Losing my place

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I think all of us are influenced by a sense of place. Grow up amidst skyscrapers and it’s pretty easy to see humans as life’s central architects. Spend enough time in the wide-open West and you just might feel a bit less important in the overall scheme of things.

For me, place is profoundly important to who I am. It has been that way as long as I can remember and it has shaped me to my core.

In the small town where I was born in Oklahoma, there was a spot called Red Hill. It wasn’t a dramatic vista by Colorado standards, but it offered a placid view of the Canadian River with its sandbars and giant cottonwoods as it wound its way across the Great Plains. As a kid, it felt like I could see forever. I still retreat to the comforting familiarity of that place when I get the chance.

Over the years, I’ve found myself in a few locations that have inexplicably moved me. For instance, places that have made me feel like I was home even though I’d never been there before. I remember feeling that way on the far eastern coast of Maine near Quoddy Head and Lubec. I imagined ending my days in a tiny bungalow atop a cliff looking out over the Bay of Fundy. That feeling is with me still even though I haven’t returned there for many years. It’s a part of me now.

I have also experienced places that felt as though they had been molded from my own psyche, as if I had imagined the perfect place and then discovered it.

One such place has been coming to mind a lot these days. But sadly, for all the wrong reasons.

I made my first trip to Wyoming’s Red Desert in 1990. The sign said Wamsutter, Wyo., but it seemed like more letters than a gas station posing as a town along the emptiest stretch of Interstate-80 deserved. Wamsutter served two purposes back then. It allowed travelers to get from Rawlins to Rock Springs without running out of gas, a particularly noble calling in the winter. And, more importantly to me, it marked the location of an unnamed dirt road heading north into a place unlike any other in the world, a place that in many ways no longer exists.

It has been almost a quarter century since the Nature Conservancy first sent me to photograph Wyoming’s Red Desert, the big empty spot on Wyoming maps located above the tiny dot marked “Wamsutter.” At the time, I had never heard of the place and had no idea what to expect. I could not have imagined the impact it would have on my life.

The Red Desert is huge. It encompasses 9,320 square miles and is the largest unfenced area in the continental U.S. I-80 cuts across its southern quarter. Highway 287 runs up its eastern side and then angles across its northern edge, following the route of the historic Oregon Trail whose 350,000 travelers between the 1840s and 1860s wanted no part of the arid Red Desert. The Green River creates the boundary to the west.

On that first visit, my map showed only two dirt roads dissecting this massive, nearly treeless wilderness larger than some states. Just imagine that, two rough and nearly unused dirt roads in 9,320 square miles.

On that first trip I parked my van in the middle of one of those two roads for several days. It had rained and I was afraid of getting stuck in the soft desert soil if I pulled off. Cell phones didn’t exist back then and getting stranded in such a remote place was the kind of mistake that could land you in a Jon Krakauer book. I worried about blocking the road, but I needn’t have. Not a single vehicle ever came along, not a car in three days.

I had found my paradise. 

Walking through the Red Desert back then was like nothing I had ever experienced. The dark-red earth was an endless array of interconnected cracks that stretched to the horizon. Every few steps led to another collection of bleached white bones; sometimes belonging to a horse, sometimes an antelope, sometimes just a jaw bone or skull and occasionally an entire skeleton still positioned just as it had fallen.

It all felt so prehistoric, so empty, so lonely. It was instantly my favorite secret in the world.

To the west, the ground turned from red cracked dirt to white, hard-packed sand and the sagebrush and clump grass gave way to the black rock spires, white cliffs and painted dry layers of the Jack Morrow Hills. Mountains were visible in the distance to the east and north. To the northwest, sand dunes stood out against the backdrop of distant mountains.

Not just any dunes. Like everything in the Red Desert, they have an impressive resume. These dunes are, in fact, the largest living dune system in the United States.

Named the Killpecker Dunes, they cover 110,000 acres or just more than 170 square miles. Some of them are more than 100 feet tall. In 1990, I didn’t see a footprint or a tire track on a single dune even though motor vehicles were allowed to drive right over them. Their wind-sculpted shapes and swirled sand patterns created an endless outdoor gallery for my benefit. They turned orange against the dark sky when the sun came and went. They were something to behold.

The Red Desert is also home to one of the nation’s largest populations of wild horses. Herds of 10 to 20 dot the landcape. Harems of mares graze while stallions stare you down when you get a step too close. The wild horses here are distinguished by their extra long manes and tails. I just remember thinking they looked at home and I felt the same way.

The dunes are the biggest and so are the antelope, at least when it comes to herd size. The Red Desert boasts the largest migratory herd of pronghorns in the lower 48 — somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 animals. The Bureau of Land Management also claims the desert is home to the world’s largest herd of desert elk. I hope that’s still true. But there is reason to doubt it.

You can still find skeletons of buffalo near the dunes, evidence of another great migration that once passed this way, one that disappeared well over a century ago thanks to our lack of vision. I fear our commitment to the future hasn’t gotten much better since.

These giant herds were long a food source for Native Americans living in or visiting the region. In more modern times the Shoshone, Crow and Blackfeet spent time in the desert as evidenced by the many petroglyphs and pictographs they left behind. But even more ancient people left their marks in these high-desert rocks. Petroglyphs at the Bores Tusk formation and at Black Rock date back nearly 12,000 years making them some of the oldest rock carvings in the U.S. Researchers believe these older glyphs were made for spiritual and ceremonial purposes, which makes sense. The place inspires such reverence, or at least it did.

Along the white sandstone cliffs south of the dunes, there is an amazing wall of rock carvings near some shallow caves and overhangs. One of the carvings is in the shape of a hand, but it is unlike any I have seen before. It is several inches deep and open at the bottom. It’s the first thing you come to and it invites you to place your hand inside. And once you do, it is impossible not to think of all the people who have done the same for thousands of years. I found it a powerful experience.

Maybe it was the isolation or maybe the sound of the wind given voice as it moved through the grass, whatever it was about that wall of carvings, it gave me a deeper connection to this vast unspoiled wilderness.

The Red Desert holds your soul like it does the rain. It’s the only place that keeps its water forever trapped with no escape to an ocean. At its north end, the Continental Divide splits into two separate strands; one that makes its way along the eastern edge of the desert while the other runs further to the west. These two Continental Divides rejoin at the southern tip of the desert creating what is known as the Great Divide Basin, a geological quirk that allows no water between the two divides to flow east or west to any ocean.

Unfortunately, the same unique natural forces that formed the Red Dessert are now, in a way, responsible for its destruction.

More than water was trapped here. 

During the Paleocene and later epochs, the Red Desert was covered by an ancient lake called Gosiute. It trapped between 10,000 and 20,000 feet of sediment in the geographic basin of the Red Desert. This sediment became shale and today, the Red Desert is cursed to sit atop the world’s largest known oil-shale deposit.

I love the Red Dessert. It is a place that I have walked with friends and family many times. I have shared it with those closest to me because doing so allowed them to know me in a deeper way, to understand who I am.

It is the place that I have felt more connected to than any other, but it’s gone now, and in some ways, so am I.

I wasn’t exaggerating before when I said the Red Desert no longer really exists.

It is beyond my comprehension that this place of wild horses and giant herds of antelope and desert elk; this place of sand dunes and the oldest messages from our earliest ancestors; this place of bones and solitude that had existed nearly free of our influence for millions of years has now been completely destroyed in little more than a decade.

Here is one last maddening fact about the Red Desert. As of 2014, 84 percent of it has now been industrialized by the oil and gas industry.

This once roadless paradise is now an endless tangle of graveled roads connecting thousands of wellpads. Wamsutter has become a man-camp of shoddy pressboard housing units, trailers and storage yards filled with pipe. An endless train of white pickups coming and going 24/7 now disperse up the same road to the north that once led so very few to so very much.

So how did it happen? Why didn’t we stop it?

The very thing that made the Red Desert a paradise allowed its murder to go largely unnoticed.

The whole place is BLM land and the Cheney/Bush years were hard on BLM land. But I don’t limit my rage. President Obama has often boasted that his administration has increased oil and gas production on public lands to a greater extent than his predecessor, and he’s telling the truth.

The destruction of our last remaining wilderness areas has become a game of corporate-pleasing one-upmanship that neither party has the wisdom to lose. They need to stop playing. But they won’t so long as our system of campaign finance treats money as speech. It has become the only language Washington can hear.

So for now, both parties remain committed to the destruction of any place found guilty of concealing a hydrocarbon.

How did I lose my place? The sad answer is that our government gave the Red Desert to the oil and gas industry because it could; because no one was watching; because no one lived there. There was simply nobody around to hear the scream when the trigger was pulled.

I know I didn’t do enough to stop it. And now I’ve lost a big piece of who I am … or was.

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