If - you love fishing Lake of the Prairies
• you enjoy skiing at Asessippi Ski Resort
• love the unspoiled environment of the Shell River Valley
• you own a business that profits from the tourism attracted to these recreations you might want to know more about the recent application by a large local business to tear up the valley adjacent to the Shell River less than half a kilometre from the Ski Hill and Cottage Cove, to open yet another gravel pit.
If you live near an active gravel pit , you know how much noise, dust and traffic is produced hourly, and what it does to the local ecology and environment.
Dust , machinery effluent and grinder noise cannot coexist with a fragile fish spawning ground, a recreational river (fishing, boating) and hiking trails through unspoiled forest teeming with deer, bear, and nesting eagles, hawks and vultures.
Nor can it coexist with a winter wonderland of unspoiled snow on quiet ski runs, polluting the snow with gravel dust and filling the hills with the cacophony of its grinders.
Surely, there are many other locations for gravel pits that will not devastate such a valuable, irreplaceable natural resource and deprive our future generations of the joys of the area as it currently exists.
Please help those of us who live in this valley oppose this application and thereby help your own community preserve this invaluable resource.

Dr. Ron Witzke
Cottage Cove