I was stuck. My Subaru wagon had slid off the road—or what I thought was a road but quickly realized had only been cleared for snowmobiles. After an hour of struggle assisted by a helpful couple I waylaid, the car was just a little closer to the road and a lot deeper in the snow. Then he arrived. Over the crest of the hill, John Fandek appeared with his trusty steed, only the steed was a large shiny tractor that had the horsepower and traction to tow me out with ease.

John Fandek has lived in the Upper Green River Valley for the last 42 years. He came to the valley fresh out to the Army and never left, but now he’s beginning to wonder if he’s here for good. “I get so discouraged by what is happening here. I think about picking up and moving, but where the hell do you go?” Fandek asks.

Fandek is discouraged by the changes in the Upper Green River Valley resulting from the oil and gas boom. In particular, the people flooding into the area upset him.

When I look around the valley, I see miles of empty space, abundant wildlife, amazing views—and not a lot of people. Pinedale feels small—there’s just one grocery store, which closes at 6 p.m. and you pass through the main part of town in less than a minute. But for Fandek, the place is almost unrecognizable and the changes are driving him to speak out against rampant development.

“The development is happening way too fast,” he says. “There’s a gold rush mentality here. Everything I like to do—hunt, fish—has had a people impact. There are more cars, more crime, more drugs. “What we are losing is worth a whole lot more than the natural gas. But all people see are dollar signs.” Fandek talks to me about his concerns as we load hay for the elk at the feedground north of Cora, where he has worked for the past 25 years. He uses a horse-drawn sleigh to feed the approximately 750 elk that winter here.

Today, the elk are hungry. Because of the debacle with my car, we are hours later than normal, so the elk crowd up closely. They look healthy and fat. It has been a mild winter. The calves have blots of blue paint on their hair where Fandek hit them with a paintball last week to mark them as he vaccinated for brucellosis. He’s skeptical about the effectiveness of the vaccine, but it is part of his job.

Project Plowshare & Project Rulison

Project Wagon Wheel was part of Project Plowshare, a program created by the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Department of Energy) to find peaceful industrial applications for nuclear devices. The commission proposed using nuclear bombs to blast out canals, create underground reservoirs, carve roads into mountainsides, open up harbors, and stimulate the release of natural gas fields. The term Ploughshare comes from the Bible, Isaiah 2:4, which talks about transforming “swords into plowshares.” In this case, the bombs were the swords.

Between 1958 and 1975, the Atomic Energy Commission conducted 27 nuclear tests in sites scattered around Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, Nevada, and New Mexico. Some of these projects, particularly Project Rulison, which took place near Silt, Colo., have come back to haunt today’s natural gas developers. Wyoming’s project—Project Wagon Wheel—never took place.

For more information on Project Plowshare and Project Rulison, see the March 7 issue of High Country News.

The horses walk along slowly, pausing for Fandek to cut the strings on the hay bales, and moving forward again as he drives one-handed and kicks flakes off the sleigh every 40 feet or so. Fandek is in his early 60s, but he looks ageless. He’s lean and tall with skin creased from years of working outside as a ranchhand. He tosses around 125-pound bales of hay with practiced efficiency, but says he’s told the Wyoming Fish and Game Department if the bales are this heavy next year, he’s quitting. I try to help, but I’m not used to moving hay bales and I’m probably more of a nuisance than anything. Fandek tolerates my awkwardness without complaint.

Fandek’s opposition to irresponsible oil and gas development is not a recent position. In the 1960s, he says the government came up with a program called Project Wagon Wheel that called for using nuclear bombs to fracture the tight sandstone formations underlying the Upper Green River Valley to release natural gas. Fandek thought it was a bad idea.

“I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper stating my opinion,” he recalls. “I was working for El Paso Gas at the time. My supervisor called me into his office after my letter came out and told me I was out of line, so I quit.

“I’ve never been much of a joiner, but I know what I believe in and I’m not afraid to speak out. I know there is a hell of a lot more value in the Upper Green River Valley than oil and gas.”

The horses have come to a stop. Fandek doesn’t urge them forward. Instead, we lean against the front of the sleigh and look around. It is a warm day for February in the Upper Green River Valley, and the sun feels good on our faces. From our vantage point we can see little in the way of human disturbance. The hills roll up toward the Gros Ventre and Wind River Mountains. Across the valley, the Wyoming Range stretches off toward the south. Fandek points to a spot across the Green River where the Astorians camped on their disastrous trip to the West Coast to establish a fur trading company for John Jacob Astor nearly 200 years ago. This part of the valley looks much the same as it did then.

The elk we’re feeding stay close to the lines of hay. You can see their tracks on the surrounding hillsides, but outside the feedground fences, the snow is untracked. These rolling river bottomlands are private lands, and the elk are not welcome. Oil and gas development has not come this far north, and in fact much of the area here along the Wind River Front has been withdrawn from leasing. A bone for conservationists, according to Fandek, who says there isn’t much potential for gas here anyway. Everything else, he says, seems to be up for grabs.

“Industry is dropping money everywhere,” Fandek says. “It appears as if they can do anything they want. The BLM has become their puppet. I think people are going to wake up one day and be really sorry for what they’ve lost.”

In the meantime, Fandek, who seems to prefer going quietly about his business, has been openly vocal about his desire to see the development slow down and for other factors, such as wildlife, water quality, air quality, and quality of life, to be given equal attention in planning. Unfortunately, he is not optimistic his voice will be heard.