Outdoors crowd plays larger role in West’s development debates

RIFLE, Colo. — Outdoors guide Keith Goddard remembers when he could go for hours or even days and not see another person on top of western Colorado’s Roan Plateau.

“Up until a few years ago, you could stand right here all day long, and if you’d seen one or two vehicles, you’d seen a bunch,” Goddard said, peering from a field of wildflowers to rocky, wooded slopes below.

As he spoke, three 18-wheelers sped by in a noisy reminder of the natural gas boom many expect to get even bigger in this stretch of land 180 miles west of Denver. It is prized by both energy companies and by people like Goddard, a 42-year-old member of the so-called hook and bullet crowd that is wielding more and more clout when it comes to managing public land — clout that’s being noticed by industry officials and politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Fearing that energy development sweeping through the Rockies could permanently scar the landscape, hunters and anglers are forming alliances with environmental groups like The Wilderness Society and Sierra Club.

The two sides, who have sparred in the past, are trying to protect such areas as northern Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, Wyoming’s Jack Morrow Hills and New Mexico’s Valle Vidal.

Trout Unlimited, a group historically focused on the nation’s trout and salmon fisheries, recently toured the Roan Plateau before the Bureau of Land Management releases its final environmental impact statement — in essence, the management options — for drilling public land in the area. That report is expected next month.

“For the last three years, we’ve been organizing hunters and anglers all over the West on energy-related issues because there’s just been an unprecedented amount of gas and oil development going on all over the West in some of our last remaining wild places,” said David Stalling, Trout Unlimited’s Western field coordinator based in Missoula.

The efforts have been noticed. At a recent energy forum in Denver, Ken Wonstolen of the oil and gas association called the alliance of outdoors groups and environmentalists an effective marriage of convenience.

“It’s something we have to address very seriously,” Wonstolen said.

Politicians have noticed, too.

Bill Ritter, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Colorado, has sent letters to sportsmen, pledging to be a good steward of public lands. His Republican opponent, Rep. Bob Beauprez, has also met with hunting and fishing groups.

Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., locked in a tight re-election race, has introduced legislation to ban new oil and gas drilling on federal land along the Rocky Mountain Front.

In June, Republican Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico co-sponsored a bill prohibiting energy development in the Valle Vidal in northern New Mexico after her Democratic challenger signed a pledge opposing drilling.

In Wyoming, Republican Sen. Craig Thomas joined Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal last year to successfully protest proposed oil and gas leases in the national forests.

This kind of bipartisan opposition in the West helped scuttle a plan by the Bush administration to sell 300,000 acres of national forest, said Daniel Kemmis, a senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana.

“That was as stillborn a proposal as you could find, in large part because so many Western Republicans opposed it,” Kemmis said. “They saw these broad-based coalitions that are now just too politically potent to ignore.”

Alliances among environmentalists, loggers, ranchers and hunters have evolved as environmental groups realized they needed local support, Kemmis said. He said he believes more industries will follow timber companies in working with grass-roots activists.

“I think it would be very good for the West if we begin to see more of that kind of cooperation,” Kemmis said.

More than 25 Colorado groups ranging from the Colorado Environmental Coalition to the Colorado Bowhunters Association have written guidelines they believe would minimize drilling’s impacts on wildlife and habitat.

Bob Elderkin, a retired BLM employee and hunter who helped draft the proposals, said circulating the guidelines in an election season was intentional.

“When our elected officials start realizing there’s a large united bloc of the voting public that’s serious about this, then they’ll become serious about what we’re proposing,” Elderkin said.

Wonstolen, the senior vice president and general counsel for the oil and gas association, said the energy industry recognizes there are special places on the plateau that should be protected and that it could be made a showcase for development.

Elderkin, who worked on the Roan Plateau while with the BLM, said he wants strong rules in place to make sure development leads to good examples across the West.

“This current gas play is different from anything we’ve experienced in the past because in the past we were always talking about a specific oil field or specific gas field of limited geographical extent,” he said, standing beside the East Fork of Parachute Creek as it flowed toward a 200-foot waterfall. “This gas play is literally from horizon to horizon.”