Thank you for your comments Malibuhaze and everyone else.

When the cell tower is installed at Galena, it will then become drivers choices to use their potentially lifesaving phones in responsible ways - just as is in ranges where cell phones already work. Drivers will have the option to ignore their phones if they ring on dangerous curves, or even turn them off, until there is a real emergency.

Cell phones can be utilized as lifesaving tools, even on dangerous icy roads. I have worked an abundance of nighttime delivery jobs, where my co-workers and I would sometimes fight the sleepies driving on mostly barren roads into the wee hours, without much in the way of stimulation besides the radio. My colleagues and I soon discovered that if we simply called each other to check in and converse for a few minutes over our hands-free sets, then it would usually stimulate us enough to stay safely awake for the remainder of the night.

All-night-working snow groomers could use the same method to check in on each others welfare occasionally. Why it was only a few years back, one groomer became briefly trapped in a small avalanche up Owl Creek or thereabouts.

Will drivers use their phones responsible most of the time? Perhaps not. It is easy to envision some drivers who will pay less than full attention on hairpin turns, while yammering away on a stupid cell phone. Often these are the same types of individuals who might munch on a messy pickle sandwich, sip a cold pop, apply an emergency splotch of eye shadow, and listen to the radio too loud to hear an ambulance blaring, or let a cat crawl around under the front seat, or even read a related Wifi story about cell phone safety, while distractedly chugging along.

Years ago, my sister had a housemate who once was hit in his car by a bicycle randomly thrown off a bridge! He had to swerve hard to pull off in heavy traffic and later stated that, had he not happened to have both hands on the steering wheel, he certainly would have crashed! I took a cue from his lesson and hope others would do the same, regarding large mammals crossing the highway, or some slippery feller spinning right at you in the ice. With tens times as many people killed in car crashes every year than were killed on 9-11, would you not want to travel fully prepared with two hands clenched to the steering wheel and with a cell phone coverage area that does not have forty miles gaps on major Idaho highways, whereupon sometimes even the police have trouble communicating with their only backup?