A New Tune for the Red Desert Blues
Future Hopes Pinned to National Conservation Area Designation
by Molly Absolon
 The rain started during the night. By morning we were camped in red gumbo that clung to our shoes. Each step was treacherous and slippery, not to mention tiring due to the weight of the mud. I looked at my group—a couple in their 60s, a family with two young children, two single parents with a child each—all of them out for an adventure. Unfortunately, we were getting a bit more of an adventure than we bargained for.
It wasn’t hard to make a decision. With rain and snow in the forecast, we turned around and hightailed it back to the trucks five miles away, making our getaway to avoid being mired indefinitely in mud. Our trip was aborted, but not before we experienced some of the eerie magic of the Red Desert: the surreal colors of the Honeycombs at sunset; the silence of empty spaces interrupted only by the wind; the bright unexpected splashes of pink bitterroot poking up out of the sand; a lone antelope standing guard on a low rise; and the sound of coyotes singing us to sleep.
The Red Desert is well known to Wyoming Outdoor Council members either through personal experience or through years of Frontline articles about the area. It is a land of dramatic contrasts that make it hard to characterize. You go from vast stretches of cracked mudflats to verdant springs; from isolated aspen groves to miles of stunted sagebrush; from emptiness to being surrounded by large herds of wild horses or racing pronghorn.
This part of Wyoming is home to 350 wildlife species, including elk, pronghorn, sage grouse, burrowing owls, myriad birds of prey, reptiles, and kangaroo rats. Swept clear of snow by relentless winds for much of the winter, the area provides crucial winter range for an array of migrating mammals, while in the spring it is a birthing and nesting site. The desert’s distinctive landmarks—the Boar’s Tusk, the Oregon Buttes, and Steamboat Mountain—guided emigrants on their way west and served as important sacred spots for the indigenous people who lived and hunted here for thousands of years.
But in spite of its beauty, cultural significance and abundant wildlife, the Red Desert is not an easy place. You can read journals from Overland Trail emigrants describing snowstorms in August, impassable mud after rains, and insufferable heat in October. Some things haven’t changed.
Others have. As you are well aware, energy development—with its roads, well pads, compressor stations, power lines, truck traffic and more—is already affecting parts of the Red Desert. Damage has also occurred as a result of everything from motorized recreation to the web of fences stretching across the area that block wildlife movement and fragment habitat. Years of drought have taken a toll on the quality of forage available in the desert causing declines in wildlife already stressed by human-caused impacts.
 The Wyoming Outdoor Council has been working with our members and allies to protect this unique landscape since our founding 38 years ago. One of WOC founder Tom Bell’s first efforts was to push for the area to be designated as a North American Antelope Range. His concept was not new. Lander resident Dr. Frank Dunham proposed that the desert be set aside as a winter game preserve back in 1898, and in 1935 Wyoming Governor Leslie Miller sought to have the area transformed into the Great Divide Basin National Park. People like Dunham, Miller and Bell have recognized that this is a place that deserves to be protected for more than 100 years. Today, we remain committed to carrying on the effort.
National Conservation Area
Our current efforts have coalesced into a campaign to have the northern Red Desert—approximately 300,000 acres around the Jack Morrow Hills Planning Area—designated by Congress as a National Conservation Area. National Conservation Areas are part of the Bureau of Land Management’s National Landscape Conservation System, which was established in June 2000 by then Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. The mission of this system is to “conserve, protect and restore nationally significant landscapes that have outstanding cultural, ecological, and scientific values for the benefit of current and future generations.” (See accompanying story on the NLCS on page 6.)
The National Landscape Conservation System consists of all of the Bureau of Land Management’s National Monuments, National Conservation Areas, Wilderness Areas, Wilderness Study Areas, Wild and Scenic Rivers, and National Historic and Scenic Trails. In Wyoming, this includes 42 Wilderness Study Areas—including seven in the proposed National Conservation Area—as well as the Continental Divide Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express Trail, the California Trail and the Nez Perce Trail.
Specifically, National Conservation Areas are designated by Congress to provide for the “conservation, use, enjoyment, and enhancement of select natural areas, recreational destinations, paleontological sites, and other special environments, including fish and wildlife habitat.” The BLM currently manages 14 National Conservation Areas across the West, with the most well known being the 10-million plus acre California Desert Conservation Area and Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area outside of Las Vegas.
BLM Unlikely To Provide Adequate Protections On Its Own
For years, the Wyoming Outdoor Council and our allies have sought to work with the BLM through the National Environmental Policy Act to come up with common sense solutions and alternatives for protecting the Red Desert, but increasingly it is becoming obvious that this effort is unlikely to be successful.
The BLM is under clear direction from the Bush administration to expedite energy development on public lands, regardless of its sensitivity or historical uses. Furthermore, since the beginning of 2005, the Wyoming BLM has announced changes in its policies that are effectively cutting people out of the planning process. These changes include shortening the time to review and protest lease sales; charging for access to public documents; failing to extend comment periods in spite of website failures and incomplete information; and refusing to consider public comments based on unclear requirements.
As a result, we have come to believe that National Conservation Area designation—which is an act of Congress rather than an administrative decision by the BLM— is the best way to ensure the Red Desert remains a living, vibrant landscape for generations to come.
The Jack Morrow Hills Coordinated Activity Plan
In the meantime, the Jack Morrow Hills Coordinated Activity Plan, which was released in the summer of 2004, remains in limbo. The Wyoming Outdoor Council, and a number of others, filed protests of the plan alleging that it failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act because it does not provide adequate protections for big game, sage grouse and water, and because it largely ignored the approximately 100,000 public comments submitted on behalf of conservation.
“One of the biggest problems with the BLM’s plan is that it is largely a ‘trust us’ kind of a document,” says Bruce Pendery, the public lands director at the Wyoming Outdoor Council. “It is too vague and too discretionary. While the BLM has recommended that environmentally sensitive development occur in some places, there is no hard-core commitment or enforcement to those recommendations. Hence the reason we filed a protest. It’s hard to trust the agency based on its current track record.”
According to BLM regulations, these protests should have been acted on 90 days after they were filed. Months have passed since that deadline came and went, and the BLM has still not reached a final decision on the future management for the Jack Morrow Hills.
“You can read this failure to act as a recognition of the plan’s shortcomings,” Pendery says. “But even if they revise the plan based on our input, given the BLM’s recent decision-making pattern both in Wyoming and all over the West—I am not optimistic any alternative will live up to our desires.
“The BLM has not shown the leadership or courage required to put even the smallest piece of public land off limits to drilling. For this reason, we believe it is time to take the future of the Red Desert to the people.”
Throughout the planning process for the Jack Morrow Hills, people from all walks of life have agreed that the Red Desert was different and worth saving. Now they have to come together again.
Says Lander resident and owner of Thornberry Automotive, Mark Thornberry: “Enough is enough. Wyoming has always been known for its wide-open spaces and its opportunities for citizens to travel and recreate in landscapes largely untouched by industry. Despite the hardships of living here, that’s why many of us choose to live in this state. The Red Desert is a national treasure worth protecting. Some of it should just be left alone.”
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