Big Piney, Wyo. – To the cadre of sportsmen attempting to save the Wyoming Range from oil and gas development, the scene has become iconic. Whether captured on film or in the mind’s eye, the lingering image is of a large drilling platform poised above a small creek where swims a population of threatened cutthroat trout. It’s not a pretty sight.
For residents of western Wyoming, this little-known mountain range has become a sort of line in the sand in what has turned into an expanding effort throughout the Rockies to forestall a rampant wave of drilling.
From northern New Mexico to northwest Colorado to the Rocky Mountain Front of Montana, wildlife enthusiasts are fighting a sort of rear guard action to somehow ameliorate the oil and gas boom.
Nowhere has the effort gained sharper focus than in this obscure group of mountains not far from the Utah border.
“There’s a feeling that the state has given more than its share to energy development, that the Wyoming Range should be spared,” said Tom Reed, field coordinator for Trout Unlimited, one of 24 organizations signed on as Sportsmen for the Wyoming Range (www.WyomingRangeSportsmen.org).
What brings these mountains so sharply into focus, apart from the fact they have been only slightly scarred thus far, is the presence of three subspecies of cutthroat trout, the native trout of the West and a subject of environmental concern.
At a spot where roads diverge high in the range at a place called Tri Basin Divide, a single Forest Service sign points the way to three river systems, each with its own distinctive trout.
To the east, Fish Creek tumbles off toward that despised well platform and a union with the Green River, whose several headwaters contain other vestiges of the Colorado River cutt. The Greys River flows north with its cache of Snake River cutthroat, while the real treasure of the trio, the Bonneville, swims in the Smith Fork of the Bear River, a landlocked stream of Utah’s Great Basin. With the Yellowstone cutthroat, these make up the Cutt Slam touted by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department as the pinnacle of its angling success.
Add to these fishery concerns the disruption of big game migration routes, and Wyoming residents have ample reason to resent further incursion upon their wildlife resources. Gov. Dave Freu- denthal stands squarely behind a conservation effort also endorsed by the wildlife commission. John Barrasso, who in June replaced Craig Thomas in the U.S. Senate, has given indication he will support federal legislation that Thomas was poised to introduce before his death.
The effort to spare the range takes several courses. The most promising is legislation enabling a rollback of nondeveloped leases through a willing seller program through an independent arbitrator. Some 150,000 acres have been leased by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management dating to the 1950s, with a third of that under production, mostly in the southern end of the range. Development has been sparse thus far.
Reed readily acknowledges such a scheme would require millions of dollars, money that might be raised from sportsmen’s groups and foundations.
“This isn’t an in-your-face, ‘hate gas companies’ thing,” he declared. “We believe energy developers can gain tax credits, along with a wealth of good public relations while still showing a profit for their stockholders. We see it as a win-win proposition.”
Marc Smith, executive director of the Independent Petroleum Association of Rocky Mountain States, seems less certain about the initiative. “Where you get into the weeds with these negotiations is determining what’s fair,” Smith said while defending his industry’s ability to operate in a compatible environment with wildlife.
A second thrust involves a moratorium on further leasing; a recent proposed Forest Service lease sale of an additional 44,600 acres has been placed on hold by court order, Reed said. The principal focus is to keep drilling from expanding to the north end of the range and away from the Greys and Smith Fork river drainages to the west.
“We have to take a stand somewhere,” Reed said. “We have to say that you’re not going to foul every place.”
Staff writer Charlie Meyers can be reached at 303-954-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
