he elk like the high areas because it provides tall sage for calving and canyons for shelter," Valenzuela told me on our tour. The sagebrush beneath Steamboat Mountain's south rim grows to an astonishing 12 feet in height, providing cover where mother elk can hide their calves. "But it's also the area that has the highest interest for oil and gas."
Wild elk are extremely shy. If a forest elk is disturbed by people, it may run a quarter mile or so before it stops. But a Red Desert elk, with no trees to hide behind, may run as far as 3 miles. Oil and gas drilling represent a serious and sustained disturbance the elk are unlikely to abide. One group of elk stopped its winter migration after gas wells and ranches went in on the migration route. If the elk are pushed off Steamboat and other high ground, they lose their best calving habitat. There is a very real possibility that the herd may shrink, or vanish.
I think about this the next day as, sweating hard, I hoof it over the dunes, checking my binoculars in vain for elk. For human visitors who crave isolation and wildness, a gas well or road even miles distant here is visible, and often audible. Gas wells are hard to hide. As I found in my peregrinations through southwestern Wyoming, there are plenty of people who mind.
"It's the development of the roads that messes everything up," said Bill Crump, a former Wyoming Game and Fish officer who now raises hay in a bucolic valley outside Lander. Crump, a tall and rangy man of seventy-seven, has been horse-packing into the Red Desert for fifty years. He wouldn't mind getting some oil and gas out of the desert, but he knows petroleum development means better access, and there's the rub. "If I want to go someplace to get away from people, I don't go to the mountains," Crump told me. "Any more, the mountains are loaded up with people. I go to the Red Desert. When you let roads develop willy-nilly, there is a loss of solitude, and that solitude is a fascinating thing."
"My grandpa used to call it miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles," added Marian Doane, a fourth-generation Lander resident whose forebears all ranched. Doane, a youthful grandmother with long, brown hair and a deep tan, now works as a range technician for the government. "It's this great wilderness nobody knows about. It lets me breathe. I can do what I want, go where I want, except when Mother Nature says I can't." Doane's father recently died, and her family ranch has been sold and subdivided. She furrowed her brow at the idea of the Red Desert filled with roads and drill trucks. "To lose the desert," she mused. "I probably wouldn't have much connection here anymore."
People like Doane and Crump sometimes struggle to explain what it is that makes the Red Desert worth saving. As I spent time with them, I came to understand that the debate over the Red Desert isn't only about whether what is on the surface of the land is more important than what lies beneath it, or vice versa. For those who want to keep the drillers out, the value of the place lies equally in what isn't there: people, roads, fences, drill rigs. It's a debate not only about what is present, but also what is absent.
It's hard to make a political case for absence. For most Americans, this is flyover country -- a place you pass by on your way to somewhere else. Anyone driving through this profoundly empty-looking land is less likely to be admiring the sagebrush and prickly pear than to be thinking, "Please, don't let me break down here." Even to a hiker, most of the Red Desert is at first just dust and gray brush and cactus, low undulating ridges and stony buttes and a marked absence of water.
As is the case with most deserts, this one demands time and effort to see and appreciate. One morning I visited a lonely stone bluff where paleolithic Indians had carved scores of petroglyphs. A few yards above the carvings of elk, buffalo, men, horses, and tepees, three raptor nests were perched atop the rock, one of them taller than a human. The air was still and warm, the views long, and I was enveloped by an unexpected, unfamiliar serenade of birdsong from deep within the surrounding sage.
The Red Desert allows refuge unimaginable elsewhere. One day in the 1960s, John Mionczynski -- who wasn't interested in being invited to the Vietnam War but did like to wander the desert -- ducked into an empty ranch house to get out of a storm. "On the cookstove was a little note that said, 'Feel free to shelter yourself and stay as long as you like, just replace any firewood you use,'" recalled Mionczynski, now a wildlife biology consultant. "So I did. I stayed there for a couple of years." He studied local plants and learned to live off the land. "Nobody came by to ask me to leave."
