Old West and New in an Uneasy Truce

Dave Hill loved to drill. From the adrenal rush of gambling on the big strike, to the screech of the bit chewing into the earth, wildcatting was his life.

But after his last project required a stack of environmental impact reports higher than the sagebrush that carpets this high-plains valley, Hill hung up his overalls.

He’s selling real estate now, pitching alpine vistas to buyers who want a stake in the unspoiled West.

Hill has left the old Western economy, where people made a living with drills, spades and backhoes, often leaving behind toxic pools, depleted soils and dwindling wildlife.

However reluctantly, Hill has entered a New West where wilderness is no longer a larder to be raided, but the backdrop against which a cleaner, more stable economy is being built.

Nowhere do those two worlds contrast more than here in Sublette County, a sprawling expanse of broken range with fewer than 6,000 people, no traffic lights and copious deposits of natural gas.

Straddling two economies, Pinedale does its best to shake off the incongruities. The quiet hamlet, where antelope and elk graze the park, hardly flinches when hundreds of wells are built out on the animals’ wintering grounds. A fourth-generation rancher jeers at “trophy ranches” owned by fair-weather moguls, but admits he’d sell his spread to the first millionaire with checkbook and pen.

What passes for quaint contradiction here is rapidly becoming grounds for heated debate elsewhere, after the Bush administration unveiled its energy strategy. Heavily influenced by Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Wyoming congressman and oilman, the plan calls for substantially more drilling in the Rocky Mountain West, home to the largest stretches of wilderness in the lower 48 states.

Across the region, environmental groups are mobilizing to stop the spread of oil and gas drilling into national forests and proposed wilderness areas like those surrounding Pinedale. Vowing to keep Wyoming from becoming an “oil and gas sacrifice zone,” Earth First! plans to rally its forces July 7-16 in the town of Alpine, about 60 miles northwest of here.

Pinedale residents are left wondering what will come of the tenuous truce the two Wests have held in this quirky town of 1,181 that touts itself as “All the Civilization You Need.”

More Exploratory Rigs Than in Alaska

The Old West hums with activity in the arid mesas of south Sublette County, where the biggest players in the energy industry are running more new exploratory rigs than in all of Alaska.

Billions of cubic feet of natural gas comes out of this county. No other area in the U.S. is as important to the energy industry right now as the Greater Green River Basin that begins here and sweeps south to Utah and Colorado.

Decades of drilling have taken a toll on the longest migration corridor for elk, deer and pronghorn antelope in the Rockies. Wells, roads, tanks and pipelines pock the wildlife route where it passes through Sublette County, leaving a lattice of scars. In some areas, signs warn of potentially lethal sour gas vapors. Cows, birds and wildlife have died from drinking petroleum-laced water out of waste pits that dot the prairie.

“I’ve seen reclaimed [well] sites that were planted 20 or 30 years ago that still look like the moon,” said Linda Baker, assistant library director and Pinedale’s most vocal environmentalist. “I haven’t seen anything that to me looks like good wildlife habitat.”

One of the town’s staunchest defenders of oil and gas development, Pinedale Roundup Editor Rob Shaul, had a recent epiphany after taking his first aerial view of the Jonah Field, the biggest natural gas complex south of town.

“Overall, I think the Jonah Field has been a blessing to Sublette County,” Shaul told readers June 14. “But it has had its costs--the industrial development of what once was formerly a very remote and wild part of Sublette County.”

Such misgivings were rarely expressed until recently, because most of the oil and gas development took place out of sight, if not out of mind. But up to 900 new wells have been approved in an area that reaches to the southern edge of town. Derricks march north toward ranch country, where wealthy outsiders have paid $1 million or more for private trout-fishing domains, and retirees have snatched up subdivided ranches in 20- and 35-acre plots.

While these new trophy ranches yield substantially more in property taxes than cattle operations, their value pales in comparison with productive wells. The energy industry is responsible for 86% of the county’s annual tax revenue. It is the reason there are well-paved roads, a health clinic and heated indoor swimming pools in the schools. “It’s a very frustrating thing to live in a county that gets 90% of its revenue from oil and gas and have all these people bucking it,” Hill said.

Like Hill, who dismisses his job switch as a “midlife crisis,” Wyoming loves drilling. The state ranks seventh in production of oil and fifth in natural gas, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The industry pays 81% of the indirect business taxes, and about a third of the property taxes, in a state that has no personal income tax on residents, according to the Commerce Department.

Yet analysts worry that the state has done little to buffer itself against inevitable energy slowdowns like those it has suffered in the past.

“We sure haven’t taken advantage of opportunities to diversify,” said Bob Schuster, an attorney who edited a 1998 study on Wyoming’s chronic underdevelopment. “People say the spigot is back on. We have to find a way to have stability in revenue so we’re not captive to whatever flux.”

Indeed, for all its energy riches, Wyoming scores well below the national average for median household income (35th) and average annual pay (45th).

Wyoming is not alone. Montana, where another boom is in the offing, ranks 47th in per-capita income and last in average annual pay.

Economists and politicians note that dollar for dollar, energy production does not employ many people. In fact, Wyoming’s boom-time job growth, seventh-best in the nation last year, came overwhelmingly from government and services, according to the Commerce Department. Mining’s job growth was anemic in comparison.

“We produce a . . . lot of oil and gas in the Great Plains of Montana, but you go out there and you don’t see any great economy,” said Thomas Michael Power, dean of the economics department at the University of Montana.

Power said environmental amenities can drive local economies better than Old West commodities.

From Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, to Grand Junction, Colo., and Santa Fe, N.M., vibrant local economies have sprung up independent of Old West industries, driven by people who want to live and work in beautiful places with great recreation.

“If you don’t mention climate, open space, scenic beauty, lakes or rivers, oceans,” Power said, “you’re really stuck trying to explain migration patterns.”

Not everyone is convinced.

“There’s not a whole lot of evidence that emphasis on the environment and quality of life has brought solid growth,” said Jane Shaw, senior associate for the Political Economy Research Center, a conservative think tank in Bozeman, Mont. “You can’t build a whole economy entirely on the attractions of quality of life.”

A Choice Between Drillers and Skiers

For Pinedale, the choice can seem pretty stark: oil and gas wells marching up from the Jonah Field versus rich newcomers migrating from Jackson, Pinedale’s glitzy neighbor 80 miles to the north.

A skiing and recreation mecca, Jackson has diversified in a way that has reduced the Old West to window dressing.

Most of the scant privately owned land around Jackson has been converted into gated subdivisions, pricey dude ranches and “starter castles.” The clerks in the Kmart and the cooks in the cafes are lucky if they can afford more than a trailer hard by a creek outside of town.

Pinedale residents take one glance north and cringe.

A sleepy town in a broad undulating valley framed by the Wind River and Wyoming ranges, Pinedale could be the set for the old television series “Northern Exposure.” Moose--as well as mule deer and pronghorn--wander through town and can outnumber humans in the public park along Pine Creek.

The only chain enterprise here is the Best Western Motel--no Starbucks, no McDonald’s, no Wal-Mart.

Nonetheless, a New West economy is emerging.

The area was settled by ranchers, but today, ranching accounts for less than one-tenth of the employment, while more than half the jobs come from services, government and retail, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

This year, a fourth real estate office opened, giving the town one sales agent for roughly every 90 residents.

The Pinedale area is home to massive spreads owned by Don Kendall, the former CEO of Pepsi, former Secretary of State James Baker III, and moguls who have made their millions selling goods ranging from surgical staples to hair-loss tonic to Gummi Bears.

Rancher Jim Greenwood, who runs cattle on the nearly 6,000 acres his great-grandfather homesteaded more than a century ago, is practically hemmed in by the new landed gentry, including several who paid millions for plots on which they fish, but do little else.

“Basically what they do is pay a monster amount of money for fishing rights,” Greenwood chuckled. “It gives me a kick there’s that much money around.”

Plenty of that money has gone to Ron Saypol, who is a Manhattan native and a developer with a knack for turning ranches into gold. His latest work is the former Quarter-Circle Five ranch, a 3,400-acre spread on the Green River that Saypol chopped into 18 pieces that sold for $1 million each. Owners at the renamed Seven Mile River Ranch have built nothing there, and pay an additional $16,000 annually (about two-thirds of the average annual income for locals) to fish, sleep and eat on the property.

More modestly budgeted buyers are snapping up ranchettes of 20 and 30 acres, with 2,500-square-foot log homes, that sell in the $300,000 to 400,000 range.

“The market is changing because you’re getting more high-end buyers,” real-estate sales associate Hill noted. “We have a ton of people retiring and moving in. . . . People come into my office looking for something under $100,000, and we don’t have it. We have a working-class problem in affordable housing.”

Dan Farrand fled inflated housing prices in Palo Alto to come to Pinedale five years ago. The 50-year-old programmer was not looking to be a pioneer of the New West, but his Green River Computing Services is the kind of rootless New Economy company that is transforming other areas of the Rocky Mountain West.

He’s made peace with Pinedale’s brutal winters, which included a blizzard on June 12. By 4:30 p.m. on any given day, Farrand’s office is empty, and Farrand is sailing on icy Fremont Lake.

“I guess I’m the classic newcomer,” Farrand said. “I want to close the frontier now that I’m here. The oil and gas? The county needs the energy. I don’t know what they’re doing to mitigate environmental impacts, but I’m ready to accept that we need to develop the resources.”

A former developer from the Chicago area, Tom Rosseter understands Farrand’s view. But after seeing a drill rig pop up outside his cabin window on the New Fork River south of Pinedale, he wonders how much is enough.

“Wyoming, as we all know, is dependent on extractive industries,” Rosseter said. “We understand that. We’re concerned about what’s going to happen to this country. We’re concerned about this dividing people. I wonder if people who live in cities worry about this. They worry about their lights going off, but I don’t know if they worry about us.”

Many Americans share some of Rosseter’s concerns. A Los Angeles Times poll in April found that half of those polled would choose the environment over the economy if the two were in conflict.

In Pinedale, though, the values of the old working West abide. Residents are by and large proud of their central role in dealing with the nation’s energy crunch, and convinced that both Wests can live in relative harmony.

Rancher Greenwood proudly points to the cranes, antelope, mule deer, elk and other wild species on his ranch, tucked up against the Wyoming Range about 20 miles west of town. He’s also proud of the 172-foot drilling rig he allowed EOG Resources to place on his spread.

Three diesel generators the size of combines roared from beside the platform, while a drill shaft screeched like a freight train hitting a curve. Just 150 yards away, a male pronghorn bedded down, apparently unfazed by the din.

“The way I look at it, energy companies save America by providing energy, and agriculture provides the food, and both of them take big hits,” Greenwood said.

Greenwood hopes EOG hits natural gas and pays him good royalties. If not, he said, he might just sell the whole place to the first person to hand him a $12-million check.

Such things happen in Sublette County. As Hill, the wildcatter turned salesman, knows well, there’s no shortage of people with cash to construct their own personal West. “I like to use the line from ‘Field of Dreams,’ ” Hill said. “ ‘It’s money they have; it’s peace they lack.’ ”