Sometime in late June or early July, in a part of western Wyoming informally called the Golden Triangle, sage grouse start to roam. Moms and chicks relocate from dry, harsh desert to higher, greener pastures in search of blooming wildflowers and skittering beetles. And because those chicks are at their gangly teenage stage — far from the competent adult fliers that glide effortlessly over the high plains — they walk. For as far as 20 miles.
These sagebrush-covered foothills of primarily Bureau of Land Management land have a higher concentration of sage grouse than anywhere else on the planet, likely in part because the birds have room to move.
More than a thousand elk winter there, too, sustained by the high-elevation landscape’s cured grasses, dried wildflowers and shrubs. So do pronghorn and mule deer, wintering or using the area as a stopover on their journeys, which include the longest documented mule deer and pronghorn migrations in the Lower 48.
The Golden Triangle is 280,000 acres of superlatives, “the best of the best,” said Tom Christiansen, a retired Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist who worked in the area for more than 30 years. Perennial and intermittent streams emerge from cracks and meander down wrinkles in the hills, creating wet meadows and irrigated pastures even at higher elevations. So far, the land has been relatively untouched by invasive species like cheatgrass.
But the future of the region and its inhabitants hangs on by little more than a thread. It is one of only a handful of places in oil and gas-rich southwestern Wyoming not currently available for leasing, and the management plan protecting it is facing unprecedented attacks. Conservation groups fear it may be opened to fossil fuel development as the BLM rushes to rewrite the rules governing the area, Congress overturns recently approved land-use plans across the West, and the Trump administration pushes for energy dominance above all else.
“There used to be a lot more of the best,” Christiansen said. “But this is about the last of it.”
UNDER THE BLM’S own management plan, the Golden Triangle is off-limits to drilling. But that didn’t stop the agency from announcing in October that nearly 20,000 acres could be available for oil and gas leasing. (Almost 75% of the 3.5 million acres that include the Golden Triangle — the subsurface mineral estate overseen by the BLM’s Rock Springs field office — is already available.) Two months later, the BLM reversed course. The Golden Triangle parcels were never intended for leasing, said BLM Wyoming public affairs leader Micky Fisher. The announcement was simply to identify areas drilling companies were interested in before the agency filtered out those that could not be leased. This was unusual: Typically, according to Fisher, the BLM would filter out unavailable leases before making an announcement. A revised document posted in late December no longer included the Golden Triangle.
But the fact that the BLM proposed the parcels in the first place alarmed conservation groups.
The BLM decides what is and isn’t allowed in different areas based on resource management plans. These weighty documents tell local field staff how to respond to requests to graze cattle, mine trona, drill for oil or build new hiking or mountain- biking trails. Members of the public are involved throughout the agency-led process, including through countless meetings, discussions and public comment periods responding to environmental impact statements. Plans often take years or even a decade to complete.
“There used to be a lot more of the best. But this is about the last of it.”
The current plan for the Rock Springs area was finalized in late 2024, after more than 13 years of deliberation. But the BLM announced in October that it will spend one year overhauling portions of it. Not only is it uncommon to dramatically change a recently approved plan, but to do it in the span of a year is “disrespectful of the communities that have put a lot of time and effort into this,” said Julia Stuble, The Wilderness Society’s Wyoming state director.
A BLM news release said the possible changes are a response to President Donald Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, which, it says, directs “federal agencies to reassess policies that may unnecessarily restrict access to domestic energy and mineral resources.” The release specifically called for reexamining areas of critical environmental concern — such as the Golden Triangle — to see if protections are still warranted.
Conservation groups acknowledge that stipulations on drilling can help alleviate negative impacts. The BLM, for example, can designate certain areas open to leasing with “no surface occupancy,” meaning companies can access underground oil and gas only through technologies like horizontal drilling. One well pad might connect to a dozen wells that extend for miles beneath the surface, eliminating the need for a dozen different well pads scattered around.
But enacting such stipulations is getting harder: Historically, BLM field staff could add restrictions during leasing. Now, thanks to the 2025 Big Beautiful Bill, they must be written into the management plan before an area is leased.
And once an area is leased and then developed, wildlife generally pay the price, said Hall Sawyer, a longtime Wyoming biologist. A paper he authored in 2017 showed that mule deer herds declined by nearly 40% after development of the Pinedale Anticline, another sagebrush-covered landscape less than 50 miles away.
“If it’s important habitat, don’t lease it, because after that you lose control over being able to protect the resource,” he said.
THE THREAT OF leasing and drilling in the Golden Triangle is one more example of Congress and the current administration pushing past historic norms, said David Willms, the National Wildlife Federation’s associate vice president of public lands.
In late 2025, House and Senate Republicans used the Congressional Review Act to throw out the newest version of five resource management plans in whole or in part: one in North Dakota, another in Alaska, amendments in Wyoming and Montana and a record of decision in Alaska. House Republicans also used the Congressional Review Act to begin reversing the withdrawal of a mineral lease near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota, and are reportedly considering using it to overturn the resource management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.
When management plans are overturned, they revert to older versions that don’t take into account new science on migrations, for example, or the effectiveness of energy- development stipulations. The older plans — sometimes decades old — also offer no real insight into how the land will be managed in a future shaped by climate change, data centers and increased recreation.
But if Republicans cont-inue rewriting or overturning management plans, then future Democratic administrations are likely to remake them, too. At some point, locals will stop feeling like their voices matter, Willms said. “If those people are too burnt out and don’t show up to help with that, what kind of plan do you end up with? Probably one driven out of D.C., which is not what people want.”
That’s why Willms and others stressed how important it is for anyone who cares about the ecological future of the Golden Triangle — and all those sage grouse racing to greener pastures — to stay involved. The loss of all those superlatives is not yet a foregone conclusion.
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This article appeared in the March 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Weakening the rules.”
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