ot long before I met Mac Blewer, he had come close to blows with another patron at the Hitching Rack, a low-slung building on Lander's southern approaches known for its steak and margaritas. Blewer, thirty-one, is the outreach coordinator for the Wyoming Outdoor Council (WOC). As much as anyone, WOC is trying to make the political case for absence; the Lander-based, 1,200-member organization has campaigned for decades to protect the Red Desert. Blewer and his colleagues spend a lot of time trying to explain to Wyomingites that they don't want to take away their jobs, guns, or dirt bikes.
When the first draft environmental impact statement was written for the Jack Morrow Hills in 2000, the BLM received more comments from the U.S. public -- 12,000 -- than it ever had for a Wyoming project. Ninety-three percent favored significant protection for the area. That response was masterminded by WOC, which had rounded up more than a hundred national groups to put the word out to their members. But WOC also crafted a broad Wyoming coalition that included businesspeople as diverse as a Rock Springs motel operator, an Indian crafts shop owner, and sheep and cattle ranchers. In so doing, WOC showed that the political dividing line over the Jack Morrow Hills is neither straight nor bright. It is not so simple as newcomers versus old-timers, hippies versus rednecks, greens versus browns. It is Solomonically messy.
"We didn't begin with nothing," WOC executive director Dan Heilig explained, lounging in shorts and T-shirt in his Lander living room. Huge cottonwood trees arch over his house, and water purls in an irrigation ditch through his unkempt front yard. "The Red Desert has always had a following, and it's a very disparate collection of people. It has a very mystical allure."
Heilig, who is balding and rumpled, enjoys the gallows humor of a career environmentalist living in a state that mainlines oil and gas money. Wyoming gets 40 percent of its revenues from taxes on oil and gas production; so do the counties around the Jack Morrow Hills. The state geologist's office calculates that extracting all the coal, oil, and gas from the planning area that could "reasonably" be extracted with current technology would yield state and county tax revenues of at least $1.88 billion.
Given this political reality, Heilig knows the Red Desert won't be protected if it remains a secret. His opponents often accuse him of wanting to lock the place up. But he's not guilty. He wants to split the baby, too -- in a different way from the BLM. He'd like to see the Jack Morrow Hills area become a National Conservation Area. Grazing and hunting would continue; the existing roads would be maintained; and existing wells would stay. What WOC doesn't want is new wells and an oil and gas boom that by its nature will degrade or destroy the things that make the Red Desert special.
Heilig fully expects that WOC and other groups will go to court when the BLM's new plan comes out. Meanwhile, he will keep building support for the desert, bringing people into it, helping them see what is there and why it matters.
Some environmentalists worry that in fragile places, the tread of too many visitors is as destructive as cattle or drill rigs. Is there a risk, I asked Heilig, of loving the Red Desert to death?
"It's a concern," he said. "A greater concern is oil and gas. There's absolutely no solitude in a gas field."
leave the dunes, heft my backpack, and head for Steamboat Mountain, a lumpy butte that rises 1,200 feet above the surrounding plain. I hike up a draw and find myself on a sky island. Here is a different sagebrush landscape from what I'm accustomed to seeing around the West. There are 150 million acres of sagebrush in the United States, and almost all of it is overgrazed, the ground underneath barren and exposed. Few people have seen a healthy sage-and-grass ecosystem, because few exist. This is one.
Broad meadows of sagebrush roll over the uplands. Beneath the small bushes I spy lupine, campion, larkspur, and bluebells. The grass is thick and rich. Groves of aspen and limber pine scatter across the hillsides, and in them I hear Clark's nutcrackers and Steller's jays. Mule ear sunflowers wave in the breeze. This is a robust sage environment, and it is one of the richest and most diverse ecosystems in the West.
"Compared to a mature forest, Big Sagebrush has a greater wealth of species," Bruce Welch, a U.S. Forest Service plant physiologist in Provo, Utah, told me. "The only thing I know of that has more species is riparian areas." Another sagebrush researcher described it to me as "a two-foot-high old-growth forest."
Welch reeled off a dazzling list of species that depend on sagebrush: eighty-seven mammals, ninety-four birds, sixteen Indian paintbrushes, twenty-four lichens, thirty-one fungi, thirty-two midges, fifty-two aphids, seventy-four spiders, twelve katydids, twelve grasshoppers. For many of these, sagebrush is critical habitat, without which they must perish or move.
I rest at the top of the climb and raise my binoculars. Magically, elk pop out of the landscape: four here, two there, eight on the next ridge. As dusk approaches I climb a small nub of rock -- remnants of a volcanic vent -- and gaze down, hidden, at twenty bull elk grazing 200 yards away on the sage-carpeted rim of the mountaintop. They are joined by several mule deer and antelope, watched over by a soaring ferruginous hawk, and mirrored by more elk browsing a mile away.
I bed down in the sage knowing there probably isn't another person sleeping within 10 miles of me. Maybe 20. I'm starting to understand why Mac Blewer compares this desert to the Serengeti. And I remember Leonard Hay, in his living room in Rock Springs. "Why do you want wilderness?" he had asked me. "What are you going to do with it?"
