Rocky Mountain Power is proposing a 345 kV transmission line through Cedar Valley down the Western border of Quichapa Lake, and the question is not whether southern Utah needs power. It is whether that steel has to cut through the last quiet refuge of Cedar Valley. Cedar City still runs sheep the way it has since the 1850s. The Willden family brought the first ten head in those years. By 1869 the Cedar City Cooperative Sheep Association counted 2,184 at Iron Springs. Families whose names are still on that country still summer flocks on the same mountain. That trail is still alive. Last November, 6,000 head were driven off Cedar Mountain, through town, and west toward winter range. Iron County is still one of the top sheep counties in the state. Cattle follow the same mountain-to-desert cycle, much of it on multi-generational family ground, grazing the same land and feeding those Southern Utah families. Rocky Mountain Power’s draft Three Peaks–Purgatory Flat 345 kV line is being drawn through the west side of Cedar Valley around Quichapa Lake — the rural edge that is supposed to stay pasture, wetland, and family ground. Quichapa is not empty desert. It is a federally designated lacustrine wetland and, per SUU research, the most biodiverse bird site in Iron County. When it holds water it is a Pacific Flyway stop: Canada geese, mallards, gadwall, cinnamon teal, northern pintail, American avocet, white-faced ibis, American white pelican, eared grebe. Bald eagles and golden eagles hunt that shoreline. Cedar City has been a southern Utah bald-eagle wintering spot for decades. You can put a 125-foot-class industrial corridor through land that will be commercial and industrial anyway. Or you can put it across the last rural west-valley floor — winter sheep country, cattle pasture, and a wetland eagles actually use. The company’s own slides already talk about collocating with existing infrastructure. Do that here. Keep the towers on the developing I-15 / commercial-industrial side. Leave Quichapa and the west-valley grazing country rural. The load they are planning for is not out here. It is stacking up along I-15: commercial pads, warehouses, and the data-center appetite that is chewing through rural Utah one campus at a time. It does not have to sacrifice a wetland and a winter range so the next warehouse of servers can stay cold. This is still a draft route. Comments still count. Open houses: October 6, 5–7 p.m., Festival Hall, 96 N Main, Cedar City October 7, 5–7 p.m., Leeds Fire Station 47, 730 N Main October 8, 5–7 p.m., Heritage Hall, Washington October 14, virtual Tell them to keep the towers on the developed corridor and leave Quichapa to the birds and the stock. Save rural Utah, starting here.