Whose West Is It Anyway? : For the Longtime Residents of Escalante, Utah, (pop. 1000), Living on the Frontier Means Living Off the Land. Can They Hold Their Ground Against Environmentalists and New Arrivals Pushing Conservation? Welcome to One Battle of The War That’s Raging Across The West.

It isn’t easy to get to Billie Jones’ Burr Trail Cafe outside Escalante, Utah. It’s 60 miles from the nearest town of any consequence and 150 from the closest commercial air service. At one point, where the road traverses the vermilion canyons of the Escalante River and you see nothing but crumbling turrets and temples of red and gray sandstone collapsing toward the horizon, you realize not a whole lot has changed around here for the past 200 million years and certainly not for the last 50, when the mail made its way across these canyons lashed to mules.

This is the outback, a land as ungenerous as it is magnificent, described by Mormon pioneers as the roughest country in the state. It was a land no one else wanted, and over the years, that has been consolation enough for the inhabitants--rarely more than 1,000--doing whatever it took to scratch a living out of the place. But Escalante is on the map now. Not just on the tourist brochures but also on the itinerary of a mobile generation freed by technology to live where it wants.

America is drawing a bead on its last, remote places, on towns where frontier experiences still shape the culture and politics. Escalante, along with all it stands for, is in the cross hairs.

At times such as this, when the future hovers like an early freeze, it is tempting to take refuge in the past, and the past is very much on the minds of the regular customers at the Burr Trail Cafe. They are a small group of middle-aged men in overalls and cowboy hats who can trace their ancestry back to the area’s first white settlers.

A popular haunt for drinking coffee and fretting about the price of beef or the scarcity of winter range grass, Billie’s is a cozy place, slightly larger than a horse trailer and usually thick with cigarette smoke, the smell of French fries that gurgle in a tub of molten grease and the metallic odor of sweat drying on a cold day.

On a recent December afternoon, the topic of conversation is an economic development plan, devised by a local ex-schoolteacher and the Utah governor’s office to try to prod Escalante out of the 19th Century into the 21st. It would give the town a destination resort, a golf course, even a small jetport.

“What they’re looking for is a gimmick to replace the milk cow,” says Paul Hansen, a part-time cowboy and heavy-equipment operator who is drinking his own bourbon out of a coffee cup. “A jet strip and a golf course might do it, but I don’t think so,” Hanson says.

“I’m not going to stay, not if they put condos all over this county,” says Arthur Lyman, a great-grandson of the first ranching family to come to the area in the late 1800s. “I like the open country. I want to be able to take a piss without somebody looking at me.”

Lyman is sitting at the counter beside his brother-in-law, Dell LeFevre, another rancher. “I could run a dude ranch and make it work,” LeFevre says, “but I don’t like people.” His slow smile betrays him. But the others know what he means.

None of them is especially fond of the newcomers moving into the rural West--people with soft hands who make a living elsewhere, whose social ties are to New York or Los Angeles, people like the the CEO of a West Coast biotech firm who runs his business via modem or the New York mutual-fund wizard who researches stock picks in the morning and skis all afternoon.

These people, the natives say, usually don’t join the school boards or man the volunteer fire departments. They don’t know how to drive a Caterpillar and can’t be counted on to help plow the roads when the county maintenance crew is snowed in 50 miles away. They join environmental groups, pressure Congress to turn grazing land into wilderness preserves and then overrun it with mountain bikes, river rafts and all-terrain vehicles.

“They come here and buy their five acres, and the rest of us can go to hell,” LeFevre says.

You can find a Dell LeFevre cursing into his coffee in virtually every Western crossroads cafe where a mountain view or a desert sunset attracts exiles from the cities. The nation’s nomadic population is provoking cultural conflict on the frontier, as it has since Daniel Boone led a band of European malcontents through the Cumberland Gap into the Shawnee Indians’ ancestral hunting grounds.

For many years, the Western outback remained off limits to all but the hardiest urban migrants because it demanded too much. To live on the land, you had to live off it. Survival depended on your ability to become part of an old-fashioned, agrarian way of life. But technology has changed that, providing a lifeline to the urbanized world, allowing the tenderfoot to take up residence in the most remote places without having to grow calluses.

The change is relentless. In the rural West, those places with fewer than 50,000 people that the U.S. Census Bureau calls “non-metro,” the growth rate has outpaced the nation’s for the past 14 years. During that time Cheyenne, Wyo., Santa Fe and Yuma, Ariz., grew from non-metro to metro status. Existing metropolitan areas, such as Boise, Idaho, Las Vegas, Nev., and Albuquerque all expanded, transforming ranch and farmland into subdivisions and office parks.

As old cattle and mining towns turn into high-country exurbs, tensions mount. A family dog eats poison that a rancher left out for coyotes, and a lawsuit over animal rights divides newcomers and natives into warring factions. The old-timers decry the spread of civilization but refuse to pass zoning laws protecting land from development. By an odd twist of country politics, newcomers often become the embattled champions of open spaces.

Nowhere are these battles clearer than in Escalante. The Hole in the Rock country, a maze of canyons, rocky tablelands and forested mountain slopes, is an epicenter in the battle for control of the rural West that is pitting the environmental movement and its largely urban financial and political base against traditional ranchers, loggers and miners.

Established in 1876 by Mormon pioneers, Escalante hit the skids in 1990, the year the town’s sawmill shut down, throwing a fifth of the population out of work. Escalante--named after Silvestre Escalante, a Spanish priest who passed through the region in 1776 in a failed attempt to find a route from Santa Fe to Monterey--might well have slid into the weed-choked, boarded-up oblivion that has consumed thousands of small towns by-passed by freeways, automation and global economics. And it still could. Dotted with hay barns and pear orchards and back-yard granaries framed by gnarled locust trees, the town is a living daguerreotype of a simpler America. For years, the town met its own needs by raising honey bees, making barrels and molasses, dairying, growing hay and cattle, mining and logging. If the future of the West lies in peddling Western wear or showing tourists the wonders of nature, most people here want nothing of it.

Escalante wants to survive on its own terms, the way it always has, even though that can mean living on a frayed shoestring. Since the sawmill closed, many families have been working four and five part-time jobs, often commuting 150 miles a day to make ends meet. With second-hand equipment bought at auction, the son of the old mill owner has jury-rigged a new operation, cutting fewer logs with less waste. If he can make a nickel on every dollar he spends, owner Stephen Steed says, the mill will survive. But long lags between timber harvests are becoming more frequent as environmental groups, convinced that the region’s upland forests are being logged to death, protest virtually every proposed new cut.

“If public sentiment is against taking the raw material that’s out there, then it’s all over for us. But I don’t believe it’s come to that.”

Nor does Steed believe that Escalante must change its ways to survive. “I’d more or less like to see things the way they are,” he says. “Cows can do damage if they’re not properly managed, but I’d rather see them in the desert than 100 tourists. I guess we are a little bit selfish. We don’t mind sharing the place. We just don’t want to give it away.”

It is ironic that Americans continue to wrestle with the fate of a region that scholars claimed was pretty much settled and civilized 100 years ago. By the end of the last century, with the West’s available supply of free land staked out, the frontier appeared to be gone, surveyed and fenced, logged, grazed, dynamited and dammed.

But it was not peopled to death, and the West of the imagination endured. With the help of movies, real estate promotions, travel magazines and, more recently, environmental publications, the modern West could be marketed much the way it was a century ago--as a place of untapped opportunity and unspoiled beauty.

Purists argue that today’s West is a pale shadow of its original self because so much of its resources have been plundered to serve the needs of an industrial society. But tell that to the vacationing family that comes upon an old-fashioned cattle drive or to a group of inner city children seeing the Sierra for the first time. For them and millions of others, the West remains one of those rare places where imagination and reality can still converge. The question is whether that will still be true at the end of the next century.

Outsiders are already trickling into the canyons and valleys around Escalante, building solar homes, installing computers and planting organic gardens. New Yorker Robert Weed, one of the first, bought his land 12 years ago. He spends six months of every year here, running an import company from his home in a spectacular canyon.

Weed devotes much of his time to environmental causes, and he is spearheading an effort to stop logging on nearby Boulder Mountain. He is a founder of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and, over the years, his efforts to restrict timbering and cattle grazing have not endeared him to the locals, or they to him.

“I have not made an attempt to be part of the community,” Weed says, speaking from his second home in Vermont. “But when you drive into town and find you’re being hung in effigy from a power pole, you can get a sense that it’s not the most neighborly place.”

Protests like mock hangings are not all that uncommon in small Western towns that tend to regard environmentalists much the way Southerners looked at carpetbaggers after the Civil War. But historical perspective is cold comfort to Weed, who regards his adopted town with open bitterness.

“I was brought up Jewish, and I think I have a little perspective on persecution and intolerance,” he says. “You hear all this talk about small town values and friendly country folk, but I have never been in a community so intolerant of strangers or of people with different ideas.” Still, Weed returns every year because he loves the country.

A.J. Martinez, another newcomer, talks about making his way in rural Mormon Utah. Martinez is the local area manager for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and is often the referee in land-use disputes between residents and environmental groups.

Unlike Robert Weed, however, Martinez grew up in the West, in southwestern Colorado. “I learned my environmentalism from the back of a horse,” he says. And while his land-use decisions aren’t always popular with his neighbors, he fits in.

Martinez does worry, however, that many of his neighbors aren’t coming to grips with the changes he believes are inevitable. If they don’t, he fears they will lose control of their community. “It was once the land of milk and honey,” he says. “Grass grew up to the horse’s belly. But we used it up, or an awful lot of it in a short period of time, and now we’ve got to be more careful with it.”

For now, he would be satisfied if the community planning committee he chairs would agree on a zoning ordinance limiting where new growth can occur. “People don’t want to be overrun by condos or mobile home parks, but they don’t want to limit their options,” he says. “Suppose they go ahead and zone the land agricultural so nobody can clutter the place up with condos? Then suppose somebody comes along who wants to build condos and offers them $5,000 an acre for land that cost $500? Then what? Issues like that have people pretty much tied up in knots.”

In Escalante, peoples’ stubborn resistance to change is capturing the public’s imagination. The town’s leading light, Louise Liston, a plain-spoken former schoolteacher who could have stepped out of the pages of “Our Town,” has become something of a celebrity, debating the leaders of national environmental groups, lecturing congressional committees on the needs of rural America and figuring prominently in a new book titled “It Takes a Hero.”

It was Liston who came up with the idea of publicizing Escalante’s plight after the sawmill closed. A local county commissioner and a descendant of one of the town’s founding families, Liston was on the board of the National Association of Counties the year the organization listed Escalante as one of the 10 most endangered communities. By getting Escalante on that list, she turned the tables on the environmental movement, which seeks to restrict economic exploitation of Western public lands. Most of all, Liston wanted to stop a wilderness bill that would set aside from further development 5.7 million acres in Utah, including 337,000 acres around Escalante that the town regards as critical to its survival. Wilderness designation would prevent new mining and new road construction, limit commercial activity and allow for stricter supervision of existing operations.

“I am keenly aware of the unmatched beauty of the deserts, high plateaus and pine-scented mountains in my county, of the limitless opportunities for solitude and rejuvenation of the soul,” Liston said in testimony to the House Natural Resources Committee last spring. “But I am also keenly aware of the communities, schools, families and friends who struggle to live in the shadow of those beauties and maintain a quality of life not found in urban societies.”

Tall and erect, with a firm handshake and a fixed, unblinking gaze, Liston is one of those serenely implacable people who can project a moral dimension without opening her mouth. It comes in part from a deeply held conviction that her family, and country people in general, have taken good care of the Earth because their lives depend on its bounty.

Liston claims that her husband’s grandfather made the difficult journey to Salt Lake City in the early 1900 to persuade the Forest Service to limit the size of herds allowed to graze on public land. “So you can see why it might hurt us,” she says, “when we are accused of raping and ravaging the land out here, when we really have been a good caretaker for a long time.”

To early explorers making their way down the Colorado River, the pinnacles, arches and fluted battlements of Southern Utah’s vast tableland were like an apparition of the millennium. They felt as if they had slipped through a hole in time and were peering at the earth’s marbleized remains. They named many of the strange rock promontories after the gods: Vishnu’s Temple, Shiva’s temple, Vulcan’s Throne. It is all part of the Colorado Plateau, 130,000 square miles of high desert, sculpted mountains, serpentine canyons and bone-smooth rock that rose from ancient seas and swamps like a multilayered, multicolored cake over the past 275 million years. At the heart of it, just beyond the town of Escalante, are the canyons of the Escalante River, described in 1880 by explorer Clarence Dutton “as a maze of cliffs and terraces, of crumbling buttes, red and white domes, rock platforms gashed with profound canyons, the extreme of desolation, the blankest solitude, a superlative desert.”

Just outside Escalante, there is a bumpy old wagon road that leads to the past. And every year, about 500 Mormons from across Utah make the 60-mile pilgrimage down that road to a place called Hole in the Rock, where they reflect on an important moment in their history and marvel at a death-defying feat of engineering.

In the wintry autumn of 1879, a party of 82 wagons and 70 families set out across the high desert east of Escalante to found a new settlement in southeast Utah. Louise Liston’s great-grandfather was a scout for the expedition, which included forebears of several other Escalante families. Forty miles out of town, with snow piling up behind them and a 2,000-foot cliff down to the Colorado river in front of them, they decided to push on.

The average angle of descent was 50 degrees, the upper part of it dropped one yard for every yard forward, and there were two sheer drop-offs of at least 50 feet apiece. Hanging off the cliff from ropes, using pick axes and dynamite, they blasted a wagon track out of the cliff face.

The expedition lost some livestock on the way down but, miraculously, no wagons or people. Hardy Redd, whose family owns one of the largest ranches in southern Utah, makes the trip every year, he says, “to renew the contract with my ancestors.”

“You get a feeling of connectedness with the people who came before you and who did something that was maybe not extraordinary in the ways of the world but certainly was extraordinary in the small world of southern Utah,” he says.

The Hole in the Rock trek was a colonizing expedition, commissioned by Mormon elders concerned that gentile settlers were making inroads in southeast Utah. A persecuted people, the Mormons had finally found a refuge in Utah, and they guarded the land with a passion that still burns.

“This was a people who had been driven out of a lot of places. Out of Jackson County, Mo., out of Nauvoo (Ill.). Stoned, tarred and feathered,” says Redd. “The people lived here and put down roots, investing their time and energy for four or five generations on land no one else wanted because it was a harsh, inhospitable place. Then along comes someone from the East Coast or Washington, D.C., or someplace else and says, ‘You are using the land the wrong way.’ It set people off.”

Redd is a gracious host, eager to show off the countryside to first-time visitors and known to invite all kinds of people, environmentalists included, home to dinner. But even he is beginning to wonder if the land his ancestors struggled so hard to protect isn’t under siege. On his last Hole in the Rock trip, Redd had to get out of the way of a cavalcade of merry Jeepsters, seeing how far up they could get on the Hole in the Rock trail.

“I’m trying to adjust to the new realities,” Redd said. “The better angel of myself sees people having fun and tries to wish them well. But I can’t get used to it. The idea of people playing down there. . . . I don’t know.”

With 10 national parks and several adjacent wilderness areas, the Colorado Plateau is well on the way to becoming the nation’s largest playground. Every summer, Louise Liston estimates, 2 million to 3 million people drive through town on their way to Bryce Canyon or Capitol Reef. But, she says, only a small percentage of those travelers actually stop in town. Nor is there much reason to. There was a time, after the sawmill closed, when you had a hard time getting served in the local cafes if you looked like a backpacker. The climate has thawed, but the town certainly does not embrace the recreation boom that many see as a new kind of blight on the landscape.

Locals refer to it as eco-pollution. They talk about the lush, winding canyon trails trampled into steeplechase courses by throngs of endurance bikers and other outdoor adventure junkies and about the river banks festooned with “poop blossoms,” discarded toilet paper from the tent camps that line miles of canyon bottoms on holiday weekends. And they point to the former mining and cattle towns that have metastasized into tourist traps, no longer attractive or affordable to natives.

Half a day’s drive past the Henry Mountains and through some of nature’s most vividly extravagant architecture brings you to Moab, once the uranium capital of the nation, now threatening to become the Disneyland of the desert.

When the mines closed and Moab’s population began to drift away in the early 1980s, local leaders decided to prospect for tourists, promoting the charms of a town of 5,000 people nestled between two of the nation’s most resplendent national parks, Arches and Canyonlands. Today, Moab is a launching pad, not just for hundreds of thousands of mountain bikers but also for jet-boat rides on the Green River, Jeep safaris into the deepest recesses of Canyonlands and for New Age “retreats” in fragile Native American archeological sites.

Environmental groups tend to regard Moab as a ghastly anomaly. They say that wilderness tourism can be regulated effectively, as it is in many national parks. And they insist that sightseers tend to be much easier on the land than cattle or chain saws. They also believe that tourism will provide a more reliable source of income, liberating communities from the boom/bust cycles of extractive industries and ending their dependence on the federal subsidies those industries inevitably require.

It hasn’t worked out that way in Moab. With the tourist boom in high gear, Grand County officials last year found themselves, hats in hand, knocking on the door of the federal treasury. With a $600,000 general fund, barely enough to take care of the 7,500 or so full-time residents, the county could not meet the staggering costs of accommodating the medical, sanitary and law enforcement needs of several million annual visitors.

“What do you do when the EPA tells you that you have to build a $1-million Class I, state-of-the-art landfill because suddenly you’re producing 40 million tons of waste per day?” asks County Commissioner Bill Hedden. “Where are you supposed to get the money to build and staff a full-range trauma center because your little country hospital emergency room isn’t adequate anymore?”

Besides celebrating its beauty, the early chroniclers of southern Utah also noted the limitations and the fragility of the land. John Wesley Powell, the famed explorer of the Grand Canyon, emerged from the plateau country to produce one of the most prescient studies of the West ever written.

Powell correctly predicted that much of the area, with its sparse rainfall and thin, crusty blanket of topsoil, could not sustain the kind of intense farming and ranching practiced in other parts of the country. Western lands, he warned, would not yield the agricultural cornucopia promised by the real estate boosters and political pitchmen of his era.

But Powell was ignored in favor of other theories. In southern Utah, for example, people believed that extensive cattle grazing and timber cutting would be good for the land. The reduction of vegetation would limit absorption of ground water and generate more runoff into streams and rivers, making the water more available for irrigating crop land. But as runoff increased, less water replenished the aquifers that act as vital storage tanks.

Human impact on the land is particularly visible in the mountains north of Escalante, where clearcutting in the 1970s laid waste to ponderosa forests. Elsewhere, the damage is more subtle. Some native plants have disappeared, trampled by cattle and people, replaced by non-native vegetation that’s good for cattle but not for wildlife.

Which leads to an argument that environmentalists have been harping on for years. By altering the landscape and depleting scarce resources, the people of southern Utah and many other parts of the West set in motion their own inevitable decline. If unchecked, they will use up what is left--the 10% of virgin old growth which the Forest Service says is still standing and the 37% of public rangeland that the Bureau of Land Management says is still in good condition. So why not back off the land now, the environmentalists argue, and spare what is left of the native trees and grasses and wildlife on public lands?

No one makes this argument more bluntly than Scott Groene of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, who’s trying to build national support for a bill in Congress that would grant wilderness protection to the mountains and canyons around Escalante.

Growing up in rural Kansas, Groene watched small towns collapse under the weight of bad luck and bad judgment. He reacts unsentimentally, the way a farmer might react to an animal that has come to grief.

“You could feel bad about it. But that was life. There was nothing you could or should do to stop it from happening,” Groene says. “A lot of these little towns in the West may die. It’s a question of whether we recognize that before we let them use up all the natural resources. Trying to keep these ranches going is a losing proposition. Their kids aren’t following in their footsteps. Some of these towns don’t have anybody under 60 in them.”

Unlike a lot of environmentalists, Groene acknowledges that a group like his can hurt people when it wins a court order blocking a timber sale or barring cattle from a canyon. “These people are my neighbors, and I’m not blind to their troubles,” he says. “I know that it’s true when they say they’re going to miss a truck payment if there’s no work in the forest. But if you aren’t willing to say ‘No, you can’t go chop the trees down,’ then you’re not going to be able to stop the planet from being torn to pieces, because there’s always going to be someone wanting to make a truck payment by going out there and chopping something down.”

Or trampling it under. Standing among a small herd of cows in a shallow basin scooped out of a mesa, Groene points to a tiny smudge of black algae crusting out of the red rock. It is called cryptogamic soil, or brown sugar soil, and without it little else would grow in this place. It collects moisture, supplies nutrients for other plants and, most important, holds the ground in place. Without it, the plateau country could turn into a sea of dunes. Cryptogams are so small and so delicate you can destroy them without knowing it.

Groene carefully steps around the tiny patch. The cows don’t.

Rancher Dell LeFevre is one of those people Groene is talking about--a fellow behind on a truck payment.

A big man in brown overalls with an intelligent gaze that softens a pugnacious manner, LeFevre grazes his cattle all across the federally owned, forested tablelands around Escalante that Groene would like to see made into a wilderness preserve.

LeFevre believes he would be be in a lot of trouble if Groene’s wilderness bill passes. His ranching operation supports 14 people--him and his wife and the 12 orphans they have adopted from around the world. The brood ranges from toddlers to teen-agers. A few don’t speak English yet, and it will be a long time before any of them are self-sufficient.

But LeFevre has enough to preoccupy him without fretting about the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance strategy for retiring his grazing land. Right now, his problem is that the calves he bought for $470 last year are worth $370 this year.

“You figure the difference on 400 calves, which is what I’m talking about, and you’re in a world of hurt.”

Ranchers are chronically in debt, and LeFevre estimates he owes $50,000, including his debt on the truck and a whole lot more to the Internal Revenue Service.

“It’s been worse,” he says. “I’ve owed close to a million.”

LeFevre, now 54, spent many years drilling ventilation shafts for a mining company and cowboying for his brother-in-law until he could raise enough money for a down payment on his ranch. After leasing his grazing allotment from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, he spent 10 years buying and assembling a water system consisting of 17 miles of pipe, pumps and troughs spread across 30 square miles of rangeland.

In the process of making the land cow-worthy, LeFevre altered the terrain, scalping hilltops to allow the water in his pipeline to flow more easily. And with a heavy chain tied between two bulldozers, he uprooted scores of juniper trees to make room for more grass. That was seven years ago. The splintered carcasses of those trees still litter the ground south of Escalante.

LeFevre is the first to admit that the dry, harsh country would not support cattle without expensive intervention. He supplements the thin winter range grass with protein blocks and hay bales. Still, the cows lose weight every winter, and some wouldn’t make it at all if he didn’t pull them off the range and nurse them back to health on his small hay pasture.

Looking for ailing cows after a recent winter storm, LeFevre eases his pickup over a low rise to a place where his water line connects to a large stock tank. The three-foot sides of the circular tank are heavily camouflaged with brush.

It’s a common precaution in country where the war of words between environmentalists and ranchers occasionally erupts in acts of vandalism. Springs and stock tanks are prime targets, and both sides have been victimized. Four years ago, rancher Arthur Lyman was rounding up stray cattle one morning when he came upon 23 dead cows, including seven newborn calves, all shot in the head. Lyman had been grazing his cows in an area popular with hikers, and the shootings had been preceded by anonymous threats. Five cows were shot last fall, and the pressure to move cattle out of popular hiking areas continues.

You can read some of the tamer rhetoric on the hikers’ registers that are posted at trail heads along the Escalante River. “Take the cows out,” writes A.G. from Ventura. “We don’t need cows on our public lands. . . . “Beautiful country/too much cow poop!” exclaims another Californian.

From time to time, LeFevre has thought about moving. He has looked at ranch land in Arizona and Nevada but always come back to southern Utah. Like so many families around Escalante, LeFevre’s has been here since pioneer days. “Where do you go? Where does a Dell LeFevre go when he gets run out of here? I’ve never come up with the answer to that.”

Back at home, with his kids crawling over him, LeFevre lightens up a bit. “When you add it all up, the lean years and the fat ones, I’ve had it pretty good here. That’s why we’ve been able to adopt all these kids. I wanted to share what I had with people who didn’t have as much. And that’s why I don’t need the government or the environmentalists screwing it up.”

Louise Liston says she would like to end the wrangling with the environmentalists. Working with the Utah governor’s office, she has come up with a plan for Escalante that would set aside a portion of the adjacent mountains and canyons for wilderness while reserving the rest for recreation, including a golf course, and for traditional uses--ranching and logging.

Liston hopes she can put an end to the environmental wars with such a compromise, but the environmentalists aren’t buying in and neither are many locals.

“The Escalante region is slam-dunk wilderness, and Louise Liston knows it, and that’s why she is willing to give up some of it,” says Groene. “But all she wants to give up are the steep, deep canyons where you can’t do much with the land anyway. She leaves out all the accessible upland areas where you could have economic development. Unfortunately, those areas have the best wildlife values. They are the places where you find the forage and the corridors for cougars and coyotes and deer and the other wild animals.”

Liston says she is flexible on some of the boundaries, but Groene is in no mood to compromise. “We’ve already lost 12 millon acres of potential wilderness to development in southern Utah, and we can’t afford to lose anymore.”

With little hope of mustering the support it needs within Utah, SUWA is trying to mobilize a nationwide campaign, enlisting the aid of groups like the Sierra Club. A former director of the alliance is touring the United States with a slide-show of the canyon country in hopes of building a broader constituency for southern Utah wilderness.

Among the regulars at Billie’s, Liston’s wilderness compromise is about as appealing as an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease.

“We know we don’t own this land,” says Arthur Lyman. “But we’ve been here for 100 years, and we feel that we have bought the right to use the land. We feel they are trying to take away a right that we paid for.”

“This is the last West,” says A.J. Martinez, putting his hands in the air and framing a small piece of the purple twilight outside Billie’s. “You got to admit it’s still a pretty good atmosphere, but it’s getting smaller every day, and I wish somebody knew how to save it.”