he Red Desert means different things to different people," Renée Dana told me, a few days before I went seeking elk. We were bouncing along in a government-issue Dodge Durango piloted by Dave Valenzuela, a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) geologist. The smell of morning-damp sage wafted through the windows, while pronghorn antelope bounded over the brush and the occasional sage grouse flushed out of our way. Dana, whose business card describes her as a BLM "resource advisor," is coordinating the effort to decide how the agency should do its job in this area. It hasn't been going very well.
From the point of view of wildlife, petroleum engineers, and environmentalists alike, the most important part of the Red Desert is what the BLM refers to as the Jack Morrow Hills planning area -- 622,000 acres of broad, mesa-punctuated steppe. More than 90 percent of it is federal land managed by the BLM. Almost all the rest is owned by Wyoming. The BLM is now drafting a plan that will determine exactly what can be done here, and when, for the next twenty years. The first draft was sent back by the Clinton administration because it proposed too much drilling. The next draft is due this fall. (Definitions of what the Red Desert actually is vary widely. Most people agree it covers about 4.5 million acres, including the Great Divide Basin, the wide, closed saucer where the Continental Divide forks and rainwater flows to neither ocean.)
The Jack Morrow Hills, named for a local nineteenth-century thief the BLM officially terms a "bad" man, aren't much more than rolling hillocks. Their shades of buff and dun are softer than the carmine of the iron-rich soils eastward, which give the Red Desert its name. But the western side of the Jack Morrow Hills area is dominated by White Mountain, a long uplifted ridge of striped cream and lavender that is the source of the Killpecker Dunes.
As we stand on its rim, looking east over the dunes and into the heart of the planning area, Valenzuela explains that White Mountain's layers of sedimentary rock were formed when what is now the Red Desert lay at the bottom of a series of freshwater Cenozoic lakes and rivers. (Deeper sediments had been left by earlier shallow seas.) The uplift of the part of North America that became the Continental Divide raised and eventually drained the waters. Later, lava flowed up through vents and faults and sometimes pooled on the surface, solidifying into hard igneous rock. Today, the dominant vertical features of the Red Desert are flat-topped buttes -- Oregon Buttes, Pacific Butte, Steamboat Mountain, North and South Table Mountains. The lava pools that cap them have kept them standing as the soft rock around has eroded away.
Underneath all this lies oil, coal, and natural gas, potentially in significant quantities; the BLM says 45 percent of the Jack Morrow Hills area has "high potential for oil and gas development." The Bush administration, led by a president and vice president rooted in the petroleum industry, has been more aggressive than any in memory about drilling America's public lands -- while expressing no meaningful interest in energy efficiency or renewable energy sources. There are already numerous wells operating in the Red Desert today, including 156 in the Jack Morrow Hills area. The BLM says there could be 11,000 new wells in southwestern Wyoming by 2015.
The planning area also contains 132 square miles of land the BLM has recommended for conservation forever, through the creation of protected federal wilderness areas. But whereas only God can make a wilderness, only Congress can designate a wilderness area. And since Congress has not seen fit in the last dozen years to decide the fate of these lands, these "wilderness study areas" remain in bureaucratic purgatory. For the moment the BLM is keeping the drill rigs out. But the new plan could change that.
Dana and her team are trying to balance competing interests. "We've gotten the gamut," she says of the comments received from various "stakeholders" -- hunters, drillers, conservationists -- "from 'Let us do our thing and don't interfere,' to 'Do things logically,' to 'Keep it as it is.'"
The BLM's job is by definition a Solomonic one. Its mandate from Congress is to manage federal lands for "multiple use and sustained yield," but some uses aren't compatible with others. Solomon knew how to decide between incompatible choices. He never actually split the baby; he gave the baby to the woman who convinced him of the right of her claim. But the BLM has been cheerfully splitting babies for decades. Congress lets the agency close lands to oil development, but often, the BLM decides to allow a little of this and a little of that in a single place. And a little conservation next to a little oil drilling means, effectively, no conservation.
