Wyoming's Red Desert

It's time to draw a line in the sand of Wyoming's Red Desert. The White House is proposing to let some of their biggest campaign contributors in the oil, gas and coal industries drill more than 1500 wells across a wilderness that was once a famous passageway for the Pony Express - the Jack Morrow Hills in the Red Desert in Wyoming. The Hills are also home to North America's largest antelope and desert elk herds and the site of rare prehistoric rock art painted over 2,000 years ago. If the polluters can get access to an area as historically and ecologically sensitive as the Jack Morrow Hills, they'll know that with enough political pressure and campaign donations, they'll be able to drill, mine, and log just about anywhere – even in national monuments.

The Jack Morrow Hills cover 620,000 acres,and one-third of that space is potential wilderness. This wild landscape contains volcanic rock formations and aspen covered buttes, active sand dunes and rainbow colored deserts. This area is home to the largest desert elk herd and largest antelope herd on the continent. The Red Desert also contains vital links to America's cultural history. The prehistoric rock art in the Red Desert is over two-thousand-years-old. More recently, riders on the Pony Express rode through the Red Desert, as did Mormon settlers. Today, the members of the Shoshone tribe still visit spiritual sites in Jack Morrow Hills. The Shoshone Wind River Reservation is nearby, and the tribe maintains its strong connection to the Red Desert. Wyoming conservation groups are calling on Congress to designate Jack Morrow Hills as a National Conservation Area within the Red Desert. For now, however, this wild land is unprotected. It is vulnerable to the insatiable appetite of the oil and gas industries. The Bush administration, with its well known ties to Big Oil and Gas, has proposed to allow 1077 natural gas wells and 543 coal bed methane wells to be drilled in Jack Morrow Hills Study Area – bringing in seismic thumper trucks, building roads, and bringing pollution to a once-pristine area.