alt Hacker News> We stopped going there after we took a rafting trip down the Salmon in Idaho and rounded a curve in the river and found a large vacation home built right up on the bank complete with a concrete boat ramp.
The Albertsons founding family and heirs has had nothing to do with Albertsons grocery stores for at least 20 years.
If I were you, and if the information above was true, my beef would be with the government and the voters.
My beef is in fact with the government and the voters and those who use their wealth to destroy something that others have paid a substantial part of their own incomes to go out and enjoy. The first time I rafted and kayaked that river there was one dirt road that ran along the river for a few miles past the put-in and miles further down the canyon there was one high-tension power line. You were miles into the Snake River before you saw homes from the river. Over the decades I ran that same stretch several times and each time encroachment was worse. Rich cocksuckers who build homes that they only use for a week at a time are the equivalent of cockroaches that drop their egg cases and move on. One egg case causes the whole area to become infested with others in a few short years.
The attraction of the river was the silence and the grand views, paddling the rapids at different flow levels and learning to read the water, watching wildlife come up to the river, admiring the geologic story told by the rocks exposed on the canyon walls, the dark night skies. Once you add a structure, with the supporting access roads, powerlines, etc into the mix you have destroyed something that was worth saving for future generations. I don't expect everyone to understand that since too many people spend their lives caught up in the bullshit pursuit of money or recognition.
I don't give a shit whether that family still owns or runs the grocery business or did when they built that place. The fact that they built there, right on the river and built a ramp to launch their jet-boat on what had been one of the quietest stretches of the river makes them my enemy and worthy of my contempt. The fact that they decided to build the ramp and just pay the annual fines is an artifact of a broken system where penalties and sanctions do not match the gravity of the infraction. Wealthy people do whatever they want, trashing things everywhere they go. It could be true that this will never change. I'm hoping that it will though and working to help it along.