You wouldn’t know that any of the northern Wyoming Range was leased for oil and gas drilling by looking at it. Maniacal yodels from sandhill cranes rise from marshy areas just off a main road. Meadows are packed so full of flowers it’s hard to imagine that there’s enough room for all their roots. Toward evening, mule deer wander by as nighthawks whoosh by under a sky showing the first handful of a billion stars.

Even a professional hunter and tracker like Larry Jenkins didn’t see a sign.

Jenkins began guiding hunters in 1963. Seven years later, he bought the rights to build an outfitting camp high in the Bridger-Teton National Forest near a miles-long meadow on the crest of the Wyoming Range. A place that then, as today, ranked as one of the premier hunting areas in the world.

“We timed our going in and out with storms,” says Shirley Jenkins, Larry’s wife and business partner. Their camp sat at the end of a rugged old track initially built to service a long-abandoned coal mine. They’d bring the camp supplies up in a sturdy truck with a winch, and the clients would come in on horseback.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Jenkins says, oil companies began drilling on the far end of the meadow, a couple of miles from his camp. The old track was replaced by a road capable of handling twenty-four-hour eighteen-wheeler traffic. The activity drove off both wildlife and potential clients.

“It ruined me,” says Jenkins.

Even after a few years, when the wells were abandoned and the Jenkinses’ camp was up and running again, things were never quite the same. The oil people said they’d tear out the road after they were done, but the improvements had proven too useful for the Forest Service officials to give up. Today you can drive up in a motor home, though the camp still feels remote.

This summer, when told that the land north of his camp had been leased for more drilling—and that this fall, the Bridger-Teton National Forest intended to auction mineral rights for a huge tract of land just to the south—Jenkins was disbelieving and irritated.

“Really?” he said. “I think that’s ridiculous.”

The Wyoming Range forms the western margin of the Upper Green River Valley, a place experiencing a boom of development driven by rich deposits of natural gas, increasing demand and rising prices. This boom has brought with it great profits for energy companies and their supporting businesses—and promises much more. What started as a few wells just a decade ago has now become hundreds in places like the nearby Jonah Field, and could soon become thousands if the Bureau of Land Management approves industry’s wish. The BLM, the predominant land manager in the Upper Green River Valley, has leased nearly all the mineral rights to oil and gas companies.

This past summer, officials on the neighboring Bridger-Teton National Forest announced that the mineral rights for about 157,000 acres along the eastern slope of the Wyoming Range would be auctioned beginning in October of 2004. If purchased, the leases would have doubled the number of existing acres currently leased in the forest and would extend industry’s reach from the Upper Green River Basin all the way to the crest of the Wyoming Range.

U.S. Forest Service officials initially downplayed the decision to lease, saying that many of the lease parcels are protected from development. Greg Clark, the district ranger on the Big Piney ranger district, where most of the current and proposed leasing exists, said he was comfortable with the level of analysis done. But just weeks before the auction, Jack Troyer, the regional forester, unexpectedly pulled the leasing pending further study.

In the late 1990s, the Forest Service did a full environmental impact statement on four management units in a different part of the Bridger-Teton and decided it was inappropriate to allow leasing in those areas. Conservationists asked for more study for the newly proposed leases, and now it looks like they will get it.

“The same reasons for withdrawing the four areas [then, still] exist in places where they are now offering leases,” argued Linda Baker, before the leases were stalled in late September. Baker, a librarian in nearby Pinedale and leader of a conservation group called the Upper Green River Coalition, says that locals have differing “degrees of acceptance” of the development. Some people welcome the business, others see it as a pragmatic response to the country’s demand for natural gas, and some are leery that the land and wildlife, which help define a way of life for many Wyoming residents, may be paying much too high a price.

While additional leasing is on hold for now, active leases are still in effect for large sections of the range. Many of the proposed leases would have filled in parcels already leased by a California-based gas developer in 1995 and 1998. He’s planning to begin drilling on the forest soon. While it’s unknown if the forest will ever see production as intense as on the Jonah Field or the Pinedale Anticline, it’s hard not to get the sense that some of the most stunning country in the American West is gearing up for a change.

“The biggest travestyÉis turning massive amounts of public land over to industry,” says Baker. Many in the conservation community feel the land is being sold out from under the feet of the American public. Yet, an increasing number of those feet are propped up on ottomans in living rooms warmed by natural gas, and industry points out that it has to come from somewhere.

Fourth of July weekend is one of the busiest on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Nearly every clearing off Greys River road is filled with motor homes and campers. Farther up the road, the motor homes give way to tents set at a more generous distance from one another. The road winds up along the river, between the Wyoming Range on the east and the Salt River Range on the west. The Wyoming Range doesn’t have any designated wilderness; it’s a more working-class kind of forest. But despite the off-roaders, horseback riders, snowmobilers, hunters, hikers and sheepherders, high-country solitude is not hard to find.

Just past the abandoned Blind Bull mine, a road ends at a wide, high valley. Rolling hills covered with lupine, sunflowers and sage and dotted with pockets of aspen, subalpine fir and spruce blanket the crest of the overthrust belt. The belt is a 75-million-year-old series of massive faults that stacked much older chunks of earth atop younger ones. At a warming hut, recently renovated by a local snowmobile club, guest book entries say things like, “Up here for five days—didn’t see a soul!”

But the scars from the mine, the warming hut, an empty sheepherder’s cabin up the trail and a couple of abandoned oil wells give away an obvious fact. It hasn’t always been so quiet here, and under the proposed lease arrangements, it’s not likely to remain so. To get a glimpse of what’s on the horizon, you needn’t go far.

Down in the valley, not far from where the Green River meanders through sagebrush hills, a pronghorn antelope looks up and stares as a truck passes by, and then ignores it. Inside the truck, Jeff Johnson, the Jonah Field production manager, explains why and how EnCana, the company he works for, invests millions of dollars to drill more than two miles beneath the ground.

The why is simple: they believe there are about 10.5 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas underneath the area called the Jonah Field. At today’s prices that resource is worth many billions of dollars.

The how is more complex, and quite ingenious. Johnson says gas companies have drilled, completed or permitted about 450 to 500 wells in the Jonah—about 350 of them are EnCana’s. Each drilling pad eats up three to five acres of land—more if there are multiple wells per pad. EnCana operates five drill rigs on the field, each with two crews working twelve-hour shifts. The drills stand several stories high—a mixture of hydraulics, mechanical engines, computers and problem-solving people that work together to bore a two-mile-deep hole. After about three weeks, they finish drilling a well, break down the rig, move it to a new spot in some fifty-five trailer trucks, and rebuild in two or three days. Each drill hole requires nearly 1.5 million gallons of water, which EnCana gets from eleven water wells they’ve drilled in the valley. The cost of drilling each natural gas well runs approximately $2 million.

Johnson pulls the truck up to a completed well and explains the geology. About 65 million years ago, a series of braided streams writhed across a broad valley. Debris eroded from the uplifting Wind River and Wyoming ranges filled the valley over time, leaving plant matter to decay and turn into combustible treasure. The gas lies in thin, lens-shaped layers, formed by countless old braided streams stacked on top of one another for about two thousand feet. Each well passes through several such lenses. The layers between the lenses are solid rock, and must be fractured in order for the gas to migrate to the well. A sandy mixture is forced into the small fractures—maybe a tenth- or a quarter-of-an-inch thick—to keep them from closing under the weight of two miles of earth and slowing the flow of gas.

Information gleaned from well logs (detailed geological surveys of each drill hole) tells the EnCana workers that the relatively small area occupied by each lens requires that wells penetrate the earth about once every five acres. If it were up to Johnson, he’d put a vertical well every five acres. It’s more likely he’ll have to use directional drilling, where multiple wells are drilled from one pad.

Johnson holds up a map to show that he’s driven from the northeast corner of the field to the southwest corner, crossing the whole thing in just a few minutes. He pulls out a chart that shows the 30,000-acre Jonah Field as the second-highest producer of natural gas in the state, behind only the 8-million-acre Powder River Basin. Compared with other fields, the Jonah produces a lot of gas in a relatively small area. The landscape is dotted with well heads, tanks and generator huts, and scarred with roads, pads and pipelines, but Johnson says this will be erased when the wells peter out in a few decades, and that you’ll hardly know they were here.

Just west of the Jonah Field, driving up a dusty gravel road toward the boundary between Forest Service and BLM land, Lloyd Dorsey of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition points out the ominous signage:

Attention: You are entering a toxic gas production fieldÉTravel at your own risk.

Map coordinates posted at each well give away the unmarked Bridger-Teton boundary. Past it, up the hill on the horizon, a Halliburton truck and several men in red jumpsuits service a well.

At about 9,500 feet Dorsey stops near the well, one of seven producers on this part of the forest. As he watches from the barbed wire fence surrounding the pad, David Daniel, a Pinedale contractor working for ExxonMobil, walks up. He explains that they are doing a routine servicing of the well. “If you see any gas coming out, run that way,” he says, pointing upwind from the well. He says an accident is unlikely, but—like another popular sign in this well field says—safety first.

The wells here deliver sour gas. It contains a variety of marketable gasses, plus hydrogen sulfide—the poison that inspired the signs.

ExxonMobil recently received approval for a dozen more wells on national forest land. In August, they requested another eleven wells, which are currently under consideration by the Forest Service and BLM.

“This is really classic mule deer area,” says Dorsey, “rolling broken lands, security timber, pockets of aspen and upland shrubs.” Now, it’s also a classic gas production area with acres of pads, overhead powerlines, noisy processing facilities with windsocks—so you know which way to run—and stakes with flagging tied to them that lead into stands of whitebark pine outlining more pads.

“Down here a lot of horses are out of the barn,” says Dorsey. “It’s very difficult to slow development.” He doesn’t want to see this happen to the rest of the Wyoming Range.

Like many other conservationists, Dorsey is frustrated by what he sees as a vast land grab. Most of the land already leased in Wyoming and around the West has not been fully developed. Yet public land agencies keep putting more mineral rights on the auction block. “Lease acquisition is an industry in and of itself,” says Dorsey. “That’s not an energy policy that benefits our country.”

Dorsey wonders why industry and government don’t go back and develop current leases and use up the existing property rights, instead of taking even more of the public’s property rights away by leasing more public land.

John Lockridge, the California gas developer and a major leaseholder on the Bridger-Teton, has been working in the industry since the 1950s and is happy to answer that question.

“You can’t wait on a supply of oil or gas to reach full development in one field before developing another,” says Lockridge. “If our industry operated on that basisÉ” he says, exasperated with those who believe more public land should be kept off-limits to development, “I hope they are the first ones cut off on a supply.”

He points to his experience trying to develop a gas field in the Bridger-Teton as an example of how long it takes to get production going. “I have been requesting this land for ten years. I’ve been stonewalled,” he says.

“We started this play before Jonah or the Pinedale Anticline produced,” says Lockridge. If big reserves are there, as he anticipates, this field could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions.

He hired a consultant who estimated a resource potential of up to 80 trillion cubic feet of gas under his current leases and the nearby land the Forest Service just pulled from leasing. But resource potential is based on little data—it’s far from clear how much recoverable gas lies under the ground. The only way to really find out is to drill and see what’s down there.

“I think the American public is being mistreated by the withholding of lands for a few individuals,” says Lockridge. He describes those individuals as radical environmentalists, but his statement is tinged with irony given that he has much to gain from a big hit.

The technology used in the Jonah would be employed in this field, but with a big difference. Lockridge says that the tight sands under his leases were deposited as a river delta. While the braided streams that resulted in the Jonah field require tight well spacing to get at the lenses of gas within the rock, these gas-bearing formations could be contiguous. One well could extract gas out of a larger underground region.

“I would be surprised if anything more than eighty-acre spacing would be considered—at first,” he says. It’s the “at first” that has some people worried. Estimated density of gas wells has been known to increase over time.

Greg Clark, the Big Piney ranger, says that the Forest Service estimates the “reasonable foreseeable development” on the Bridger-Teton at about ninety wells—a number taken from the more-than-decade-old forest plan. Dorsey thinks that’s a ludicrously low estimate. Lockridge thinks the Forest Service is off as well. “I have commented to the Forest Service that I thought their estimates were too low,” he says.

While Lockridge hopes for another rich field like the Jonah, conservationists want the line drawn at leasing more of the Bridger-Teton.

Once leased, it becomes difficult to stop a developer from drilling. Clark insists that he’ll say no to drilling in sensitive areas, and he doesn’t expect much production to happen on the forest anyway. He’s been there seventeen years and has seen industry interest come and go. But increasing technology and rising prices are strong forces.

The complicated problems surrounding current development are far from solved. Big-game migration corridors and winter range, a rise in air pollution and the destruction of critical sage grouse habitat are all concerns. Change is coming so quickly it’s difficult to measure the ecosystem’s response.

Linda Baker is well aware of the demand for natural gas, and knows that the Jonah field is highly productive. “If we can get more resource out of a smaller area, that’s the best possible scenario, but it should be understood that that becomes a sacrifice zone. You can’t create crucial habitat but you can protect it elsewhere,” she says.

“I’ve inventoried every trail,” says Baker, who worked in the Wyoming Range for the Forest Service for several years. “My impression is that the Wyoming Range has a lot more wildlife than even the Winds. We stand to lose a hell of a lot if we start playing around in there.”