No. 697 Gale Dick

Transcript (41 pages) of an interview by Gavin Noyes with Save Our Canyons co-founder Gale Dick, on 23 April 2009. Part of the Utah Environmental Oral History Project, Everett Cooley Collection tape no. U-3210Gale Dick (b. 1926), former professor of physics at the University of Utah, talks about the history of Salt Lake area activist group Save Our Canyons, which he has been involved with since its inception. Born and raised in Oregon, he served two years in the Navy at the end of World War II and afterward attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he fell in love with the mountains and embarked on his career and his avocation. Professor Dick remembers the academic climate following World War II, when students were particularly eager to learn and also began skiing and mountaineering in earnest. He chronicles his self-described love affair with mountains from its start in Oregon, to the Alps while he studied abroad, to Wyoming, and at last, to Utah, where he took a job in the University of Utah´s physics department in 1959. Professor Dick spends a substantial amount of time discussing the mechanics of leadership in Save Our Canyons, and discusses the group´s efforts since the 1970s to combat both the spread of development in the Wasatch Mountains and the exclusivization of wilderness. He remembers working with Floyd Sweat, Alexis Kelner, and Cal Giddings, all key players in Save Our Canyons, among others. Project: Environmentalism. Interviewer: Gavin Noyes