Loving the West to Death

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THE COMPLICATED COWBOY

"Ed Abbey was a hypocrite," said the caretaker at Pack Creek Ranch.  "His book brought more people to Moab than all the ads by the chamber of commerce."

It's the old nature writing irony: Walden sending an army of Thoreau wannabes to the woods. And I couldn't help but nod, since I'd never have come to Moab in the first place if I hadn't read Desert Solitaire when I was 28.

I spent my second night in the West at Pack Creek, high above the town, perched amid the aspens and pines of the La Sal Mountains and looking down at the multiple red rock towers, which resemble a series of giant, misplaced chess pieces. The ranch is partly owned by Ken Sleight, a 79-year-old former river rafter and horseman. Sleight was the inspiration for Seldom Seen Smith, the wildly adventurous part-time Mormon who appeared in Abbey's best-known novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang.

The next morning I found Sleight over by his truck in front of his house. He was wearing jeans and two dungaree shirts, despite the early heat. We walked up to talk in his "office" -- an aluminum-roofed bunker above the horse pasture. He sat down, stretched out his legs, and told me stories about his early days as one of Utah's original river guides.

I confessed that I'd spent the day before mountain biking, and asked him what he made of the biking craze.

"Well, I don't think they hurt the land that much," he said. "Mostly what they hurt is the spirit of the wilderness. I'll be out taking a hike and they'll come roaring down. Never one of them, of course. They run in packs in those colorful clothes. Anytime you bring fashion into wilderness I think you're in trouble. I'd like to get on my horse and ride down into town all clad in Spandex. Just to show them how ridiculous they look."

Sleight has evolved over the years into one of his region's most outspoken voices for the environment. He has watched over the decades as Moab cycled through booms and busts, and he watches now as thousands of small uranium claims are made on public lands, including the hundreds that are right next to Arches, where his old friend was a ranger. About a decade ago he discovered that loggers were deforesting the nearby Amassa Back Wilderness, dragging chained trees over Native American archaeological sites. What further outraged him was that this was going on without the required BLM monitor. So he climbed on his horse and rode up the mountain to confront the loggers.

"I pulled up in front of them so that they had to either stop or run me over," he said. "My horse bucked when they kept coming. But they finally stopped. We had a standoff until the cops came. I was hoping they would arrest me but they didn't. You can say it was just a symbol, but the next time they logged they had a BLM man with them."

Despite these bursts of civil disobedience, Sleight has spent the better part of his life in the tourism business and confessed some culpability in Moab's recreation boom. "When I went down the river with Abbey, we were both kind of like double agents," he said. "We both loved it all -- the goofing off, the joy of the campfire, the feeling that everything was right in the realm. But at the same time we had our uses for the thing. He was always writing and thinking about the places and people we were with. He was doing it with his writing, and I was doing it with the trips. 'Come with me and I'll show you Cathedral in the Desert.'

"I remember when I was living down in Escalante, taking trips down Escalante Canyon to Coyote Gulch," Sleight continued. "When I first went there the place was empty, and I would put out these little mimeographed sheets in town, trying to drum up business. But then I took a reporter from Sunset magazine down the river and he wrote an article on me. A few weeks later I saw people hiking in the canyon, and when I asked them they said yes, they had read the article. And people led to more people. I began to see you had to be careful. Began to see you could love a place to death."

Sleight admitted he had had his hand in how things ended up. But he had also tried to slow them down, fighting to regulate and keep new roads and developments out of Moab. In fact, despite his cowboy image, many of his battles over the last four decades have been efforts at restraint.

"I've become a firm believer in limiting the number of rafters per canyon," Sleight said. "But that gets into regulation. And then you start to lose a feeling of wilderness spirit and freedom."

This, I thought, is the crux of it, the reason so many are resistant to restraint, to regulating and policing our public lands. "Lawlessness, like wildness, is attractive, and we conceive the last remaining home of both to be the West," wrote Stegner. Yes, we come West for that feeling of wildness, of lawlessness, the sense that we can do what we want and do it on our own. But in these days of crushing numbers, one person's freedom has an impact on the freedom of a hundred others. Take the roaring freedom of off-road vehicles, which, while making up only 7 percent of the Moab area's recreators, have access to 81 percent of BLM land. It's true those who stay on the existing roads do minimal damage, but since freedom and exploration are central to the activity's appeal, it's common to head off-trail and splash down riverbeds. As for sheriffing the motorized drivers, or the bikers and hikers for that matter, at the moment there are two BLM law enforcement officers in the Moab office in charge of overseeing the area's 1.82 million acres and one officer overseeing another 1.79 million acres to the south.

"Mining and drilling are the biggest environmental issues in northern Utah," says Liz Thomas of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Bobby McEnaney, an expert on public lands at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which works closely with the alliance, says that the Bush administration's last-minute plan to sell off a new round of oil and gas leases in Utah -- including some on land that abuts Arches National Park -- is particularly disturbing. McEnaney says, "These leases are in areas where the BLM had identified much of the land as being of wilderness caliber, but of course as soon as any drilling equipment or roads are introduced, wilderness designation goes out the window."

In southern Utah the threat is different. "Here," says Thomas, "off-highway vehicles are the biggest issue, hands down. Right now there are 20,000 miles of route in southern and eastern Utah. If you look at a BLM map, it looks like a bloodshot eye."

Ranchers and other old westerners, and now off-road vehicle drivers, have long resented the government telling them what they can or can't do on public land. But with greater numbers and greater use, it may just be that championing regulation and restraint, while not quite as sexy as championing freedom, is the key to preserving the smaller freedoms that are left. Conversely, allow for unregulated freedom and you end up with Moab, or worse.

Continued...