“You want to go where?
There’s nothing out there, you know.” That’s what
my friends from the Midwest said about Wyoming 15 years ago, when I
bolted the crowds and moved West. To mark that occasion, I recently
spent the anniversary of my escape in a vast desert that even
Wyomingites forsake for mountains and forests and streams, places
where there is, well, something.
I rose that morning at
the crack of dawn and headed west toward the Big Empty. Look at a
map of Wyoming. See that spot so apparently devoid of human
influence they place the state seal over it? Now head south, below
the heavily trafficked interstate, south of the clamorous energy
fields and gravel-dust roads.
Welcome to Adobe Town, the
location of Wyoming’s newest proposed wilderness in the
southern Red Desert of Sweetwater County.
Unlike my
native suburbia, this is a town that geology built. Its stony
spires and promontories have oriented travelers during 12,000 years
of human habitation in the region. In 1869, when the
government’s Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel
crossed the continent, the group fancied it saw remnants of a
vanished civilization in window rocks and stone facades. Most
likely, they gave Adobe Town its name. It’s an inhospitable
place, and today, the 180,910 acre-tract is unmarked by human hands
— unless you count the fingers of roads and well pads that have
crept into more than half of this stunning and ecologically
sensitive area. If energy developers have their way, bulldozers and
drilling rigs are ready to claim an even greater portion of the
area.
I knew a move was afoot by conservationists to urge
wilderness protection for Adobe Town, but so far only a smaller
Wilderness Study Area has been designated by the Bureau of Land
Management. I wasn’t sure how I’d explain this desire
for protection to folks who want our nation to develop more
domestic energy sources. After all, it takes at least an hour of
rough driving from the nearest paved road to reach Adobe Town. If
the energy developers want a piece of land that few people ever
visit, why not let them have it?
I put that question to
Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist whose organization, the
Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, is working with the BLM and
Wyoming’s congressional representatives. His group’s
goal is wilderness designation by Congress, because that’s
the only option that would permanently protect this landscape that
combines spectacular geological formations and abundant desert
wildlife.
Opening up Adobe Town for development, Molvar
said, would likely transform it into just another industrial
wasteland, where the scars of drilling and bulldozers carve up the
landscape into a maze of roads and pipelines that could take
centuries to heal. And if the wilderness study area is protected
but the rest of Adobe Town is left open to further industrial use,
then people visiting lofty overlooks atop the spectacular
thousand-foot height of the Skull Creek Rim could be looking out
across a landscape defaced by intensive oil and gas drilling.
I took a break from my quest for nothing and sat chewing
a cheese sandwich with wilted lettuce under the hot desert sun not
far from a dry streambed, which later that day would swell with
raging water from an afternoon thundershower. I remembered the wild
mustangs I’d seen flicking flies from their companions with
their tails, and the two antelope racing back and forth in the
desert apparently for the sheer heck of it. I listened to the
profound silence that made the wind chime through the rocks like a
hand bell choir and wondered how anyone could find
“nothing” in the sunset behind Adobe Town Rim.
I drove out along a high ridge overlooking the vast
rose-and-green striped badlands, which formed a kiln where surely
the West’s rainbows are born. I idly clicked on the car radio
and was startled to scan in more stations than I could find in
Laramie. That’s when I realized the truth of Wallace
Stegner’s statement that wilderness lands are “islands
in a tamed continent.” Once we lose those islands,
we’ll never get them back. Then we really will be left with
nothing.
Julianne Couch is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). She writes in Laramie,
Wyoming.
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