I think we all agree to include as many as possible. I, too, would like to encourage more active participation from our eastern friends. Rick, I don't think adding in Yukon is needed at this time since, as you note, there are no current ATP members in the Yukon. Woofie, I like your idea to include the regional information first. Here's a little further tweaking, with explanations following:
Welcome to the Pacific Northwest Gardening forum - gardeners from Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and northern California. We are bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean, and bisected by the Coast, Olympic, and Cascade mountains ranges. Our region varies from temperate rain forests, verdant river valleys, arid high desert plateaus, and alpine mountains. Our discussions are lively and cordial - please join in.
It felt a bit disjointed to me to identify the region, then the conditions, then back to the identifiers, so I pushed the conditions after the identifiers. I also tried to give each general land type an adjective for consistency. I combined desert and plateau as I think (?) they are basically the same - perhaps someone who is more familiar with either or both can clarify. I left out 'generally considered to include' -- since we are in fact identifying who we are in the statement, this seemed unnecessary.
I was trying to think of a way to include our rather laissez faire attitude (we don't seem to get too tweaky about getting off topic) but figured once folks joined in, that will quickly become apparent. I also kind of like that we don't have a formal moderator, but again that doesn't need to be a focus of the descriptive statement.
I thought once we nail down our forum intro and have Dave put it in, I'd put a note in the Site Forum Geographic thread inviting others to check us out. I note there are members in Idaho and eastern Washington/Oregon who are not particularly active in the PNW forum - perhaps we could send them an @ invitation to join us? Or is that too pushy?
