Wilderness Study Area Designation for Steamboat Mountain?

by Mac Blewer

Steamboat Mountain Photo by Michael Evans

Last May, I watched a full lunar eclipse over Steamboat Mountain, as lightning f lared over the Red Desert and shooting stars fell. As the eclipse waned, the moon took on the appearance of a crocodile eye - orange, black and yellow - with a watchful crescent-shaped iris.

The usual poor-wills, coyotes and great horned owls called, as we conversed in front of our sage fire, perhaps in the same aspen groves that Ferdinand Hayden and Gustavius Doane had camped in during Hayden's 1877 expedition to Yellowstone. It felt good to be back in Dustin Springs for the first time since Fall 2002. Winter was fading, but not quite ready to relinquish its grip, judging by the chilly May air and the towering snow banks on north-facing slopes. Sleep came early.

I was accompanied by local naturalist Marian Doane, co-founder of Friends of the Red Desert and a relative of Gustavius Doane, on a weekend trek to conduct a wilderness survey to see if Steamboat Mountain could qualify as a designated wilderness study area.

If an area is proven to have wilderness characteristics - outstanding landscape qualities and opportunities for solitude - and thus qualifies as a wilderness study area (i.e. a potential wilderness area that requires further study before being designated as wilderness by Congress), the area is afforded increased protections from oil and gas development, mining and ATV use. Existing, valid grazing leases are still honored, and responsible hunting and other recreation activities are still allowed.

Although I believe that any fool can see that Steamboat Mountain proper, with its vast open tracks of sage and gnarled limber pines, its strange, undulating volcanic geological formations and its abundant wildlife and desert vistas, clearly qualified as wilderness, we had to conduct our survey by the book. Because the most important qualifying absence of buildings, two-tracks and roads, our survey concentrated on documenting these human activities on and around Steamboat.

After being roused early by love-struck f lickers, blackbirds, yellow warblers and towhees, we hoisted our packs, cameras and binoculars and started up Steamboat. Over the course of three days, we photographed and documented all two-tracks and other human signs - a rusty barbed-wire fence tangled in the aspens here, a shot-up 20-gallon oil drum there, some old Coors cans from the era before f lip-tops.

We stopped at the old buffalo wallows and long-abandoned wolf dens that WOC founder Tom Bell had shown us on our last trek here. And we photographed the mountain's vast prairie, in sunlight one day, and in rain, wind and mist the next. Although we found ample evidence of the desert elk that live here and use Steamboat's aspen groves and big sage as cover during calving, we only saw two elk on Steamboat over three days, a pregnant cow and a wary yearling, which peeked at us from their hiding place in the aspens nearly a mile away. We gave them a wide berth and hiked in the opposite direction.

What we found after hiking the periphery of the mountain and tromping around several of the mountain's drainages was that Steamboat Mountain proper indeed has wilderness characteristics. At the end of our research, we recommended to the BLM that 5,000 acres of Steamboat be designated as a wilderness study area.

Keeping in mind the importance of recreational access to Wyoming's public lands, we proposed that the mountain's surrounding camp sites and roads be left open, and that two two-tracks on top of the mountain be included in the wilderness proposal. However, we suggested closing four miles of the main, rocky two-track that cuts over the mountaintop and an illegal two-track jutting straight up the mountain above Jack Morrow Creek's headwaters.

We also recommended that other areas around Steamboat, including Blind Valley and Monument Ridge, be surveyed for wilderness characteristics. These areas contain many classic and unique wilderness qualities that exemplify the values that Congress, and the public, intended to protect for future generations with the passage of the Wilderness Act. I hope we will protect them.