Mountains of paperwork.

Upon the same mountain that used to bear the Old Man of the Mountains, there two ski areas, Cannon Mountain and Mittersill. Mittersill, started in the late 1940's, had a permit from the Forest Service to put trails and lifts onto US owned land. Later in the 1970's Mittersill went dormant and stopped running the lifts. The trails are still there, and hardy skiers have been using them, abet lightly. Now, Cannon Mountain wants to expand it's trail system and re open the old Mittersill trails. Sounds simple.
I attended a meeting last night at which a nice middle aged lady from the Forest Service spent a half an hour explaining all the paperwork that would be necessary. Lordy, there were environmental impact statements, assessments, obscure legal footwork of which no one had ever heard of, protection of a bird that no one had ever heard of, along with some odd weedy plant that even the Forest Service lady could not name. The Manhattan Project started with less paperwork than is now necessary to ski down an existing ski trail on federal land.
Environmentalists are like watermelons, green on the outside, Red on the inside.