With regard to permissions, we benefited hugely from having a local Bishop
scientist (Harold Klieforth of the DRI) helping us at that end - without
him things would have been very difficult indeed.  The various federal
agencies are quite different in their approaches and your applications
should be tailored to suit accordingly:

BLM - require a formal application, via a Standard Form.

LADWR - do not have a formal application as such. I submitted (via Harold)
a "proposal". However they do require archaeological reports to be
completed: the person who did this for us was Dave Rhode of the DRI
(dave@dri.edu).

NFS - require a formal application, via a Standard Form.

Timescales: I would suggest the sooner you put your application in, the
better, as it took several months from filling out the forms to gaining
permissions.

My impression (and this is only my impression!) is that they are not _too_
interested in what instruments we put up. The set of towers erected by the
DRI in 2004 have established a precedent, as it were; this was mentioned
in our submissions, i.e.  that permission has already been granted for
various meteorological towers to be installed. Another point to note is
that towers in the valley bottom may need cattle fencing and camouflaging
with spray paint of a relevant colour.

If you are planning to put any instruments in sites designated Wilderness
then you will need a slightly different approach. The proposal in this
case will need to stress the benefit to Wilderness, and the participating
scientists' willing adherence to, and respect for, the values embodied in
the Wilderness Act.

As for the going, it was reasonable as most sites were selected for their
proximity to a road. The exception being our site No. 2 on the map I sent
you, which was rather tricky to get to and required some negotiation of
fairly high brush. The others are quite routine: photos of our proposed
site locations can be found in the documents mentioned below. We don't
have any problems with you co-locating your instruments at our sites.

I have put some documents together which may be of some use/help, in

http://www.env.leeds.ac.uk/~ralph/t-rex/planning_info/

The documents are as follows.

(1) parsons.pdf
- a paper by David Parsons of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research
Institute on the challenges of "doing science in wilderness".

(2) wild_act.pdf
- the text of the Wilderness Act.

(3) wilderness1.doc
- our proposal to install meteorological stations in wilderness.

(4) forest_proposal.doc
- supplementary material regarding our proposal to install towers on NFS
land.

(5) blm_proposal.doc
- supplementary material regarding our proposal to install towers on BLM
land.

(6) ladwr_proposal.doc
- our proposal to install meteorological stations on LADWR land.

Hope this helps. If you require any further assistance please don't
hesitate to get in touch!

Looking forward to meeting you also.

All the best,
Ralph