THE POWER OF FUN

THE DAY PETER METcalf decided to take on the governor of Utah, the lieutenant governor of Utah and, well, most of the population of Utah, he looked at his hands -- hard and scarred from years of climbing, the right index finger missing above the joint -- and wondered if they were up to poking powerful people in the chest as he plunged into the contentious argument over the future of the state’s wild lands. 4 He works less than 15 miles from the Wasatch Mountains, where a web of hiking trails and ski runs incites panting, exhilarated customers to buy outdoor toys. It was these playgrounds that lured Metcalf’s climbing-gear company, Black Diamond Equipment, to Salt Lake City from Southern California more than a decade ago. And since its arrival, Utah has become a hotbed of the burgeoning $18-billion outdoor recreation market.

The Black Diamond office lies only nine miles from the state capital, where in 2002 then-Gov. Mike Leavitt, now head of the Environmental Protection Agency, crafted a deal with the Bush administration to overturn a Clinton-era move that extended Utah’s protected federal wilderness by almost 6 million acres. The rollback thrilled the state’s powerful mining, oil and natural gas industries.

Metcalf was appalled. “I have serious concerns about the recent behind-the-scenes agreements that Gov. Mike Leavitt cut with Interior Secretary Gale Norton,” he wrote in an op-ed article published in the Salt Lake Tribune last May.

Metcalf, 48, had been instrumental in bringing the twice-yearly Outdoor Retailer trade shows, Utah’s largest conventions, to Salt Lake City in 1996. The shows are sprawling extravaganzas that appear to hold all the outdoor gear in the world -- Everest base camps full of tents, boots and sub-zero-rated sleeping bags alongside climbing walls and kayak tanks -- all revved by psyched salesmen and women in polypropylene and Gore-Tex. Utah officials estimate the outdoor industry pumps as much as $1 billion a year into state coffers. The conventions alone inject $24 million a year into Salt Lake City’s hotels and restaurants.

That leverage gave Metcalf an idea: “There are many, myself included, who believe it is time to consider pulling these [shows] out of Utah in protest of the message the state has sent the outdoor industry and community,” he wrote in the op-ed piece.

The threat worked. The governor’s office scrambled to establish an environmental task force to appease Metcalf and his supporters. Leavitt fast-walked the trade show last August to press the flesh. Convention organizers tentatively agreed to keep the show, which convenes this week at the Salt Palace, in Utah through this year.

Metcalf’s campaign threw the conservation debate into an end-over-end tumble, and as the dust settled, mountain bikes and snowboards came out on a more equal footing with earthmovers and oil drilling rigs. This unlikely outcome at first cheered environmentalists. But now some are wondering whether concern for profit -- by extraction industrialists or outdoor industrialists -- is ever in nature’s best interests.

Recreation rules

Even on a Tuesday afternoon, the powder-packed trails running through the Wasatch Mountains draw cross-country skiers seeking solitude amid ghostly tangles of cottonwoods and conifers drooping under the weight of their white loads. “You won’t find people who love the land more than Utahans,” says one local snowshoer, Rick Reese. The skiers who pass -- a mix of locals and tourists -- agree.

Since the 1980s, debates over Utah’s lands have become national battles, pitting the oil, natural gas and mineral resources below the state’s surface against the rugged mountains, red rock canyons and painted deserts above. Extraction industries have always been central to the state’s economy and, therefore, to its politics.

But while no one was looking, mining and oil dollars had fallen to $1.2 billion by 2000; tourism receipts climbed to $4.15 billion in 2001. Utah officials estimate that directly or indirectly tourism supports one in every nine jobs, and visits to the state have leaped more than 350% in the last 20 years. Tourism, undervalued in the U.S. compared with other countries, is a growing force in an economy where the service sector has largely supplanted manufacturing.

A good chunk of the cash tourists spend finds its way to small businesses in areas near Utah’s national and state parks. Among the state’s more than 23 million acres of government-managed land are such action sports magnets as Moab, where mountain bikers career over surreal slickrock formations at Arches National Park; Canyonlands National Park, where hikers explore slot canyons; the rivers of Dinosaur National Monument, a rafting and kayaking draw; and Zion National Park, where climbers can spend days scaling magnificent rock faces.

During the 1980s, national conservation groups targeted the outskirts of these parks for wilderness protection, and the Bureau of Land Management eventually closed 3.2 million acres to both development and motorized vehicles.

But enthusiasm for federal protection doesn’t run deep in Utah. Veins pop when the feds designate areas off-limits to local development. “It’s a cultural thing,” said John Redd, 33, summing up the pervasive sentiment. For Redd, whose family came to Utah in 1846, anti-federalism is endemic. “The people who settled Utah came here because we’d been pushed out of every other state. For the federal government to come in and say, ‘We’re going to take this land,’ it couldn’t be more offensive.”

The battle over Utah’s wild lands climaxed in 1996 when President Clinton, campaigning for reelection, created Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a sprawling tract of twisted boulders, arches and slot canyons covering 1.9 million acres in south-central Utah. Then-Gov. Leavitt, a Republican, learned of the president’s decision from the New York Times. Clinton’s secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, later extended temporary federal protection to almost 6 million more acres in Utah, establishing the largest hands-off territory in the nation outside Alaska and California. The decision drew howls of protest -- and lawsuits from Utah’s political leaders arguing that the U.S. government had overstepped its bounds.

Leavitt’s payback for Grand Staircase-Escalante was the rollback last summer of the wilderness zones the Clinton administration had established. In exchange for the state dropping its legal action, Norton agreed to withdraw protection from nearly 6 million acres. (About 3.2 million acres, including Grand Staircase-Escalante, remain protected.) Leavitt also won the right to use provisions of an obscure 1866 law to disqualify even more of Utah from eligibility for wilderness protection.

But it was no longer business as usual in Utah. Metcalf and other outdoor executives played their wild card, threatening to take their money off the table. Nationally, the outdoor industry pulled in $5.2 billion in equipment sales alone in 2001, according to the Outdoor Industry Assn. That clout is felt in Utah as in few other places.

Firms such as Black Diamond, with 2003 revenue of $45 million, see “wild places as the economic backbone of outdoor recreation,” explained Frank Huelmeyer, the association’s president.

Metcalf’s op-ed piece attacking the governor’s deal was chased by reports that the Outdoor Retailer trade show might move to Denver or Reno. Hotel owners, restaurateurs and Salt Lake City officials pleaded with Leavitt to mend fences.

“These shows are enormously important to us,” said Lana Buehler, manager of the 175-room Crystal Inn in Salt Lake City. She wrote a letter asking Leavitt to reconsider. “I don’t feel strongly about the land, but the governor should do whatever is necessary to keep the shows here,” she added.

Leavitt found himself in a startling new climate, as small-business owners lobbied for greater environmental sensitivity. He met with outdoor industry leaders, promised to protect more red rock canyons and laid the groundwork for a task force of government and outdoor industry leaders charged with identifying recreational sites that deserve protection. The economic concerns of the politically powerful small-business sector, Leavitt intimated, can eclipse ideological battles over the environment.

The outcome, believes Metcalf, demonstrates the influence outdoor recreation can amass if properly focused. “People are realizing we’ve been speaking the wrong language,” he said. “We can’t talk about philosophy or beauty. We have to talk about money. Do these lands bring dollars to Utah? If so, we need to protect them.”

The concept is already at work from Costa Rica to Patagonia, where a few leaders have concluded that sometimes uncut trees and pristine ridges are worth more than timber and ore.

If Metcalf’s strategy succeeds in Utah, it could give a boost to outdoor enthusiasts’ clout everywhere.

“If this works, it will be heard around the world,” said Bruce Hamilton, national conservation director at the Sierra Club. “The Utah situation is forcing other states to look over their shoulders and wonder if they need to get their environmental house in order for business reasons. Everyone’s watching.”

A trade-off

As the Outdoor Retailer show convenes this week, some of the attendees will probably travel south, to Dirty Devil Wilderness Study Area, to ponder if the outdoor industry has become a political power and, if so, whether environmental advocates should rejoice or be afraid.

The Dirty Devil-Happy Canyons, a canyoneering wonderland of rocky symphonies in red and yellow, are protected by federal order. But the surrounding ridges are not. Last November the BLM announced it would auction a handful of previously protected areas, including one of these ridges, for oil exploration. Outdoor industry officials quickly attacked the decision, demanding that state officials object to the auctions. The state relented on some lands, but not on the Dirty Devil ridges.

Hikers nearby on a cold January day gazed at the gorges as their breath escaped in long, white strands, and said they felt that, as long as the canyons are protected, one small artifact of man on a ridge wouldn’t spoil the hundreds of empty acres surrounding it. That logic might appeal to Metcalf. Losing protection of some areas, he said, is an inevitable part of achieving compromise. A single oil rig to ensure protection of a vast canyon may be a fair trade.

But that ragged pragmatism worries some environmentalists. “The point of the Wilderness Act is that there are places worth protecting even if they don’t offer a direct economic payoff,” said Larry Young, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “Even if we can’t spend much time in the wilderness, just knowing it’s there, knowing we have a value system that protects those areas, is important. If this debate becomes about only protecting areas that make money, we’ve lost.”

The first test of the outdoor industry’s muscle will come when the new environmental task force, composed of 10 government officials and six recreation representatives, meets for the first time after the trade show. Although the group has no real power, Utah Gov. Olene S. Walker, who replaced the EPA-bound Leavitt last November, said in an interview this month that she will seriously consider using state power to protect recreational areas recommended by the group. But the GOP governor added that her interest extends only to recreational areas. “How many thousands of acres of sagebrush and juniper tree do you need to preserve?” she asked.

Environmental groups worry that many of the task force-named areas will be smaller than what wilderness advocates seek. Although generally supportive of Metcalf’s fight, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance warns it may protest agreements that protect only recreational areas.

Even Metcalf is unsure his strategy can win over everyone. “Talking with some environmentalists is like talking to abortion protesters,” he said. “It’s the same attitude -- we can’t lose even one acre. We have to keep people like that out of this conversation.”

As Black Diamond prepares for the Outdoor Retailer show, Metcalf’s fingers have been busy scribbling notes, taking calls and shifting papers. His hands are strong -- strong enough to take this trade show hostage, he said, and use it to demand a seat at the governor’s table.

But in spite of his optimism, the true test of his strength, and that of the recreation economy’s, lies on the horizon, in his ability to join hands not just with those on the other side of the table, but with the environmental advocates standing tentatively beside him.

Charles Duhigg is a Times staff writer. He can be reached at charles.duhigg@latimes.com.