Bruce Salisbury - Honor to the Heroes
Bruce Lee Salisbury has a reputation for being stubborn. He first demonstrated that in 1945 at the age of 15 when he joined the service after his mother refused to allow him to play football in high school. He retired from the Air Force as a master sergeant in 1966. Since he had not finished high school, Bruce started college studies at the San Juan Branch in Farmington, along with his wife Dorothy. They had three children in school; each had a job and a burning desire to finish their educations. Dottie and Bruce graduated in 1979. His degree was through the College of Arts and Sciences; hers, the College of Agriculture and Home Economics. In 1998, a diagnosis of lung cancer forced him to stop working. During his extended rehab process, he began working on the project to memorialize friends and family members either killed or gone missing while fighting for America. His goal: designate a mountain peak as Mount KIA/MIA that could become a place where families and friends journey to remember lost loved ones. When Bruce started his quest, he attempted to have one of 33 mountains (within Colorado) with the name Sheep Mountain, renamed, but met with resistance. So, he looked for a suitable peak that was without a designated name figuring there would be no real reason for refusal. He was right; there was no real reason for refusal, but plenty of resistance just the same. One of the biggest objections to overcome was presented by the Bureau of Land Management in July of 2005. They voiced concern about naming a feature with a U.S. Military commemorative subject matter, in the midst of many features commemoratively named after Native Americans. Andrew Cowell, a linguist who specializes in Native American languages, stated that the name "KIAMIA" could be construed and possibly misrepresented as a garbled Ute name. Not one willing to accept ‘No’ for an answer, Bruce contacted Thomas Givon, Distinguished Professor (emeritus) of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Oregon, who had worked for the Southern Ute Tribe for 10 years as the founding director of the Ute Language Program. That language is complex but it was Givon’s opinion that Kiya-miya-vat is a rather appropriate name for a mountain that would honor Ute, and all veterans. A warrior, once departed, crosses to "the other side," a place often described as one where a person may walk about in peace, without care, happy; in other words, " a place where people walk about laughing." Final approval came first from the Bureau of Land Management in 2005 and the US Forest Service in 2006. Mt. KIA/MIA is an 11,282 ft summit in the Sawatch Range in north-central Saguache County, CO, close to Marshall Pass, from which one can see the mountain close-up. 
BRUCE SALISBURY - Brings Honor to Our Heroes



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