Dick and Judy Inberg are, at first glance, opposites. Dick at 6’4” is tall and gangly. He looks like the muleskinner he is in his plaid flannel shirt, suspenders and slouching posture. His face is lined, with kind, deep-set eyes and a thick white mustache. He politely removes his cowboy hat as he enters my office, leaving a crease across his brow. Beside him, Judy is petite and looks like a schoolteacher or businesswoman. A small tidy woman with round wire glasses and neatly cropped graying hair, she has a patient way of deferring to her husband as we talk. They are a humble pair and it is only after some prying that I began to get a sense of how much I—and others who cherish Wyoming’s open spaces—owe the couple for their years of effort protecting the lands I love.

Today Judy and Dick are hard at work fighting for yet another cause: their beloved backcountry, specifically roadless areas in the Shoshone National Forest.

“I came out here in 1959 to work as an engineer in the uranium mines in the Gas Hills near Riverton. I didn’t like it much at all when I first arrived,” Dick recalls. “But then I went into the mountains backpacking and I fell in love with the country.

“That’s what we live here for. If it wasn’t for the wild backcountry, I wouldn’t be here.”

Dick’s backpacking career did not last long. He’d grown up in northern Wisconsin canoe camping and he quickly saw that horses were the most appropriate ‘canoe’ for Wyoming’s terrain. Backpacking gear was heavy and uncomfortable in those days, plus the distances in the Shoshone were too great to get very far, even on a week-long hiking trip. Horses, and later mules, became the Inberg’s porters and companions.

The couple’s favorite place to ride is in the Dunoir Special Management Area, a roadless area in the Shoshone National Forest near Dubois. They can get there from their home in Riverton easily for a day ride that quickly takes them away from the bustle of their everyday lives into the solitude of the craggy high peaks and blustery plateaus of the Absaroka Range.

Dick and Judy do occasionally make pack trips into wilderness, but Judy says she is a really a “softy” and prefers riding on trails through meadows rather than over rock and ice. Much of the designated wilderness in the Shoshone National Forest is, according to her, “not very horse friendly” and the Inberg’s are first and foremost riders. They want to see the backcountry protected for riding, hence their interest in roadless areas.

In January, Dick and his friend and colleague, Al Sammons, made a presentation on behalf of the Wind River Chapter of the Backcountry Horsemen of America on horse use in the Shoshone National Forest for the forest’s government cooperators group. The government cooperators group is working on coming up with recommendations for the new forest plan, which will be completed in 2008. Dick and Al wanted to show the economic impact of recreational horse use in the communities around the Shoshone National Forest. Fremont County has the most horses per capita in Wyoming with Park County coming in second. Their contribution to these rural economies is more than $6 million according to Al’s calculations and for these people to be happy, they need quiet, well-maintained trails in non-motorized primitive areas.

“We avoid areas with a lot of four-wheelers,” Dick says. “Part of the experience we are looking is solitude, quiet, uncrowded. When someone fires up their four-wheeler you can hear it a quarter of a mile away.

“We deal with so many finite resources in the world. Oil and gas are finite. If you over-timber, timber is finite. Same with grazing. Once the forest becomes motorized, it becomes a finite resource because of the physical impacts. One can argue that horses leave lasting impacts too and that is true in places where they are overused or when people aren’t using proper techniques to minimize their impacts, but Backcountry Horsemen have a tradition of volunteer service. We really work hard to take care of the lands we use.”

That volunteer service added up to over 36,000 hours between 1996 and 2004 and equated to more than $500,000 of donated time and materials according to Dick and Al’s presentation. But Dick, who is one of the volunteer leaders, acknowledges that it is getting harder to do the labor needed to maintain the area’s trail system.

“We’re all getting old. I’m going to be 70 soon, Al’s a year older,” Dick says. “We don’t have a lot of young people coming up. The younger generation is different. [The environment] isn’t a priority for them. It seems like we are losing our hunting and fishing ethic.”

“It seems like the younger generation isn’t interested,” Judy adds, “Lots of service groups are having trouble attracting young people. They just don’t join. I’m puzzled.

“It’s not only Wyoming, but it does seem that Wyoming has gotten polarized and crazy over environmental and conservation issues. These days anything environmental is evil around here. There seems to be a disrespect for the environment and the people that work for it, I don’t know why.”

Nonetheless, Dick is optimistic about the planning process for the Shoshone National Forest. He truly believes that the forest planners will listen to people in the public, and for that reason he is quick to encourage citizens to write the forest with their personal vision for the way they want the Shoshone to be managed.

“Our backcountry is very, very important,” Dick says. “Not just for recreation but for wildlife, water quality, air quality… Once it is roaded, motorized and torn up, we don’t have a backcountry. We won’t get it back. I’ve seen this happen back East. They roaded all the forests, logged everything, killed all the animals and now 50 years later they are saying, ‘Hey what did we do?’ I don’t want to see that happen here.

“I’ve got a lot invested in this,” Dick says as he and Judy get up to leave. “We lost a son to this cause. It means a great deal to us.”

The Inberg’s son, Kirk, was a bear biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. In 1991, Kirk was on a routine tracking mission to locate a wounded grizzly bear in the Absaroka Mountains when the plane he was flying in went down. Kirk, biologist Kevin Roy, and pilot Ray Austin were all killed. Kirk loved the area where he worked and died and so do his parents. Today, the Absarokas remain one of Dick and Judy’s favorite places to ride. Like their son, they treasure these lands and are committed to ensuring that they remain protected. It is their living legacy for Kirk.