold,  they'll be in a rent-back program administered by Royal Gorge's hotels, or by subsequent owners (Royal Gorge is in print as saying they're not hoteliers).  This will entail constant turnover, and impose on a community of individual cabins a transient hotel enterprise-people not concerned with being engaged in preserving the wildlife, and ambience of the Summit- how could they be, when the Royal Gorge Development destroyed all of that in the furtherance of building the theme park visitors are staying in?

Patchwork quilts have a long history in America. Typically, women used up bits and pieces of old cloth, to make warm and attractive bedding for their families and communities.  At its best, artwork, made by warm and loving hands, has been created.  Here, we have a contrast.  Royal Gorge LLC, Kirk Syme's and Todd and Mark Foster's company, wants to take the whole, beautiful cloth of the Donner Summit, a keystone of the Sierra, and slash it up into ugly little pieces of parking lots, condominiums, duplexes, hotels, luxury houses, and all the tangle of connecting roads,  and then pretend they've made something nice-  sadly, it won't be a patchwork quilt--it will be an ugly rag, a remnant of something that was once precious and beautiful.