A crowd fund was started on Generosity (link attached below) to raise money to protect and preserve Strawberry Fields, apparently also fondly referred to by the Parks Department as the "North Cheyenne Cañon Park Disposal Project" (Niiiiiicce.) If you didn't see the Indy article where that news was shared, here it is: http://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/appraisal-process-accelerated-for-citys-strawberry-fields-disposal-project/Content?oid=3748342 That should provide ample inspiration to donate. We have a goal of $50,000. If everyone who signed this petition gave $10, we could get there in a day. More, of course, is better. Please take a moment to donate to this important effort to help preserve and protect this historic and special land. Also, another reminder will be sent, but you are invited to join the peaceful procession and picnic protest on Saturday, April 23rd, 12n-2pm -- our way of showing our love and support for keeping the land wild and free for all to roam. STOP the SWAP! We leave you with an always thought provoking and beautifully composed poem by Ruth Obee. So much talent amongst these passionate open space supporters! Cheyenne Mountain: “They called me ‘Beauty’ once … … when Eden’s first dawn glistened fresh with dew and the rising sun flamed like a rose across my cheek. My shoulders and my rugged high ridges served as home to red-tailed hawks and became a Ute-riding way – reaching to an unimpeded sky – blue as blue as blue could ever hope to be. But beauty doesn’t hold they said. It can serve no useful purpose. It won’t be made to pay. Not like gold or land or bitter-feuding water rights. Still they mined me for what little they hoped to claim, bore deep down into my veins. My fading memories of historic eras past were happiest when the visionary architect John Gaw Meem designed an adobe hacienda at my cloudy heights, but there also came the face-disfiguring, knife-bladed gash of a winding road that was its only access, a snaking unhealed slash of white, like a scar, curling across my face, where neither tree nor blade of grass could ever grow. A half century later, deep inside my chambered heart of granite Norad pulsed and hummed throughout the day and night. But I prefer the sound of the lions’ chuff and roar below, where sentinel giraffes stand graceful guard to Spencer’s mountain zoo; and old friend Will Rogers looks down, tapping his foot in time to the carillon, recounting his favorite joke, savoring every word of it, with his wry and comic wit. I’m nearly as old as time, sibyl-voiced, a prophetess, with my silver antennas pointing to the stars to pick up signals there and broadcast back to earth. I whisper in the wind again and again. My name is ‘Cheyenne,’ as you may recall. I’m a vital part of the only earth that any of us shall ever know.” __ Ruth Obee April 20, 2016