Red Desert: History of a Place

By Annie Proulx and Martin Stupich

A photographic and multidisciplinary study of one of America’s last undeveloped—and most endangered—landscapes, edited by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

A vast expanse of rock formations, sand dunes, and sagebrush in central and southwest Wyoming, the little-known Red Desert is one of the last undeveloped landscapes in the United States, as well as one of the most endangered. It is a last refuge for many species of wildlife. Sitting atop one of North America's largest untapped reservoirs of natural gas, the Red Desert is a magnet for energy producers who are damaging its complex and fragile ecosystem in a headlong race to open a new domestic source of energy and reap the profits.

To capture and preserve what makes the Red Desert both valuable and scientifically and historically interesting, writer Annie Proulx and photographer Martin Stupich enlisted a team of scientists and scholars to join them in exploring the Red Desert through many disciplines: geology, hydrology, paleontology, ornithology, zoology, entomology, botany, climatology, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and history. Their essays reveal many fascinating, often previously unknown facts about the Red Desert—everything from the rich pocket habitats that support an amazing diversity of life to engrossing stories of the transcontinental migrations that began in prehistory and continue today on I-80—which bisects the Red Desert.

Complemented by Martin Stupich’s photo-essay, which portrays both the beauty and the devastation that characterize the region today, Red Desert bears eloquent witness to a unique landscape in its final years as a wild place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780292742628

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The publication of this book was made possible by a generous contribution from the University of Texas Press Advisory Council.

Copyright © 2008 by Dead Line Ltd.

Photographs copyright © 2008 by Martin Stupich

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Printed in Singapore

First edition, 2008

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Red Desert : history of a place / edited by Annie Proulx ; photographs by Martin Stupich.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-292-71420-5 (cl. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-292-78605-9 (institutional e-book)

ISBN 9780292786059 (individual e-book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Natural history—Wyoming—Red Desert (Desert). 2. Red Desert (Wyo. : Desert)—History. I. Proulx, Annie, date II. Stupich, Martin, date

QH105.W8 R43 2008

508.787—dc22

2008011077

Red Desert

HISTORY OF A PLACE

Edited by ANNIE PROULX

Photographs by MARTIN STUPICH

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN

RED DESERT

Willow Hill and old Rawlins-Bairoil Road, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2004

This book is for all who love the cranky, sagebrushed, rare, and fragile Red Desert of Wyoming.

—Annie Proulx

For David

Harriet and John

—Martin Stupich

CONTENTS

Cover

Copyright

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

I. PHOTOGRAPHS

Acknowledgments

Photographs

II. TEXT

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Natural History

1. Geology of the Red Desert, by Charles Ferguson

2. Water in the Red, by Craig Thompson

3. Environmental Change in the Wyoming Basin’s Red Desert, by Dudley Gardner

4. Titanotheres, Time, and People: A Snapshot of Red Desert Paleontology, by Tom Rea

5. Vertebrate Wildlife of the Red Desert, by Gary P. Beauvais

6. Birds of the Red Desert, by Andrea Orabona

7. Horses Come to the Red Desert, by Dudley Gardner

8. Insects of the Red Desert: An Exercise in Scientific Humility, by Jeffrey A. Lockwood

9. Sagebrush, by George P. Jones

10. Bright Green Hues Are Rare: Plant Diversity and Conservation in Wyoming’s Red Desert, by Walter and Laura Fertig

11. Biological (Cryptobiotic) Soil Crusts of the Red Desert, by Jack States

Human History

12. Early People of the Red Desert, by Dudley Gardner 231

13. The Shoshonis and Westward-Bound Emigrants, by Dudley Gardner

14. An Anthropological Impression of Rock Art in the Greater Red Desert, by Russel L. Tanner

15. Traversing the Desert, by Annie Proulx

16. Forts of the Red Desert, by Annie Proulx

17. Fort Bridger and Camps Stambaugh and Pilot Butte, by Dudley Gardner

18. Forts Halleck and Fred Steele, by Annie Proulx

19. The Union Pacific Railroad Arrives, by Annie Proulx

20. The Union Pacific, the Chinese, and the Japanese, by Dudley Gardner

21. Inhabitants of the Margins, by Annie Proulx

22. The Little Snake River Valley, by Annie Proulx

23. Red Desert Ranches, by Annie Proulx

24. Horse Bands of the Red Desert, by Annie Proulx

25. Opening the Oyster, by Annie Proulx

26. Red Desert Outlaws, by Annie Proulx

27. History of Conservation Efforts in the Red Desert, by Mac Blewer

Contributors

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. The Greater Red Desert endpapers

2. Geologic map of the Red Desert and its environs

3. Water features of the Red Desert

4. Range of white-tailed prairie dog

5. Range of Wyoming pocket gopher

6. Range of Wyoming ground squirrel

7. Cherokee Trail routes, 1849–1850

8. Camps and forts in the Red Desert

9. Thornburgh’s route to the White River Agency

FIGURES

5.1. White-tailed prairie dog

5.2. Wyoming pocket gopher

5.3. Wyoming ground squirrel

8.1. Malaise trap

8.2. Insects drawn to a light trap

TABLES

1.1. Geologic time—the eons, eras, and periods of earth history and the epochs of the Cenozoic

3.1. Generalized climate regions from 20,000 to 150 BP

5.1. Examples of peripheral vertebrates occupying the Red Desert

5.2. Wildlife species mentioned in Chapter

5.3. Examples of widespread vertebrates occupying the Red Desert

5.4. Vertebrates that are endemic to the Red Desert

6.1. Bird species mentioned in Chapter 6

9.1. Sagebrush species and subspecies and their occurrence in the Red Desert

ABBREVIATIONS

RED DESERT

PART I

PHOTOGRAPHS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dozens of people contributed to this project and, knowing it or not, quietly inched the bar higher. To you, David Vaughan, Annie Proulx, Dan Flores, Geri Stayman—and especially Dylan and Matt Stayman—who remind me always that books matter, I am deeply indebted.

To Steve Sagin, who on my first day in Saratoga pointed me in the direction of the Red Desert, thanks for the tip. Thanks too to my traveling companions there over the years—Brett Lequercia, Judi Morris, Toby Jurovics, and Rod Laird; and the intrepid Deryl James, Dave Quitter, and Gerald James, who with Annie, Bob Cook, Charles Ferguson, and Dudley Gardner (and Dudley’s crisp memory of lost maps) made high adventure where there might only have been discovery.

To Alan Mitchell, John Boyer, Debbie Rusk, Jamie Newman, Brad Carey, Terry and Jimmy Hinkle, and Larry Hicks, I am grateful for access to places and stories about places I would never otherwise know.

For six years, I have depended on others’ sharp eyes to keep these pictures on track—people acting as jurors and critics, or as old friends. Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, Jean Caslin, Peter Goin, Susan Moldenhauer, Patrick Nagatani, Kira Pollack, Jim Stone, Mary Virginia Swanson, Elizabeth Turk, Tim Wride—thanks for the candor. To Julianne Kost at Adobe Systems and Patrick Carr of Carr Imaging, thanks for taking the mystery out of Photoshop without killing the magic.

To Oscar Simpson, thanks for helping me get the captions right. To the staff at the El Rio diner in Baggs, thank you for being there.

Before the work was completed, a few museums and galleries lent momentum to the Red Desert project by exhibiting and purchasing early versions of the portfolio. To the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie, the International Cultural Center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, the Witte Art Museum in San Antonio, the Palm Springs Art Museum, and FotoFest in Houston—I remain grateful.

For decades of help in honing my heart-eye coordination, my early mentors must take credit: LaVerne Ornelas, Harold Huber, Jim Dow, John McWilliams, Emmet Gowin, and Linda Connor, thank you.

And without my friend and pilot, David Worthington, the big picture would have been impossible to imagine.

Martin Stupich

Ferris Mountains and Muddy Creek drainage, northeastern Red Desert, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2002

Honeycomb Buttes, northwestern Red Desert, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2002

Virga at sunset near Saratoga, eastern edge of the Red Desert, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2002

Echo Overlook, the confluence of the Yampa and the Green, southwestern corner of the Red Desert

Skull Rim at sunset, Adobe Town, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

Washakie Formation hoodoos eroding, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2003

Sandstone columns below Skull Rim, Adobe Town, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

Sandstone lag litters shaly badlands, dawn, the Haystacks, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2006

Weathered potholes, Little Firehole Canyon east of Flaming Gorge, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

April snow squall at Sage Creek Gap east of Flaming Gorge, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

Grove of ancient junipers east of Sage Creek basin, Ashley National Forest, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

Feral horses near Bitter Creek townsite, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2003

Killpecker barchan sand dunes migrating over rim of Great Divide basin between Steamboat Mountain and Black Rock Butte, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2002

Boar’s Tusk volcanic plug, Killpecker dune field and automobile dump, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2007

One-meter-diameter nest of ferruginous hawk on isolated bedding remnant, Skull Rim, Adobe Town, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

Hind legs, equine carcass, Carbon/Sweetwater county line, Wyoming, 2002

Grasshopper specimens from the Red Desert, University of Wyoming entomology collection, 2006

Cobble-pebble lag concentrated in a dry rill, Adobe Town, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

Battle Mountain between the Savery and Little Snake valleys, southeast Red Desert, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2002

Timber-littered alkali shoreline, Soda Lake south of Bairoil, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2006

Sandstone shaped to accept human hands, White Mountain area, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2003

Petroglyph in sandstone, Powder Springs Wash, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2006

Cairn near Brown’s Hill, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2005

Cairn, one of a series, northeast of Dad, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2005

Inscriptions made by nineteenth-century emigrants atop Independence Rock at the point where the California-Oregon-Mormon Trail nears the Red Desert, Natrona County, Wyoming, 2006

Footing at coal mine ruins, ghost town of Dines, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

Collapsing homestead and hawk’s nest on the Ferris-Bairoil Road, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2006

Remains of the town of Dad, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2003

Skyline of Wamsutter, epicenter of twenty-first-century gas boom, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2005

Thrift shop and liquor store, town center, Baggs, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2005

Downtown Rawlins with old Union Pacific Railroad station in background, Carbon County, Wyoming

Remains of metal shed, Pettigrew homestead north of Rawlins, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2006

Motel Yes No, Jeffrey City, former uranium boomtown known as Home on the Range, Fremont County, Wyoming, 2006

Double cross at grave of Jose Gonsales, possible cholera victim, Mexican Flat, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2005

Derelict section of old Lincoln Highway near Patrick Draw, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2003

Railroad tracks overgrown with rabbitbrush and sage, Carbon County, Wyoming

Pickup and horse trailer on Cherokee Rim, Washakie Basin, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2006

Chain Lakes Flat with trailer, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2006

Train derailment, Wamsutter, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2005

Overturned and shot-up Pontiac near Soda Lake Flat, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2003

Monolith, lichen, and Eightmile Lake from Atlantic Rim, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2004

Star Wars in roadside trash north of Rock Springs, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2004

Playa crust with eyeglasses, Red Creek drainage, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2003

Iron pipe merging with alkali north of Rawlins, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2003

Designated Colorado State Recreation Site for off-road recreational vehicles, Moffat County, Colorado, 2006

Gas pipeline rights-of-way intersecting near Bitter Creek, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2002

Maze of access roads in gas fields near confluence of Sand Creek and the Little Snake, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2004

Pipeline trench right-of-way disturbance east of Adobe Town, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2002

Open-pit uranium mine at Sheep Mountain south of Jeffrey City, Fremont County, Wyoming, 2005

Irrigation reservoir rising behind newly completed earthen dam on the High Savery, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2004

Mining operation near Flaming Gorge, Daggett-Uinta county line, Utah, 2004

Open-pit coal mine and tailings near Jim Bridger Power Plant, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2002

Cooling ponds at the Jim Bridger coal-fired power plant, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2002

Plumes rising at Jim Bridger coal-fired power plant near the geographic center of the Red Desert, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2002

Seismic monitoring equipment used to identify prospective gas well drilling sites east of Adobe Town, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2006

Newly excavated pit for gas well south of Wamsutter, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2005

Blowout preventer below drilling platform, gas rig north of Wamsutter, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2005

Halliburton truck passing, north of Baggs, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2005

Lined pit at drilling site, fenced and flagged, south of Crook’s Gap, Fremont County, Wyoming, 2006

Drilling site aftermath east of Chain Lakes Flat, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2006

Steel flaring tower guyed in place, former gas pad west of Barrel Springs Draw, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2005

Cross-country gas pipeline construction in progress near Grenville Dome, Carbon County, Wyoming

Surface-laid pressurized gas pipeline, Vermillion Creek drainage, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2006

Newly laid forty-two-inch gas pipeline near Walcott Junction, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2006

Forty-two-inch gas pipeline section at staging area near Sinclair, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2006

Shot-up oil drum between Wamsutter and Crooks Gap, Sweetwater County, Wyoming, 2003

A twelve-meter new mud pot in the Washakie basin east of Dad, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2007

Maze of drilling pad roads west of Rawlins, Carbon County, Wyoming, 2004

PART II

TEXT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Very many historians and researchers helped with information and connections with other people who knew something pertaining to the work in hand. All thanks to photographer Marty Stupich, whose idea of a book on the Red Desert started this project. Dr. Fred Lindzey, retired professor in Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming, was the keystone connector to the naturalists at the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database at the University of Wyoming. Deputy Mary M. Hopkins at the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, and Steven Sutter, cultural resource specialist in the same organization, rooted out yellowed archeological reports that shed light on some of the mysteries of the Red Desert. The entire staff of the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center helped in many ways over the years in ferreting out rare manuscripts and ephemeral references related to Wyoming’s past. Leslie Shores, photo archivist, gave substance and place to the shadowed histories of early Wyoming ranch life. Assistant reference archivist Anne Guzzo provided a copy of the film Fight of the Wild Stallions, showing Red Desert horse-catching techniques in the 1940s. Trina Purcell of the Denver Public Library’s Western History and Genealogy department solved the riddle of the mysterious CWA cited often as a source in John Rolfe Burroughs’s Where the Old West Stayed Young. This turned out to refer to the Civil Works Administration, whose valuable 1930s interviews with residents of Colorado counties are housed in the Colorado Historical Society archives.

Dave Quitter of Saratoga spent many hours working to find references to Quien Hornet, the name of a mountain in the Red Desert that appeared on Howard Stansbury’s map. In the end, weeks of work resulted in a single footnote. He also helped with fine-tuning the geological photograph captions.

Dan Davidson, the director of the Museum of Northwest Colorado in Craig, pointed us to L. H. Doc Chivington’s useful manuscript, Last Guard, perhaps the best account of an ordinary cowpoke’s job at the turn of the last century in southwest Wyoming–northwest Colorado. Jan Gerber, the assistant director of this museum, provided photographs and information on bygone personalities of the Little Snake River valley, including W. W. Wiff Wilson, who bridged the era between cattle raising and oil extraction in Wyoming.

Cindy L. Brown, the reference archivist at the Wyoming Division of Cultural Resources, was helpful in tracking down references to the name change of Washakie to Wamsutter. Sandra Lowry, the librarian at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, helped with day orders and documents showing that Fort La-Clede was not, in fact, part of the military fort system in Wyoming, but one of the Overland Stage stations fortified by Holladay.

Marva Felchlin, the director of the Autry Library at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, was very helpful with audio disks of lectures on American violence, especially in the west, and materials related to Wyoming outlaws and the diary of Second Lieutenant William Abbott, who served at Fort Fred Steele in 1872–1874.

Lindsay Ricketts made the first pass at copyediting and formatting a gnarly tangle of pages. Our rigorous editors at the University of Texas Press earned our profound gratitude for their punctilious work. Thank you, Megan Giller and freelancer Rosemary Wetherold.

Throughout the study period, the Western Wyoming Community College Oral History Project interviews with many people now gone helped us gain an intimate view of those who lived in and around the Red Desert. The useful bulletins and updates from concerned organizations included the Wyoming Outdoor Council, the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, and Friends of the Red Desert. Bob Cook, outdoor liaison, map interpreter, and gifted selector of the best camping spots was indispensable on trips into the desert. Dudley Gardner was a spark plug; his terrible energy, unfailing optimism, and gritty determination, his knowledge of good coffee sources in southwest Wyoming and northwest Colorado, and his willingness to drive long, bad roads and sleep on the truck seat made him the ideal historian-archeologist for the project.

Pam Murdock and Mary Wilson of the BLM Rawlins Field Office guided us through the historically important JO ranch and were very helpful in supplying historical reports on the JO and Jawbone ranches. Thanks also to Oscar Simpson of the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division and the New Mexico Wildlife Federation for explanations of coal-bed methane gas extraction machinery and procedure.

Russel Tanner commented that rock art scholars who deserve mention from the beginning for their contributions to the greater endeavor of scientific inventory, context development and description of various Native American rock art sites include David T. Vlcek, James Keyser, George Poetschat, Julie Francis, Alice Tratebus, Larry Loendorf, Linda Olson, Dudley Gardner, Bill Current, Tom Larson, Ron Dorn, Sam Drucker, and Joseph Bozovich Jr., and his esteemed father, the late Joe Bozovich Sr. Russel Tanner also wishes to thank Clifford Duncan, Starr Weed, Floyd Osborn, Haman Wise, Delphine Clair, Burton Hutchinson, Henry Antelope, Bobby Joe Goggles, Sherry Blackburn, and Diana Mitchell, as well as the late Shorty Ferris, John Tarness, and Joe Pinnecouse.

George P. Jones thanks Fred Lindzey and Marty Stupich. Jeffrey Lockwood wrote that his contribution to this book would not have been possible without the assistance of Scott Schell, Gary Beauvais, and George Jones.

Charles Ferguson thanks Andrew Coen and Ron Surdam for discussions regarding limnology. Gerald Smith and Jon Spencer shared valuable unpublished information regarding fish evolution and the Colorado River. Richard W. Jones was very helpful with reference materials, as was the entire staff of the Brinkerhoff Geology Library at the University of Wyoming. Robert L. Cook was an invaluable field assistant. Annie Proulx, Steve Cather, and Michael Mahan reviewed earlier versions of the manuscript and improved it immensely.

Laura and Walter Fertig would like to thank Gary Beauvais, George Jones, Ron Hartman, and Bonnie Heidel for sharing thoughts and input on the ecology and botany of the Red Desert.

Andrea Orabona offers sincere thanks to naturalists Mac Blewer, Marian Doane, and John Mionczynski for sharing their expertise and experiences with me while conducting additional research for her chapter on birds of the Red Desert.

Dudley Gardner thanks Annie Proulx for listening and editing and writes that Jana Pastor, David Johnson, Danny Walker, Mary Lou Larson, Michael Metcalf, Russel Tanner, Emma Gardner, Richard Etulain, Ken Fitschen, Barbara Smith, Murl Dirksen, Martin Lammers, Will Gardner, and Byron Loosle are owed my gratitude for commenting on the technical aspects of the sections on environment and prehistory.

Craig Thompson states, I regret the passive neglect suffered by my children, my wife, Jocelyn, and my students during my frenetic research and writing periods. I acknowledge the invaluable help of Dr. Ron Surdam, master detective and premier chronicler of Lake Gosiute, and Charles Matheson Love, the most observant fieldman with whom I have ever worked.

INTRODUCTION

This book is not intended as another plea to save the greater Red Desert. Many tries for conservation by people who love the place have come and gone over the decades, defeated by the prevailing attitude of show me the money, by the congressional cold shoulder, by lack of knowledge of what is in that high desert, by the complex mixture of politics and culture, and by the momentum of our times, inexorably propelled by shifting global histories, which, like massive continental plates, have thrust us into the present.

This book tries to sort out what there is about the Red Desert that makes it valuable, scientifically and historically interesting. We hoped to dispel some of the myths that have grown up around the place.

There is nothing in the Red Desert but sagebrush, and who needs it?

Now that forage is depleted, the Red Desert is empty wasteland. Coal, oil, gas, gravel, and trona are its only assets.

There were never any ranches in the Red Desert.

Wildlife is mostly feral horses that eat grass that could otherwise nourish cattle and sheep.

There is no water.

The Red Desert had nothing to do with the formation of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

The project began several years ago when photographer Martin Stupich asked me to write an introduction to a collection of his photographic work in the Red Desert. I agreed, thinking it would be a simple matter to go to the University of Wyoming’s library, gather up the books on the region, and write a general overview of the place. I was stunned to discover there was not one single book on the Red Desert in Coe Library. Nor did a search of the American Heritage Center’s archives turn up much beyond an old photograph of a locomotive stalled by the infamous 1949 blizzard, and a nineteenth-century paper on forage plants by the esteemed botanist Aven Nelson. What we did not know about this huge area of the state began to swell up into a thundercloud of general ignorance.

Martin Stupich’s photographs were not meant to illustrate the text, but are his stand-alone record of the desert over a period of years. The text grew up around what we didn’t know rather than the photographs. As we worked on the book, we learned that Red Desert fieldwork and study could absorb many lifetimes. Our book is only a start. Almost everyone who worked on the project came away excited by what they found, dazzled by the possibilities for learning more. Hydrologist Craig Thompson mentioned that Bitter Creek, draining one of the largest basins in North America, could enrich our knowledge of water in high desert.¹ There are flowing wells out there that serve as oases for wildlife, ice lenses in the sand dunes that melt into pools of water. None of these are well studied. Prospector Bob Cook said that every trip revealed something new to him—barrel hoops, purple glass, selenium indicator plants, and a zillion roads; it’s a spider web out there.² Entomologist Jeff Lockwood was amazed by the riches of insect life, which he said seemed absolutely staggering, adding that the diversity "has got to be phenomenal … the place is not homogeneous."³ We learned that the Red is composed of rich pocket habitats catering to a wide variety of specialized vertebrates, invertebrates and plants, pockets that are scarcely known and certainly not mapped. Lockwood described these habitat pockets as archipelagos of life in the sea that is the Red Desert.

Cautions on Venturing into the Desert

ANNIE PROULX

The Red Desert is one of those places that easily humble and even humiliate those who think they know it. No one person knows this place. Many people know special small corners, feel at home on the flanks of certain mountains or inside the particular maze of rock outcrops or up on Green Mountain or the Haystacks looking south into the desert, but weather, rock-slides, reworked roads, and sidetracks can disorient even old hands.

Readers who are curious to see the Red Desert for themselves should be careful. If possible, do not go alone, and if you have never been there before, go with someone who knows the way. If you are alone and injure yourself, you may find yourself in a bad situation.

Some roads are thickly strewn with flinty rocks that can shred flimsy tires with ease. Flat tires are a common mishap in the Red. Ornithologist Andrea Orabona recalled what happened one year when, just after she had had knee surgery, she was doing her bird survey in the Red Desert: On that trip, I was in my Game and Fish truck and got two flat tires on the way out of the Red Desert, but had only one spare. I always take my trekking poles, but also take my mountain bike—just in case—if there’s room. Since I was camping out of the back of my truck, there wasn’t room for the bike that time, so my only option was to walk out. I knew where the Sweetwater was.¹ Luck was with her. She met some lost tourists who had been looking for a grave site. They took her back to Lander, and she answered their many questions about wildlife and the desert. It was a mutual rescue, she said.

Geologist Charles Ferguson and prospector Bob Cook had a vehicle breakdown and faced a walk of a few miles to a larger gravel road that might have traffic on it. There was no traffic, and they waited and waited for many hours before someone—a Sweetwater County road grader—came along.

A rugged, four-wheel-drive vehicle with high clearance is a necessity on the old tracks, and heavy-duty tires an asset. Most of the older roads are dry-weather roads. It is possible to get caught in a passing summer shower and feel the road turn to lard beneath your wheels. Desert rats keep a copy of War and Peace in their vehicles to read while the road dries out. What looks like solid ground off-road can, if you drive onto it, reveal its true character as a bottomless bog. The new, wider gravel roads built by and for the CBM (coal-bed methane) extraction companies generally are one-ways to rigs and compression stations. They may have signs, they may not. The multiplicity of new roads and reworked roads makes it easy to get enmeshed in a cat’s cradle of connecting tracks that seem to go nowhere. In other places the old tracks have been obliterated by pipeline and new road construction, and finding your way to a specific area may be possible only with a guide, close study of several maps, and/or GPS guidance. And even recent maps have little relation to the reality of the gas-extraction present. Landmarks are as important today as they were when Stansbury crossed the desert.

If you are hiking in canyon or malpais areas, thirst and heat can drop you to your knees. It is easy to get lost in an immense place where rock outcrops obstruct the sightlines. Check ahead as you walk, and check your back trail often for landmarks. Cell phone reception is a joke. In summer it is hot and dry unless you know where the water is. There are no cafés or refreshment stands in the desert. It is smart to bring extra water, gas, tools, maps, GPS units, and a spare tire or even two.

Certain organizations—the Biodiversity Alliance, Friends of the Red Desert, and the Wyoming Outdoor Council—sometimes offer guided trips into the Red Desert, and this may be the best way to first experience the big and difficult place. Trial-and-error exploration can take many years.

Do not remove arrowheads, scrapers, or other artifacts. The Red Desert has many archeological sites. Often one stumbles on places with a good view where long ago someone sat making arrow points and stone tools. Notify the state archeologist of locations and/or GPS coordinates if you discover rock art, areas of stone tools, and such. One year we noticed a certain hunting camp in the Washakie basin. Over the years hunters had found and collected many stone points and tools. They removed them from the sites of origin and brought them to the hunting camp and arranged them on a flat rock apparently as some sort of hunting shrine. Archeologists, now unable to make connections of those tools with their original sites, photographed that collection of artifacts in 2004 and periodically check them. At least the hunters did not carry them away.

To bring a gun or not is a personal preference. On our first trip into the desert, we came upon a pronghorn lying on the bank of a new energy road. It had been hit by a speeding vehicle and its pelvis was broken. Cell phones were useless, and had not one of the people in our group had a gun, the animal would have died a slow, lingering death.

Watch the sky for weather changes.

1. E-mail message to the author, July 23, 2007.

The scale of seeing is very different as well, said Lockwood—so much of what happens in the Red Desert happens within ten feet and beyond a thousand feet.⁴ One constantly shifts perspective from what is close at hand to the far horizon line, creating a kind of psychological double-think, constantly forcing one to consider the particular in relation to the whole.

Dotted over the desert are old ranch and even ghost town sites rich in dumps—tin cans, machinery, appliances, cars, all the bits and pieces of old-time Wyoming life. Russ Tanner mentioned that the mining ghost town of Sublet has a dump of cans that covers three hundred acres. Can historians, archeologists, and their students learn something from the detritus of the western yesteryear?

Botanists Walter and Laura Fertig fell in love doing fieldwork in the Red Desert a decade ago. Walter Fertig is a specialist in Wyoming’s rare plants, and he wrote, It was such a tremendous personal discovery to find so many unusual and interesting species in places that so many people thought were without any redeeming value—just wastelands only good for drilling oil and gas, feeding cows, or driving across really fast.⁵ He continued: And as a conservation-minded naturalist, I can see that the Wyoming basin country really is the area that we are most responsible for conserving into the future. Of course a lot of my friends and colleagues think I’m a little crazy for holding this view, and it has been a frustrating, uphill effort for years trying to convince other conservation-minded individuals and groups that lands like the Red Desert need to be protected as much as, if not more than, the Yellowstones.⁶

As entomologist Jeff Lockwood pointed out, millions of people pass through the Red Desert every year without seeing it. Interstate 80 bisects the desert, and trucks and cars rush past seemingly endless miles of sagebrush, dismissing what they see as monotonous and useless. From that highway the Red Desert does not seem interesting. This is an illusion, for this place is rich in fossils, a vast stone book of pictographs and artifacts of Native American tribes. The early explorers of the west came through it. It was part of the great westward emigration. The Union Pacific Railroad cut through its center, separating the bison into north and south herds. Great sheep trails from California to the east and New Mexico to the north traversed the Red Desert. Bison, desert elk, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep lived in it. Fish swam in its waters. Outlaws hid in its folds and badlands. And a number of hardy people, abetted by the Homestead Act of 1862, impressed by the big open space, and hungry for land—many of them ex–railroad workers and coal miners—tried to establish and maintain ranches in remote and difficult corners. Some succeeded, and all contributed to the state’s reputation for hardiness, cheerful toughness, and ability to withstand privation.

It is our hope that this book will encourage naturalists, historians, graduate students, and Wyoming residents to venture into the Red Desert and discover for themselves the microhabitats, curiosities, and beauty of what remains in this little-known place, that they will observe for themselves the new roads and attendant dust storms, notice the biomass of halogeton, Russian thistle, cheatgrass, and other invasive weeds along those roads that come with soil disturbance. It is easy to blame all the changes in the Red Desert on energy extraction work, but that is the narrow view. There are countless Red Deserts in this world. Jack States touched the larger problem when he said, Undeniably much of the pristine Red Desert ecosystem is imperiled not only by resource hungry corporations fueled by a resource hungry populace (that includes sanctimonious environmentalists), but also by inexorable global warming and extinction of species. To me the issues we face in the Red Desert are not that different from any other aspect of global environmental crisis spawned by a burgeoning human population.⁷

There are important subjects that neither time nor space allowed us to include: a review of fossil finds from the Fossil-Uinta-Gosiute lakes; fish, extinct and living; ice lenses in the Killpecker Dunes; fire in the Red Desert; soil studies; wind, weather, and the severe drought that continues to grip the entire west; the error-riddled survey of the southern state line, which caused land ownership problems for years; the history of the dryland farm colony on Brown’s Hill in the 1920s; hunters and poachers; the people of the North Country and the Sweetwater Valley; the labor history of the coal mining towns; the extraordinary scenery of the badlands. Nor was there room for the stories of characters and tough old desert rats like the hermit who trimmed his hair with a lighted newspaper; horse catcher Tex Love, found sitting dead against a rock; the fellow who found the frozen body of a dead sheepherder, loaded him onto the roof of his vehicle, and casually drove around the nearest town doing errands. The women freighters, the practice of boarding ranch children in town for schooling, and the medical exigencies in sickness and accident all deserve examination.

Someone who spent time in the Red Desert years ago recently remarked to me that he could not bear to go back and see it in a spoiled condition. But we have to go back. We cannot turn away from the place. Jack States, who wrote on the biological soil crusts for this book, was born and raised in Wyoming. He related: In my younger days I was strongly influenced by my grandfather who gauged the land by how many sheep it would support while at the same time communicating to me his deep concerns regarding vagaries of environment … weather and the cumulative negative effects of overgrazing. It was out of necessity that he was a steward of natural resources, but it was out of respect and love for creation that he strived for balance, cultural with natural, conservation with exploitation. Because I value the beauty and solitude of the Red Desert landscapes, I admit to being intensely possessive, even angry at the fresh tire track, the ATV, and the army of seismic trucks. But I also believe that with good science, we can success-fully manage its natural resources for sustainability.⁸

For Gary Beauvais the great characteristic of the Red Desert is sheer open SPACE. He wrote: Boil down that piece of country to its core, and outright vastness is left. … Space is responsible for many of the Red Desert wildlife values. The Red Desert is a stronghold for greater sage-grouse because they can lek in one place, nest thirty miles away, fly another twenty miles to primary winter range, then move another twenty to survival range if the weather gets really bad. It’s a stronghold for low-country elk because they can use sheer distance to avoid disturbances. I’ve spooked herds around Steamboat Mountain and watched them run, steadily, for at least a couple of miles before they fade out of sight behind a distant ridge. A golden eagle perched on a Red Desert butte or rim surveys more country than any eagle ever did sitting on a power pole in the Great Plains. And every road, well field, and pit mine makes it smaller. Whereas before there were no boundary features, now we are carving all sorts of lines into the Red Desert. Some are visual only… like 2-tracks and abandoned railroads … but others are functional, actual boundaries, like I-80 and Jonah Field and coalbed methane fields with their attendant roads and man camps.⁹

The many-faceted character of this high, cold desert haunts those who have spent time in its irreplaceable silence and space. Mac Blewer, living in the Washington, D.C., corridor (Land of Perpetual Self Importance), knows that. He wrote: The desert comes to me now in my sleep. The other night I dreamed of antelope bounding through the sage and rabbit-brush. A murky shape that looked like Steamboat Mountain—covered in fog—was in the background. I remembered the desert looking like that after a blizzard in late June several years ago. I had been hiking … in the Sands and had been surprised by the brief wintry storm that had caught me unawares. After 24 hours of snow, hail, wind and lightning, the sun came out, the snow melted, and a thick mist rose up. Walking through the aspens and limber pine, I could see new flowers sprouting and butterflies sunning themselves on snow-banks. After a time the fog lifted and I walked in peace and a we on the top of this desert island, wishing that my sojourn would never end.¹⁰

The Red Desert needs to be examined and studied. Perhaps the most we can hope to save are small pieces, little corners of what was once the largest area of unfenced land left in the United States, forced to ignore the old truth that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Something ineffable is already lost. But Andrea Orabona remarks that there could be great value and utility in preserving the Red Desert as a national conservation area.¹¹ It would allow us to study a place about which we know very little, and although there are a dozen of these areas in the United States, there is no national conservation area in Wyoming. They are designated by Congress to conserve, protect, enhance, and manage public land areas for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations. Such areas feature exceptional natural, recreational, cultural, wildlife, aquatic, archeological, paleontological, historical, educational or scientific resources.¹² The Red Desert meets every one of these criteria.

In November 2007, Adobe Town gained partial protection from noncoal surface, uranium, and oil shale mining in a 5–1 vote by the Wyoming Environmental Quality Council. It is not protected from oil and gas extraction.

It is sad to end on a bitter note, but as we were finishing this book, we learned that vandals had slashed archeologist Dudley Gardner’s tent with knives and damaged his dig site near a new and oncoming pipeline installation.

Annie Proulx, Saratoga, Wyoming

Notes

1. Pers. comm., June 9, 2007.

2. Pers. comm., June 9, 2007.

3. Pers. comm., June 9, 2007.

4. Pers. comm., June 7, 1007.

5. E-mail message to the author, May 31, 2007.

6. Ibid.

7. E-mail message to the author, June 8, 2007.

8. Ibid.

9. E-mail message to the author, June 7, 2007.

10. E-mail message to the author, June 21, 2007.

11. Pers. comm., June 7, 2007.

12. National Landscape Conservation System,

http://www.blm.gov/nlcs/conservation/index.html.

NATURAL HISTORY

1. Geology of the Red Desert

Charles Ferguson

Prelude

Steamboat Mountain is for many the most important landmark in the Red Desert. The lava-capped mesa 50 kilometers north of Rock Springs towers over the desert and forms the northern rampart of a prominent wind gap, 400 meters deep, through which spill the Killpecker Dunes. Why is Steamboat so high, and what’s with an active dune field more than 100 miles long, but only 1 to 3 miles wide? Be sure to visit Steamboat Mountain, and check out the dunes is what geo-anthropologist Charlie Love advised me when I started this project. Killpecker Creek was a problem too; the south-flowing ephemeral wash that empties into Bitter Creek at Rock Springs occupies a valley fit for a king.

It was stormy, late in the field season, and already dark when I finally got to Steamboat and set up camp. I walked to the rim to watch the moon rise over Black Rock Flat. Standing on the rim, leaning into the wind with shreds of cloud tearing by at eye level, is like standing on the bow of a huge ship plowing through an invisible sea, dunes sprawling out across a terrifyingly visible abyssal plain that stretches out forever in all directions. Later I grilled a steak in a grove with blue moon glare casting sharp sage and twisted limber pine shadows. While I ate, a series of squalls streamed around the mountain, enveloping the camp in Kurosawan fog banks, the fire, virtually invisible in the moonlight, springing to light each time.

A Hard Place to Get To

The Red Desert as a geologic entity is here considered to include the 10-million-acre expanse of southwestern Wyoming that encompasses the Green River, Great Divide, and Washakie basins.¹ There are very few places on earth where rocks are older, but none have such a history. This is because the Red Desert is also exceptionally young. Its Cenozoic record is like no other on earth (see Table 1.1),² and even though none were there to bear witness, its landscape has changed dramatically since the dawn of man.

When the Red Desert was first being explored at the start of the nineteenth century, modern geology, the science of deep time based on James Hutton’s radical new theory that the earth was very old, was finally maturing.³ So it was that exploration and science converged, making the Red Desert one of the few places on earth whose geologic wonders were first viewed by modern geologic eyes. The white man’s discovery of fossils, coal, and oil, all known to Indians, made the Red Desert a focal point for the testing of a young science’s crucial theories ranging from evolution to the origin of igneous rocks.

Table 1.1. Geologic time—the eons, eras, and periods of earth history and the epochs of the Cenozoic (in Ma)

Note: Including the slopes of its flanking mountain ranges, outcrops of every age of the earth can be found in the Red Desert, making it possibly the only place on earth where this is true. Ages in this table, based on radiometric dating, are in millions of years (Ma). Geologists denote deep time in three bunches of triple zeros: thousands = ka, millions = Ma, and billions = Ga (kilo-, mega-, and giga-annum, respectively). Using this notation, the earth is 4.5 Ga, 4,500 Ma, or 4,500,000 ka. The average expected life span of a human is 0.075 ka. The oldest rock in the world, using the same notation, is 3,960,000 ka (Bowring et al. 1989). Gunter Faure (1977) provides a brief but succinct history of radiometric geochronology. The 14C system, based on an isotope with a very short half-life, can be used only to detect recent time—say, within the past 50,000 years or so. For deep time two main techniques, K-Ar and U-Pb, are used. U-Pb systematics can be measured in minerals that are very resistant to resetting during intense episodes of heating and alteration. The K-Ar system, supplanted in recent years by the more precise 40Ar/39Ar technique, is more sensitive to reheating, a fact geologists take advantage of to chronicle not only the absolute age of minerals but also the cooling history of rocks and ranges.

After the Civil War, three major geologic expeditions converged on the Red Desert: Clarence King up the Snake and its tributaries from the west (1867–1871), John Wesley Powell from the south in 1868 and then down the Green in 1869, and Ferdinand V. Hayden (1867–1868) up the Platte from the east.⁴ Each sought, much like the rivers they had ascended, to wrest control and authority from the others. Naming rights, credits, and vanities were major concerns at the time. The quality of their work is what remains.

Then came the serious fossil hunters. Their work galvanized opinion among a select group of scientists who were rigorously testing a new hypothesis of evolution.⁵ Cenozoic vertebrates, unlike the tiny invertebrates encased in limey shoals, were like us, warm-blooded, furry, familiar, and fascinating. Might there be evidence of human evolution in the bones scattered across the Red Desert? Samuel Knight wrote: Leidy, Marsh, and Cope, followed by Osborn and Scott, went after the vertebrates. The reverberations of the famous Marsh-Cope feud, which appears to have originated over rivalry for Basin vertebrates, has echoed and re-echoed over the badlands for nearly a century. Thus we see geologic titans tilting with ‘groups’ and ‘species’ in a tournament of rocks and fossils until the Congress, who was, for the most part, paying the bills, rewrote the rules and established the United States Geological Survey.⁶

A Global Perspective

If Hutton set the course of modern geology, Einstein put it on the fast track of the nuclear age. About the same time that isotope geochemists were figuring out how to use nuclear technology to date rocks, oceanographers learned how to map the ocean floor.⁷ Geologists were confronted with an entirely new mountain range, a midocean ridge rising from the floor of every sea. It soon became apparent that it was not only the youngest, and oldest, but also the world’s longest mountain chain, like the dorsal spine of a Midgardian serpent stretching 50,000 kilometers from a slender Arctic tail to a fat, East Pacific head.⁸ Youngest because the continuous spine is an undying fissure volcano that adds, on average, 10 centimeters of new crust to the earth every year.⁹ Oldest because the volcano has been erupting continuously for at least 2 billion years.¹⁰

Figure 1

Seafloor spreading is balanced by subduction.¹¹ It has to be. The earth is neither shrinking nor expanding,¹² and space must be made. Something has to go back into the mantle. And so it does, but not quietly. The driving force of orogenesis is the pushing, resisting, shearing, degassing, and sweating that occur at convergent margins.¹³

The world’s other mountain chain, its convergent orogeny, consists of two strands that meld together in the plate-tectonic mess of fish that is Southeast Asia. The composite Tethyan orogen of the eastern hemisphere is the shorter strand, at 14,000 kilometers, but it is also the highest and widest.¹⁴ Its ranges, including the Atlas and the Pyrenees, the Caucasus and the Himalaya, stretch from Casablanca to Singapore and owe their existence to the northward convergence of Africa, India, and Australia with Asia.

The longer strand, 45,000 kilometers, circles the Pacific from Erebus to New Zealand and owes its existence to the consumption of oceanic crust around the periphery of the Pacific Rim.¹⁵ Its longest uninterrupted stretch, 20,000 kilometers from Tierra del Fuego to Katmai, is the cordillera of the Americas, a complex chain of overlapping and incessantly interacting fold-thrust belts, thick-skinned foreland uplifts, volcanic arcs, transcurrent ranges, and extensional belts.

Fold-thrust belts are direct results of continental convergence, that is, head-on-collisions. The closing of the Tethyan Sea, on the other side of the planet, resulted mostly in continent-continent plate collisions. The Pacific Rim, on the other hand, is a convergent margin that pits ocean versus continent.¹⁶ The oceanic plate subducts, and the leading edge of the continent crumples. Seaward thickening wedges of continental sedimentary rock get scraped off and thrust up and over the crystalline interior. If any strata resist along the way, they get folded, and then sometimes again just for good measure.¹⁷ Fold-thrust belts therefore occur clustered around continental margins. One such mountain belt bounds the Red Desert to the west, and its unusually great distance from the Pacific, its thrust source, is because a younger and exceptionally wide extensional belt, the Great Basin of the western interior, superseded it.¹⁸

Farther inland, thickening and shortening of the crust resulted in highly concentrated zones of thrusting. Discrete zones of crustal weaknesses inherited from structures left over after billions of years of orogeny are reactivated and soak up the strain. Deep faults thrust old crystalline rocks up into sharp-margined foreland uplifts.¹⁹ The Red Desert’s northern, southern, and eastern bounding ranges are all of this type, and their orientations and shapes are as different as their complex geologic histories. Every age of the earth is represented, and practically every kind of rock known on earth is found there, from commoners like granite and sandstone, to the oddball sodic evaporites of the Green River basin, primordial taconites of the Wind Rivers, and the weird and wonderful wyomingites of the Leucite Hills.²⁰

Volcanic arcs, also referred to as magmatic arcs, are the result of subducted, water-soaked oceanic slabs that literally steam the overlying tectonic plate into submission. The rising fluids, driven out of the oceanic plate as it gets sucked back into the mantle, provide the flux that the already hot, deep crustal rocks need to melt. The buoyant magma rises, some erupting to form volcanoes, but much more solidifying in the middle and upper crust to form monstrous granite batholiths that sit quietly, waiting for the opportunity, often afforded to them during much later and unrelated orogenies, to bob to the surface.²¹

Zeroing in on a Wide Target

Averaging 300 kilometers in width, the American cordillera swells to greater than 800 kilometers in only three places. The lesser two are bulges in central South America (800 kilometers) and northern Canada (1,000 kilometers). The Altiplano-Puna Plateau of the interior Andes, with its monstrous 7-kilometer peaks buried up to their shoulders in their own sediment, are the western hemisphere’s highest desert, and also its highest and largest great divide basin. In stark contrast are the deep, deathlike valleys of the Mackenzie