Dick Baldes Receives "Lifetime Achievement Award"

This July at the 1999 Wyoming Conservation Congress conference in Casper, WOC and the other groups that comprise the Wyoming Conservation Congress honored Dick Baldes with a "Lifetime Achievement Award." This is only the second time such an award has been presented by the Congress to an individual who has shown a lifetime of commitment, passion, achievement and leadership in conservation efforts in Wyoming. The first award was presented in 1995 in Rock Springs to renowned Wyoming geologist Dr. David Love.

Dick Baldes, a fisheries and wildlife biologist, was project leader at the Lander U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office for 25 years. He is a long-time board member of the National Wildlife Federation and an enrolled member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe.  Dan Neal, co-editor of The Casper Star-Tribuneand an old friend of Dick’s, presented the award with an eloquent speech, excerpted below.

I am here to celebrate the life-long efforts of a conservationist whose bright mind may be outshone only by the passionate intensity for wildlife that burns within him.

DickBaldes is a friend of mine who also happens to be one of my personal heroes.

I first met Dick shortly after I went to work for Bob Peck at the Riverton Ranger and became that newspaper’s roving reporter. The Wind River Reservation then and now holds a magnetic attraction for me. It’s a place of startling beauty and of startling contrasts. Many tribal people there struggle in poverty but remain because of a sense of belonging and community and their love for the Wind River valley.

That’s not to say there are no differences, no politics. The reservation seethes with politics. There are inter-family politics that remind me of the feuding in Huckleberry Finn. There are factional politics within the tribes, inter-tribal politics, state politics, federal politics, water politics, wildlife politics and perhaps most complicated of all, racial politics. Don’t ask me to sort it out for you. But this is where I found Dick.

Over the years I watched Dick operate in his world that included functioning in the bureaucracy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of the Interior. He was a master — successfully fighting off at least two efforts to close the Lander office. But he never allowed the intrigue of politics to divert his mind and heart from the main chance. He always, always kept the needs of fish and wildlife in view.

There were losses that he had to endure but there were great gains. Convincing the people of the reservation of the need for a game code to regulate the killing of wildlife may be his greatest achievement. He didn’t do it alone. Such great gains rarely are made by one individual. But the reservation game code came from deep in Dick’s heart. He provided the reasoning, the statistics, the rhetoric, the cultural answers, the humor and the scheming that added up to the irresistible force that resulted in the final adoption of the code in 1984.

The passage of the game code paved the way for a number of reintroduction efforts on the Wind River Reservation because the existence of the hunting code cleared the major obstacle to getting help from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

In 1995, Dick and people like Kevin Hurley and Robb Hitchcock put together an effort to reestablish bighorn sheep in the Wind River Canyon that involved the tribes, Game and Fish, Fish and Wildlife, and even the Burlington Northern Railroad. They’ve seen three good years of reproduction. It was Dick who called the transplant "the biggest wildlife event on the reservation since the game code was enacted."

The ability to simplify a complicated debate is one of Dick’s great talents as a wildlife advocate. Many people here know that one of Dick’s unending battles on the reservation has been with the Midvale and LeClair Irrigation districts.

Dick thinks the irrigators should feel a moral obligation to keep enough water in Bull Lake Creek and the Wind River for fish living in them. The irrigators don’t.

And they have been willing to use every twist and turn in federal and state law to avoid that simple moral obligation. They obfuscated the debate with smoke screens that included timing of water releases, drought, market prices, and remembrances of the nobility of the small family farmer, not to mention claims they were doing all they could.

Dick simplified the argument. He went out to the river and took pictures of a bone-dry riverbed.

I know the ups and downs of the fight with the irrigators have provided Dick with some of his greatest highs and worst lows. For a while the tribes ensured flows. Then the Wyoming courts took the water away.

But Dick and the National Wildlife Federation in 1994 successfully forced the LeClair to remove a 900-foot-long dike along the Wind River the district had built illegally.

In another effort that no doubt endeared him to the less wildlife-friendly groups in Wyoming, Dick advocated for wolves, playing his card as an enrolled member of the Shoshone Tribe when he spoke at a Jackson rally and noted that American Indians "had lived in harmony with wolves since Time began." Had the Yellowstone reintroduction plan somehow been thwarted, I would not have been surprised to see the sovereign tribes of the Wind River Reservation propose bringing wolves there.

Dick Baldes would have been lurking in the shadows like a lobo.

This award recognizes a lifetime of work but this is no old man. Dick continues to work publicly and behind the scenes for Yellowstone’s bison, Wind River’s bighorns, and for wildlife throughout the West.

He speaks for those who have no voice — and for the rest of us who believe that a hundred years from now we all will be remembered for whether we found the will to protect the open spaces and the wildlife that make sane living possible in Wyoming. It is my great honor to present this award.