Wyoming’s Mystery Man:  C.J. Box on Top
By Susan Gray Gose

Riverside– C.J. Box walks into the Beartrap Café wearing a baseball cap, Carhartt jacket, jeans, and low-riding hiking shoes. He greets Margaret, the owner, and nods to her two dogs as they wander in. He orders a cheese-steak and iced tea. And he points to a spot at the bar where he likes to catch Nuggets games.

But this is also a place where the best-selling author dreams up the latest adventures for Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. Box cranks out 1,000 words a day—whether here at the Bearside, in his stream-side cabin, or at home in Cheyenne.

C.J. Box is possibly this state’s most successful homegrown author, and is certainly its more prolific. The Kelly Walsh High grad who couldn’t find a journalism job after college and was snubbed by his first agent, now publishes two books a year. The first Pickett book appeared in 2001. In less than a decade, Box has scaled the heights of the publishing world; millions of copies in the Pickett series have been sold worldwide.

The Beartrap Cafe is one of Box's favorite places to write.

Still, Box can pass for an average Wyomingite, both in his appearance and in his passions. When asked how success has changed him, he smiles.

“I don’t think I’ve changed—other than I get to do a lot more stuff that I’ve always wanted to,” he says. “I can fish just about anywhere in Wyoming. People are always, like, ‘Want to come to my ranch and fish?’ I love that.”

Each new Joe Pickett book—there are 10 now—outsells the last. Below Zero, which came out last year, hit the No. 19 spot on The New York Times Best Sellers List. Box’s publicists at G.P. Putnam’s Sons say Nowhere to Run, which will appear in stores April 6, might make the top 15.

Incredibly prolific—at least for a modern writer (Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope used to churn it out, too)—Box also has penned two stand-alone thrillers, Blue Heaven (2007) and Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (2008) for a two-book-a-year pace. While prepping to tour for Nowhere to Run, he has a new thriller, Back of Beyond, in the editing stages and a new Pickett mystery, which will highlight the wind-energy industry, in the research phase.

Despite the speed, Box clearly is impressing some critics. He won a prestigious Edgar Award—the mystery world’s top prize—for Blue Heaven. He also has won the Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe, and Barry awards, as well as the French Prix Calibre .38.

And now Hollywood has come calling. The producers of About Schmidt (the 2002 New Line Cinema comedy) bought the rights to Blue Heaven. While many optioned books languish, this one seems to be moving forward. It’s received financing, and actors Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin and Joe Pesci have signed on.

NOT JUST COWBOYS AND INDIANS.

Box shows off the Encampment River which runs through his property.

After lunch, Box—who says to call him “Chuck” (the C.J. stands for Charles James)—gives a tour of his four-acre property here in Riverside, population 59, which lies 20 miles south of Saratoga. Box bought the place three years ago as a retreat for writing—and fishing. (Fly-fishing comes up often around Box.) He guides photographer Brad Christensen and me, who are far less sure-footed, onto the frozen Encampment River which runs through his property. He grows giddy on the frozen ripples, describing the “big browns” beneath. In a nearby shed, he keeps a raft and a drift boat, which he can launch from his front lawn at the first thaw.

The property’s two-story cabin is spacious with upper and lower decks that look out to the river and Snowy Range. But it’s humbly furnished. No granite or leather, no picturesque pelt or elk-horn-chandelier— none of the usual trappings of Mountain West wealth. A wood-burning stove stands in the middle of the main room upstairs, where two sway-backed couches face a simple wooden table:  furniture that, minus the beer stains, could be found in a college dorm lounge. Downstairs, Box guides us into a small office with a single window that overlooks the driveway. His desk faces a wall adorned with a picture of a trout painted by his two oldest daughters, 23-year-old fraternal twins Becky and Molly.

Box’s main residence remains in Cheyenne, where he and his wife Laurie raised their three daughters (their youngest is a student at the University of Wyoming) and where they still own a tourism business.

It’s clear why Box loves his cabin.

“This area has the best fishing in Wyoming with the Encampment and Platte rivers,” he says. “There’re no dams. It’s all natural. From the Colorado state line to Saratoga, a survey of 30 miles of river found 3,000 to 4,000 catchable fish.”

Box’s passion for wildlife and the Mountain West makes its way into all his books. As a game warden (with the familiar pickup truck, red shirt, and badge), Joe Pickett is dropped into some of the state’s most gorgeous terrain: the Big Horn Mountains (Open Season), Jackson Hole (Out of Range), Yellowstone (Free Fire), the Sierra Madres (Nowhere to Run). Pickett often pauses to “drop in a line” in a glacial lake, or admire a sprinting herd of pronghorn.

This love of place has won Box some elite Wyoming fans. Gov. Dave Freudenthal became hooked on the series after stumbling upon a Pickett mystery when he intended to grab a different book for a trip to Alaska. He’s now read every one, and, “I am deeply troubled by the way C.J. Box treats governors.” (Box’s fictional Governor Rulon is often manipulative and devious—though he comes off better than the sheriffs.)

The governor’s wife, attorney Nancy Freudenthal, also reads Box. And the eminent geologist David Love (the hero of John McPhee’s non-fiction classic, Rising from the Plains) is said to have had his wife read him a Box novel while he was bed-ridden, before he died in 2002.

While he extols Wyoming’s virtues, Box says he tries not to “sugarcoat.”

“It amazes me when I get an e-mail from someone saying, ‘I want to move to Wyoming.’ I think, ‘Why? The wind blows, and you just read a book with five blizzards in a row and everybody dies,” Box says.

In particular, he is interested in nailing his portrayals of Wyoming people. He grew up reading Westerns laden with stereotypical cowboys and Indians who didn’t “talk or act like people I knew.”

“Yes, there are people who wear hats. But more than likely most Western characters aren’t from the West. They’re from someplace else, and they come out and put on airs,” he says. “Most people in Wyoming are pretty well-read, but they’re not geeks. They’re not rural or false. I want to write about real people and different points of views.”

BEERS ON THE PLATTE

Click to read an excerpt from C.J. Box's latest book Nowhere to Run.

Box grew up in Casper, the oldest of four children and a third-generation Wyomingite. His father was an elementary school principal and his mother taught at the Wyoming School for the Deaf. Box was the only dedicated reader in the house.

“There were no bookshelves,” he says. “I used to hang out a lot in the Casper library. I had librarians who were my friends.”

At Kelly Walsh High, Box became editor of the school newspaper and went after the high school football coach for teaching “jocks-only classes,” which helped the newspaper win national awards.

He won a scholarship to the University of Denver, where he became the college newspaper’s restaurant and rock critic. (“I had no money, but I got to eat free and see all the bands of the day.”)

After graduating from college, unable to find work in Denver, Box returned to Wyoming, where the publisher of the Saratoga Sun invited him for an interview on a fishing boat on the Platte River.

“For five hours, we floated and fished and drank beer. By the end of it, I would have paid him for the job,” says Box.

At the Saratoga Sun, Box became the sports editor and “features guy.” He also married Laurie Meese, whom he’d met in college, and began writing fiction.

Box traces his desire to write fiction back to age 14 when he read Catch 22, Joseph Heller’s blackly humorous novel about World War II.

“That was the book for me. I was so captured by it.”

At the same time, Box watched the 1975 movie “Rancho Deluxe,” written by Montana writer Tom McGuane, which featured contemporary cattle rustlers.

“It was the first time I’d seen the modern West portrayed the way I thought it was,” he says. “That started me thinking.”

His first two attempts at finished novels, written while he was at the Sun, fell flat:  “I knew they weren’t really good enough,” he says. Before settling on a game warden, Box tried using a sheriff and then a journalist as his sleuth, but, neither would realistically find himself in remote areas chasing criminals. He completed his third attempt, Open Season with Joe Pickett, in the late 1990s, and “it just felt like it was done.”

“When Chuck finished Open Season and I read it, it was around the time I was reading The Horse Whisperer,” recalls Laurie Box, who remains her husband’s first reader. “When I read Chuck’s book I really thought it was as good as the Nicholas Evans’s book. So if that book was published, why couldn’t Chuck’s book get published?”

THE AGENT VANISHES

Box shipped Open Season to an agent in New York City, but the writer was naïve about publishing in those days.

“In retrospect, he was pretty low-rent,” says Box. “For three years, nothing happened. I’d call him and say, ‘Is anyone reading it?’ He’d give me every excuse. It didn’t really fit into a formula because it was kind of environmental and Western. He basically said, ‘Quit calling me.’”

Box did, and his career took a swerve into tourism. He left the Sun to become director of Saratoga’s Chamber of Commerce.  Around 1990, he and Laurie moved to Lander for five months, where they started their tourism business, Rocky Mountain International, with Lander businessman Bill Sniffin. Sniffin credits Box with the business concept: convincing Rocky Mountain state governments to save money by marketing themselves en bloc to Europeans, who annually take month-long vacations and can visit the whole region in one trip.

“He was the brains,” says Sniffin, who later sold his share in the company to the Boxes. “He’s a very smart guy and makes a lot of smart decisions.”

One of those decisions was to move the company to Cheyenne to be closer to a major airport and the state capital.

A thriving tourism business would be enough for most people, but Box couldn’t shake the desire to write. Sniffin remembers reading early drafts Box’ mysteries on trans-Atlantic flights.  “They were really good,” says Sniffin, a former newspaper publisher turned columnist. “I can always brag to people that I read them first.”

Still, Open Season was going nowhere in New York. Box decided to “give it one more shot” and took his manuscript to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers conference in Denver, where writers can pitch their ideas to agents and editors.

Box showed Open Season to an agent whose interest was piqued. He asked Box if he had a representative. Box gave him the name of his New York agent. The man’s response was shocking.

“He said, ‘He died,’” says Box. “I thought it was a joke. He said, ‘You didn’t know he was dead?’ He had died of AIDS, and I didn’t know it.”

But from that point on, Box’s novel took a trajectory rare in the publishing world. A young Putnam editor at the conference took the book home and within days pitched it to her boss. The publisher offered Box a contract for three books featuring Joe Pickett.

Despite the low advance of $15,000 (fairly typical for first novels), Box was thrilled.

“It was everything,” he says.

Open Season went on to outperform expectations by going into four printings, receiving four-star reviews, and being nominated for an Edgar and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

THE JOE SIX-PACK FAN

Box’s books have succeeded partly because of his unusual readers: Men. The readership of the average American novel is about 80-percent female, but Box’s readers are split  50-50, male-female, says Box. With all the hunting, big game, ammo, and mountain air, it’s probably no wonder.

“It always perplexes the bookstore owners,” he says, with a chuckle. “They’re used to a certain kind of person coming in, and here are these guys.”

Box has received fan mail from a hunter who reads Pickett novel while hunkered down in deer blinds. A group of Maine hunters mailed Box a snapshot of themselves, outfitted in orange and holding up copies of his books.  They told him they usually “sat around drinking and telling dirty jokes” but now “sat around drinking and reading Joe Pickett novels.”

“It’s not like a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ scene,” they added.

Sarah Brown of Laramie, who attended a Box book-signing event in Saratoga in early February, says her two sons, ages 23 and 24, were far from big readers until they discovered Box.

“They’re backcountry skiers,” she says. “They thought sitting down with a book wasn’t a good use of their time. But one of them found a Pickett mystery. In two months, they’d read the entire series.”

Box fans are also drawn to his guileless heroes who recall the romantic Old West. There isn’t much moral ambiguity in a Pickett mystery. The game warden is brave and doesn’t hesitate to go after evil, even when it lies far outside his job description. He’s also a good family man, who, while chasing down the bad guys, also pines for his wife Mary Beth and three daughters in fictional Saddle String.

But Box’s heroes aren’t like a John Wayne character. Pickett, for example, is a poor shot, and he’s constantly killing off his horses by accident. In Box’s thrillers, one hero is a down-and-out divorced rancher (Blue Heaven) and another is an adoptive father (Three Weeks to Say Goodbye).

Box says he can’t conceive of writing books without such main characters.

“I could write other books with other characters, but I wouldn’t be as proud of them,” he says. “Other people can do those.”

Surprisingly, Box’s Western style has made him popular in France. The country is his No. 2 for sales.

“I’m almost considered a literary writer in France, believe it or not,” says Box. “Their critic community has a real thing for contemporary Western novelists like Tom McGuane and Jim Crumley. They’re venerated much more [in France than at home].  I kind of fit in with them, in [the French critics’] minds.”

But Box’s fans need not worry that too much France is rubbing off on their favorite mystery writer. On his Web site, www.cjbox.net, Box posted a photo of himself titled “Snooty.” The picture shows a sour-looking Box standing in an ornate room, while the caption says,  “American crime fiction novelist C.J. Box doesn’t appreciate a castle in the Loire Valley in France and wishes he could order beer and chicken wings in the café to get him through the day.”

No, Box is not at risk of becoming a member of the literati. In college, he could barely stand being around so-called “creative writers.”

“I could never finish a creative writing class,” he says. “I think I started seven of them. What I was interested in there were no courses for: Writing commercial fiction. [The creative writing classes] were all about journaling or writing stories about your angst. Everyone in the class was like that, and I hated it.”

Box was a guest-lecturer at the University of Wyoming recently.

“I advised the students to take journalism, not creative writing,” he says.

Others, however, might fault such a workmanlike approach to prose. Geoffrey O’Gara, a Lander journalist and author of What You See in Clear Water, says he admires Box’s productivity (“Some of us ‘literary’ writers take forever to produce books.”) and increasing skill (“He’s improved his writing, his plotting, his depth of characterization over the years.”) But he wonders if Box is “exhausting his ideas.”

“While Joe Pickett has grown richer with age, some of his plots and themes seem to be recurring,” O’Gara said, adding, “I’m not sure you could identify a Box ‘voice’. So he may never compete with, say, Annie Proulx..”

Coincidentally, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Proulx owns a large ranch up the road from Box in the Platte Valley. The two have met. Box reports that Proulx said she is a fan of his work. And Box says he admires Proulx “as a stylist.” But, he says, “she often portrays people whom I’ve never met.”

KEEPING THE DAY JOB

Box and his wife Laurie still own Rocky Mountain International, though he’s dramatically cut back his involvement. He’s pragmatic about keeping his “day job.”

“Everyone says, ‘I wish I could just write and quit my job,’ but I think there’s some value in not quitting,” he says. “There are a lot of writers who after a few years start to lose touch with how real people think and look. They’re not out among them. They’re in a place like this.” He sweeps out his arm, indicating his cabin and its mountain views. “I like the day-to-day interaction stuff. I like to be plugged in to where the business is going, what the clients are doing, what’s happening in those states, and that kind of stuff.”

Ever level-headed, he adds: “You don’t have insurance programs as a writer. There are a lot of benefits to owning a business, which I’d hate to give up.”

His familiarity with marketing may also be one key to his success. He is no shrinking violet when it comes to self-promotion. He admits, for example, that the black cowboy hat that he wears for his dust-jacket photos, goes on during book tours and promotional events.  The everyday Box is a baseball-cap guy.

His old colleague Bill Sniffin has noticed the image adjustments.

“It was interesting how he took on a Garth Brooks look,” Sniffin said. “He took on the hat and got rid of the glasses.”

While some writers complain about book signings and promotional road trips, Box embraces them.

“I honestly do like them,” he says. “I really like meeting with readers. Plus, it’s part of the deal. It’s pretty unusual when novels just become best-sellers without any promotional support. It happens, but it’s pretty unusual.”

His publicists at Putnam love his attitude and wish they had “25 more just like him.”

“Chuck thinks nothing of jumping into his mammoth SUV and driving 300 miles to do an event and then repeating the process the next day,” says Michael Barson, co-director of publicity for Putnam. “Last year I rode with him from Yellowstone to Cody, doing multiple events along the way, and then he tossed me by the side of the road in Cody and pressed on to do another book signing in Casper before heading home to Cheyenne.”

Box also answers every fan letter and e-mail he receives, fair and foul. On his Web site, he recently hit his 1,000^th reply. He’s answered gushing notes from beanbean, and responded to grumpy messages like “Below Expectations” from Dorothy.

Reader by reader, he believes, is the surest way to increase sales.

“It’s such a low-tech business,” he says. “Nobody buys a book based on an ad. There’s always somebody telling them, ‘I met the author,’ or, ‘Have you read this?’ It’s always one-to-one.”

Occasionally, fans have gotten a little too close. At a book signing in Los Angeles, a man showed Box a photo of deer. The animals were grazing in Box’s yard in Riverside.

“It was a little eerie,” says Box. “I was kind of discombobulated.” The Boxes recently unlisted their Cheyenne phone number.

WIND MILLS AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISTS

Beyond promotion, Box also spends time researching his books. Each starts with a controversial issue that hooks him: endangered species in Open Season, or the government’s ability to condemn and take private land in Nowhere to Run. He then wraps the crime around the issue. Currently, he’s researching the wind-energy industry, climbing to the top of a wind turbine to “see if a dead body could hang from it.” (And? “It could.”)

“Here’s the question I’m puzzling over,” Box says. “How can a person look at an oil field and say that it’s ugly, and look at a wind farm and say it’s beautiful? There’s as much growth disturbance, maybe even more because of the view shed, with the wind farm than with oil derricks. What it means to me is that some kind of beauties are ideological.”

Box autographed books after speaking at the Saratoga Community Center.

Box tries to get the details right. He’s done numerous ride-alongs with Cheyenne Game Warden Mark Nelson, his “technical advisor.” (The two have also become fishing buddies.)

“When we fish or ride together, he’s got a lot of questions,” says Nelson, who met Box after Open Season and has consulted on every mystery since. “He’s like a sun that soaks things up.”

As our interview wraps up, Box seems anxious to get on with his day. That night, he’ll make an appearance at the Community Center in Saratoga to hand out awards for student essays, make brief remarks, and sign books. Undoubtedly, he has research to pursue, a manuscript to fact-check, a book-tour to prep for, and a family to check in on.

Finally, does Box think he might ever become so wrapped up in his writing that the rod and waders collect dust?

“Neh,” he says. “I’d rather be a fly-fisherman.”

Susan Gray Gose is a freelance writer who lives in Lander with her husband Ben and two children, Lily and Gage. She has been managing editor of the Lander Journal, a correspondent for People magazine, an assistant editor for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, and a reporter for The News & Observer (N.C.) She also writes fiction.

If you are a rancher and you want to get federal money from the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) to do range improvements, you have to agree to build wildlife-friendly fence.  Four wires: lowest wire is smooth and 18 inches high, top wire is barbed and 42 inches high.  These designs let antelope and some other critters go under and deer go over without damage to critters or fence.

This works pretty well.  Some ranchers have gotten used to the design; a calf might stray under but the mother cow will not, and the calf will come back to mother, and all is well.

But this is not the way fences are built along highways.  Most are woven “sheep-tight” wire topped with a strand or three of barbed wire.  Pronghorns cannot go under or through these fences.  Consequently, sometimes we see stories about 15 of them killed in one big collision near Pinedale, or problems with migration in the Red Desert.

This is a two-question poll.

First question: Should fences along highways be built to NRCS standards, or is that so impractical for agriculture that it would be a bad idea?

Lead to second question.  We have pronghorns all over in our subdivision in southwest Gillette.  I have frequently seen bunches of them jump wire fences.  Some of my friends who live elsewhere make jokes about how we must have trained them specially, because “everyone knows that pronghorns don’t jump fences”.

Second question: Have you seen pronghorns routinely jump over wire fences?

Enter your responses in comment box below or e-mail them to TheSageGrouse@WyoFile.com

WITH EVERY mile of his last patrol of the Sierra Madres of Southern Wyoming, Joe Pickett felt as if he were going back into time and to a place of immense and unnatural silence. With each muffled hoofbeat, the sense of foreboding got stronger until it enveloped him in a calm dark dread that made the hair prick up on the back of his neck and on his forearms and that set his nerves on edge.

The silence was disconcerting. It was mid-August but the normal alpine soundtrack was switched to mute. There were no insects humming in the grass, no squirrels chattering in the trees to signal his approach, no marmots standing up in the rocks on their hind legs and whistling, no deer or elk rustling in the shadows of the trees rimming the meadows where they fed, no grouse clucking or flushing.  Yet he continued on, as if being pulled by a gravitational force. It was as if the front door of a dark and abandoned house slowly opened by itself before he could reach for the handle and the welcome was anything but warm. Despite the brilliant greens of the meadows or the subdued fireworks of alpine flowers, the sun-fused late summer morning seemed ten degrees cooler than it actually was.

“Stop spooking yourself,” he said aloud and with authority.

But it wasn’t just him. His horses were unusually twitchy and emotional. He could feel Buddy’s tension through the saddle. Buddy’s muscles were tight and balled, he breathed rapid shallow breaths, and his ears were up and alert. The old game trail he took was untracked and covered with a thin sheet of pine needles but it switchbacked up the mountain and as they rose the sky broke through the canopy and sent shafts of light like jailbars to the forest floor. Joe had to keep nudging and kissing at his mount to keep him going up face of the mountain into the thick forest. Finally deep into the trees, he yearned for open places where he could see.

Joe was still unnerved by a brief conversation he’s had with a dubious local named Dave Farkus the day before at the trailhead.

Joe was pulling the cinch tight on Buddy when Farkus emerged from the brush with a spinning rod in his hand.  Short and wiry with mutton-chop sideburns and a slack expression on his face, Farkus had opened with, “So you’re really are goin’ up there?”

Joe said, “Yup.”

The fisherman said, “All I know for sure is I drink beer at the Dixon Club Bar with about four old-timers who were here long before the energy workers got here and a hell of a lot longer than you. A couple of these guys are old enough they forgot more about these mountains than either of us will ever know. They ran cattle up there and they hunted up there for years. But you know what?”

Joe felt a clench in his belly the way Farkus had asked. He said, “What?”

“None of them old fellers will go up there anymore.  Ever since that runner vanished they say something just feels wrong.”

Wyoming has the smallest population of any U.S. state, but it maintains a literary output that rivals most other places.  While it’s been a quiet year so far for writers in Colorado (population 4,939,456, according to 2008 Census Bureau projections), writers in Wyoming (population 532,668) have been publishing at a good clip over the past few weeks.

Laramie’s Alyson Hagy kicked things off in early February with the publication of her fourth story collection, Ghosts of Wyoming.  Claiming Ground, a memoir by Cody’s Laura Bell, is due out March 9, and it comes with glowing blurbs from Rick Bass, Kent Haruf, William Kittredge, and Mark Spragg.  Haruf writes, “This is a book that compels you to the last sentence, both because of its sheer beauty and its profound meaning.” Spragg writes, “Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground is the finest memoir I’ve read.” I guess I’d better read it myself.

Knopf will publish Spragg’s third novel, Bone Fire, on March 11.  Spragg is also from Cody, (population 9309), which means that .0215% of Cody’s population will publish a book in March.  To put that in perspective, writers in New York City (population 8,363,710) would have to publish 179,820 books in March to keep up with Cody’s per capita output.  Even if you include self-published writers, I doubt New York’s scribes could produce that many volumes, especially given that about 172,000 books were published for the entire year in the United States in 2005, the most recent year for which UNESCO’s publishing statistics are available.

The Wyoming Authors Wiki lists 52 writers with connections to Park County, Wyoming, where Cody is located.  It also lists 18 deceased writers—including William “Buffalo Bill” Cody himself, author of such works as 1927’s Life and Adventures of Buffalo Bill..  And so, with the power vested in me by no one, I anoint Cody, Wyoming the new literary capital of the United States.

That’s not to snub Carbon County, where Annie Proulx was based before her recent move to New Mexico, or Teton County, where Alexandra Fuller [editor’s note: and Terry Tempest Williams] live, or Ucross, population 25, home to award-winning mystery novelist Craig Johnson.  Wyoming-native mystery-thriller novelist C.J. Box lives near Cheyenne, and his new Nowhere to Run hits stores on April 6, rounding out several busy weeks for Wyoming writers.

If you can’t make it up to Cody next month to attend the joint book signing/tour kickoff for Mark Spragg and Laura Bell on March 9 at The Thistle (2 p.m.), don’t worry, because Cody will be coming to you.  Spragg and Bell will be touring all over the region, visiting 24 bookshops in Billings (Barnes & Noble, March 10, 7 p.m.), Red Lodge (Red Lodge Books, March 12, 3 p.m.), Boulder (Boulder Book Store, March 16, 7:30 p.m.), Bozeman (Country Bookshelf, April 20, 7 p.m.), Missoula (Fact & Fiction, April 21), and many more places in Montana, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and California.  One can only hope Spragg and Bell will be hawking some sort of triumphant “We’re From Cody, Read Our Dust” t-shirt on the tour.

• Not all literary activity in the region is confined to Wyoming: several Colorado writers have been busy polishing their books and getting them into print, and this Saturday, Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver is sponsoring a panel called “The Story of A Book,” in which the authors will explain the process of how their books came to be.  Nick Arvin, whose novel The Reconstructionist is due out in 2011, Phyllis Barber, author of the memoir Raw Edges, Jay P.K. Kenney, who wrote Great Road Rides Denver, Cara Lopez Lee, author of the memoir They Only Eat Their Husbands, and Lynn Wagner, whose poetry chapbook No Blues This Raucous Song is out now with Slapering Hol Press, will discuss the “ins and outs of the process they’ve enjoyed (or endured) in getting their manuscripts from crazy first idea and into actual print.” “The Story of A Book” takes place at 910 Arts in Denver (910 Santa Fe Drive) on Saturday, February 27 (6:30 p.m.).  Lighthouse asks that attendees email their RSVP to info@lighthousewriters.org.

By Allison Winter, E&E reporter
Reprinted  with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net. 202/628-6500

The Bureau of Land Management will examine oil and gas drilling permits with “closer scrutiny” to determine if they might affect the imperiled greater sage grouse in light of the new protected status for the iconic Western bird, BLM Director Bob Abbey said today.

The Interior Department today said it would add the bird to a list of “candidates” for protection under the Endangered Species Act. The candidate list is a sort of waiting room for plants and animals that warrant federal protection but are excluded because of other priorities.

The split “warranted but precluded” decision on the sage grouse gives no specific legal protection to the bird, leaving it to states and federal agencies to decide what sort of conservation measures to take for the species. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said the department wants to use the latest science and habitat maps to encourage continued energy development, but in areas that will not imperil the sagebrush steppe ecosystem.

“We want to find smart ways of protecting habitat and developing much-needed energy and Western lands,” Salazar said.

Environmentalists, Western politicians and energy developers have feuded for nearly a decade over potential listing of the chicken-sized bird, whose sagebrush habitat also intersects with prime areas for energy development and agriculture across 11 Western states.

Today’s decision left questions for all of the groups, who said possibilities for energy development or conservation would largely depend on whether states or federal agencies take new steps in response to the candidate status.

That was not enough to please Western lawmakers who asked the federal government not to list the bird over concerns it could complicate oil and gas drilling, wind energy, grazing, mining and other energy development.

“If it isn’t one thing it is another with the sage grouse listing,” said Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.). “The state of Wyoming, its industries and its citizens have worked tirelessly to protect the sage grouse and avoid an ESA listing. More unpredictability in this ruling means more uncertainty for Wyoming jobs.”

For his part, Abbey said the Bureau of Land Management — which manages more greater sage grouse habitat than any other government agency — would develop new agency guidance to try to plan energy development around sagebrush habitat. Abbey said the grouse would also factor into BLM’s review of oil and gas leases.

“We will be reviewing applications for permits to drill to determine what are the likely consequences moving forward,” Abbey told reporters today. “We will certainly review with a closer scrutiny in areas where we have determined there are sage grouse.”

The Obama administration is currently taking a second look at 52 controversial leases in Utah that the George W. Bush administration had approved in what an interdisciplinary review team classified as a “headlong rush” executed improperly. Abbey today said BLM would likely include new protections for the grouse as part of the National Environmental Policy Act review process on the leases.

Abbey also issued an internal agency guidance today, calling for BLM to expand the use of new science and mapping technologies to improve land-use planning in an effort to conserve grouse habitat and ensure continued energy production and recreational access to federal lands.

“There is plenty of room in the West to have compatible energy development and … habitat for the sage grouse,” said Tom Strickland, Interior’s assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks.

Sage grouse live in California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. More than half of North America’s sage grouse are believed to be in Wyoming.

Kathleen Sgamma of the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States said her group was “encouraged” that Interior opted not to give full endangered or threatened status to the bird. But the group is worried BLM and other agencies may still keep them from developing inside the “core areas” for the grouse.

“We’re concerned that land managers will nevertheless implement this decision by introducing very restrictive policies that prevent companies from investing and creating high-paying jobs in local communities within core areas,” Sgamma said. “But it appears that Interior plans to balance implementation so that restrictions on energy development do not apply with a broad brush across the entire region.”

In January, BLM issued guidance to its Wyoming field offices asking regulators to limit the density of energy projects to no more than one wind turbine, electricity transmission line or an oil and gas well per square mile inside sage grouse “core areas.” It also calls for restricting all development activities in or around core areas during the bird’s spring nesting season — March 15 through June 30.

The sage grouse finding — which a court ordered the administration to complete by today — results from a lawsuit filed in 2006 by the Idaho group, Western Watersheds Project. A federal judge in Boise, Idaho, ruled in 2007 that political pressure tainted an earlier decision from the Bush administration not to list the sage grouse.

Some environmental groups are concerned the voluntary aspect of the listing might not be enough to protect the bird, since “candidate” status avoids the habitat protections and consultation requirements given to threatened or endangered species.

“FWS got the science right but passed on the opportunity to fully protect this bird today,” said American Bird Conservancy President George Fenwick.
But Ted Toombs, Rocky Mountain regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Center for Conservation Incentives, said the candidate status presents an opportunity for landowners and states to work to get conservation right for the grouse.

“An endangered species listing is no one’s first choice as a tool to fix broken landscapes. It is really a last resort option to keep species from going extinct,” Toombs said. “The first, best option to protect species is for conservationists, farmers, ranchers, energy companies, the recreation industry and other stakeholders to work together on habitat conservation and restoration, so that an endangered species listing can be avoided.”will examine oil and gas drilling permits with “closer scrutiny” to determine if they might affect the imperiled greater sage grouse in light of the new protected status for the iconic Western bird, BLM Director Bob Abbey said today.

LARAMIE – Wyoming’s greatly-used,  little-appreciated sagebrush ecosystem and one of Gov. Dave Freudenthal’s most elaborate initiatives are rapidly approaching a critical milestone.

At the end of the week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide whether to move towards listing the Greater Sage-grouse as an endangered species.

Wyoming’s minerals extraction and ranching industries and the governor’s office are awaiting the decision, due out early next week.  They’ve worked together to craft a strategy to avoid listing the Sage-grouse as endangered.

Sage-grouse and its sagebrush habitat are widespread in Wyoming.  This habitat has become fragmented as development has proceeded across the state, causing grouse numbers to dwindle. A federal endangered species listing, with its accompanying ban on disturbing the bird and its ecosystem, could force the cut back or closure of operations on ranches, mines, and oil and gas fields all over the state.

The governor’s strategy has produced efforts to help the bird, and allow industry amidst the sagebrush to continue. Those efforts have been hailed as unique in the nation. But whether those efforts have been enough – particularly when one initiative was dramatically cut back in scope last fall – will be up to the federal wildlife experts.

Aaron Clark, energy infrastructure advisor to Gov. Freudenthal, expressed anxiety over the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision when he spoke at the governor’s Wind Symposium last autumn.

“The thing that scares us to death,” he said, “is that from a gas production standpoint, 83 percent of the total gas production in the state of Wyoming would be subject to additional regulatory review with a full statewide listing of Sage-grouse.”

The decision, due Friday, March 5, to be published in the Federal Register early next week, will determine whether the bird and its habitat should receive the protection against destruction and disruption that is provided to “listed” species under the federal Endangered Species Act.  An initial pro-listing decision would begin a year-plus process before the bird would be officially listed and protected.

With its decision, the federal agency could also affect both the ranching and minerals extraction industries.

“I need to get clear on the record, it isn’t some obsession that I have with the Sage-grouse that has led me to where I’m at,” Freudenthal assured his listeners at the Wyoming Wind Symposium on the University of Wyoming campus last August as his staff presented conservation plans.  “What I have is an obsession with is making sure that the economy in this state continues to function, which it won’t if we in fact get that bird listed.”

Freudenthal has taken the lead in coming up with plans to stave off a federal listing. In 2007, he organized state employees and the private sector into a team to come up with a plan that would designate as sage-grouse “core areas” packets of land that ranchers, miners, and oil and gas drillers must avoid.

The “core area” designations have critics who see them influenced as much by economics as by science – and not backed with enough legal muscle.

The idea behind the governor’s strategy is essentially to create enough state protection for the Sage-grouse that the federal wildlife officials can comfortably decide that the bird’s future is looking all right, and Sage-grouse should not be listed as endangered.

Meanwhile, a second strategy that might have helped keep the grouse off the endangered species list was scaled back and postponed.  This would have  involved the creation of a binding agreement that would exempt landowners from further restrictions on their economic activity if they agreed to Sage-grouse conservation measures before listing occurred.  The scope of the conservation agreement – once planned to cover the entire state – has been drastically cut back since the governor’s office first announced it with some fanfare last August, and now is set to be rolled out next fall, too late to affect the wildlife service’s decision.

Whether the state’s Sage-grouse strategy will give the bird enough protection to avoid a federal listing is unclear.  But even the federal wildlife agency does not list the grouse this year, an unrelated  factor may  be at work – the agency’s workload. So many other, more vulnerable bird species await listing, the agency may not have the manpower to address the requisite protections for all. So some people in Wyoming are betting that the Sage-grouse listing won’t occur – this time.

The strategy and its promise

Wyoming is home to about half of North America’s Greater Sage-grouse.  One of the five factors the wildlife service considers in its decision to list a species as “endangered” is “inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms.”  At present, Wyoming is hustling to develop “adequate” conservation measures in hopes they will preclude the need for federal listing.

Brian Rutledge, Executive Director of Audubon Wyoming and an instrumental player in Sage-grouse policy in Wyoming, believes that Wyoming has “made a lot of the right moves, but we’ve known this bird was in trouble since 1954.  Wyoming should take a lot of credit for making the first big moves to protect the bird, but whether or not it’s enough, soon enough is an open question.”

Freudenthal’s “core concept” has received some support at the federal level.

“The governor’s Sage-grouse core area concept is a model for the nation,” said Steve Black, counselor to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and co-chair of the Department of the Interior’s Renewable Energy Task Force, speaking at last fall’s wind symposium.  “He’s absolutely correct that that issue puts Wyoming– as he has said before– on sort of the razor’s edge, and that it will affect every aspect of Wyoming’s economy. And that’s true for a lot of western states.”

Bob Budd, Executive Director of the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resources Trust and a member of the state’s Sage-grouse implementation team, believes that whatever the decision on March 5, the “core area”  plan has helped prepare the state to deal with conservation of the grouse, which will be an ongoing issue.

The core area plan “focuses our effort where we can have the most beneficial influence,” Budd told WyoFile in a telephone interview.  “We aren’t running around out there saying, ‘Oh, look, gee, there’s a grouse.  Maybe we better do this, maybe we better do that.’ We are actually focused on where they are and where we can have the best influence.  Whether they list it or not, the strategy I think is sound.”

Erik Molvar, of Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, agrees that Wyoming’s future conservation relationship with Sage-grouse will continue to develop.

“If we don’t solve the problem of increasing the degradation and destruction of sagebrush habitat, we are going to see the Sage-grouse continue to decline over time,” Molvar told WyoFile. “So there is an incentive to try to do everything that we can to maintain healthy Sage-grouse populations even if a listing decision turns out not to be warranted.”

]]> http://wyofile.com/2010/03/d-day-for-sage-grouse-test-of-wyoming-policy/feed/ 0 http://wyofile.com/2010/02/the-sage-grouse-by-rt-cox/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://wyofile.com/2010/02/the-sage-grouse-by-rt-cox/#comments Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:30:39 +0000 The Sage Grouse http://wyofile.com/?p=1540 March 10,2010

Dragonflies

You might see a dragonfly while you are mowing the lawn or fishing, and think for a moment that dragonflies are interesting to see, and maybe think that it’s good that they eat mosquitoes, then you go back to your work or play and forget them.

They deserve a little more attention, and when you do pay more attention, you will be glad you did.

Dragonflies and damselflies are insects in the order Odonata.  They have six legs but they do not walk.  They can move their front wings independently of the rear wings.  They see better in front and above, so if you want to net them, approach from below and behind.  Dragonflies eat other insects, often including other odonates.

Scientific names:  dragonflies are Anisoptera; damselflies are Zygoptera.  Anisoptera comes from Greek terms meaning “not, equal, wings.”  Dragonflies’ rear wings are larger than the front wings.  Odonata comes from the Greek odonto, meaning toothed, referring to the imposing dental accoutrements by which they devour other winged creatures.   Zygoptera comes from Greek roots meaning paired wings, as the two sets of wings are nearly identical.

Dragonflies lay their eggs in slow moving or still water.  The eggs hatch into carnivorous nymphs which may live for six months to two years before emerging to molt out of their exoskeleton, spreading wings out to dry, and off they go to fly for a season while mating and eventually dying.

If you hang out at lakes or ponds containing vigorous cattail stands, you will see damselflies as well as dragonflies.  Damselflies are slender, like pencil leads, with eyes set wide apart, blue/black or green/black long bodies, and wings cocked over the body.  They are typically 1.3 to 1.8 inches long.  Damselflies are not young dragonflies.

Most people do not know that Wyoming is a rich haven for dragons and damsels.  During the flight season they are almost everywhere; low, high, wet or dry.  Dozens of species of each are waiting to be found.  Red, blue, amber, green, black; they are all about.  There are more in marshes, but we have had a dozen species in our back yard.  Grab that new digital camera and look for them between June and September.  Send the photos to a website (Odonate Central) if you are certain of identifying the species, or send them to me if you are not, and if I have time I will try to identify them.  My email: TheSageGrouse@wyofile.com
Odonate Central: http://www.odonatacentral.org/index.php/PageAction.get/name/HomePage

Want to know more?  Books:
Paulson, Dennis.  Dragonflies and Damselflies of the West.  Princeton Univ.
Borror & White. Peterson Field Guide to Insects.  Houghton Mifflin
Dunkle, Sidney.  Dragonflies Through Binoculars.  Oxford Univ. Press.
(My favorite is Paulson’s book.  Yours might be Dunkle’s as it’s a lot easier to use.)

---

March 9, 2010

Bear Baiting is Not Sport

Hunting wary ducks, deer and pheasants requires stealth, skill and often a significant commitment of energy which requires physical conditioning.  The chance that many of the prey might get away, coupled with the foregoing, is what many hunters consider to define sportsmanship.  I have bagged many deer and a few antelope, a few elk, a few goats and a big horn sheep, and lots of birds, and for the most part I have been proud of the sportsmanship shown by myself and my ethical companions.

Wilderness sheep and elk hunters frequently encounter grizzly bears, which sometimes leads to a mauling by the bear or a shooting by the hunter.  These encounters involve factors beyond the control of the sportsman, which, again, makes these activities somewhat sportsmanlike, sometimes more so than others.  It has been my good fortune that when I encountered grizzlies, they were smart enough to go the other way and I was smart enough to do the same.

Then there is bear baiting.  This tactic, almost always practiced in the spring, usually involves buying an old horse or mule and leading it into the woods, shooting it in the head, and leaving it there.  My father told me of practices of enhancing the bait with bacon grease, peanut butter and other stinky substances.  The hunter leaves this mess of meat and whatever to rot and stink in the sun until the bears, emerging hungrily from their winter dens, fall upon the unexpected treat to gorge themselves, whereupon the hunter, hiding in his blind, shoots them like target practice, like dogs.

This practice is actually legal.  Baiting ducks has been illegal for 80 years.  I had not thought about this for years until my editor asked “what the hell is this?” but maybe people should contact the Board of Outfitters and ask them why they allow licensed outfitters to lure bears into traps to be shot remorselessly.

This is not sportsmanlike.  This is lawn chair murder.

]]> http://wyofile.com/2010/02/the-sage-grouse-by-rt-cox/feed/ 14 http://wyofile.com/2010/02/green-fees-cheyenne-lawyers-crusade-on-us-legal-payments/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://wyofile.com/2010/02/green-fees-cheyenne-lawyers-crusade-on-us-legal-payments/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:59:02 +0000 Philip White http://wyofile.com/?p=1642 By Philip White

CHEYENNE – Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen has raised a furor among ranching communities in Wyoming and elsewhere in the West by claiming that environmental groups are abusing federal statutes and collecting billions of dollars in attorneys’ fees from the public treasury.

In an October 3, 2009 guest opinion in the Wyoming Livestock Roundup, Budd-Falen said, “Environmental groups are receiving billions of federal taxpayer dollars in attorney fees for settling or ‘winning’ cases against the federal government.” (Emphasis in original).

On November 3, U.S. Representatives Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Rob Bishop (R-UT), writing for the Congressional Western Caucus, sent a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder alleging abuse of the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) by “certain organizations” and citing “alarming” figures presented by “an independent law firm.” The letter urged the Department of Justice to set up a searchable database detailing disbursements made under the act, which enables the payment of the attorney fees.

On November 7, Lummis and Bishop wrote a guest editorial in the Billings Gazette in which they repeated Budd-Falen’s charges and her incredible numbers, which they attributed to an anonymous “Wyoming-based law firm“: “Over the years, these groups have been able to force the federal government to pay out billions of dollars for attorney fees and costs.”  Later in the month, Fox Television News picked up the story, interviewed Budd-Falen on camera, and commented, “Sometimes they [environmentalists’ lawyers] are paid if they lose.”

Attorneys from the environmental groups say Budd-Falen’s calculations are wildly inaccurate, deceitful and defamatory.  An analysis by WyoFile indicates that Budd-Falen’s research contains no support for her assertion that these fee payments are anywhere near “billions”.

Lummis Wants to Shine

Rep. Lummis, moved by Budd-Falen’s figures, says she plans to introduce a bill in Congress on the issue. Her bill would require federal agencies to provide a readily accessible means of determining how much is being paid to whom under federal statutes authorizing attorneys’ fees to litigants—plaintiffs or defendants– who prevail in lawsuits against the government. Lummis said she decided to address the issue after she read Budd-Falen’s allegations and also learned that the federal government is no longer required to report on recipients and the amounts.

“The information I received from Karen Budd-Falen indicates that these fees might be quite large and that certain environmental groups might be receiving such large payments as to draw suspicion on my part as to what is motivating these lawsuits,” Lummis told WyoFile in a telephone interview this month.  “I’m simply wanting to shine a light on this expenditure of taxpayer monies.”

Who Pays for the Lawyer?

In the United States, the loser in a lawsuit does not have to pay the winner’s attorney’s fees unless obligated to do so by a contract or a law specifically authorizing such an award. Many federal statutes do exactly that, authorizing a court to allow fees to a prevailing party in a proceeding in which the government agency, whether involved in the litigation as a plaintiff or a defendant, is found to have violated the federal laws and regulations. The Equal Access to Justice Act, which is the focus of Budd-Falen’s work, was passed by Congress to give citizens a tool to lessen the risk of challenging the power of the federal government by allowing them to recoup attorneys’ fees when they prevail– and also meet several other requirements that federal judges have broad discretion to apply.

Budd-Falen argues that tax-exempt environmental groups should not be able to use these fee-shifting laws because some of the groups are well-heeled and can afford to pay their own lawyers. She claims that some of these non-profit groups use the fee awards just to finance the filing of more lawsuits, a sort of self-perpetuating lawsuit industry.

On the other hand, environmental lawyers say Budd-Falen’s crusade is ultimately motivated more by a dislike of the substance of the decisions being made in their successful cases, rather than the awards of fees.

And others point out that the fee-shifting laws benefit many besides environmentalists. Two Northern Plains lawyers who have represented agricultural producers in cases where fees were awarded, believe these fee-shifting statutes are helpful to their clients.

“Given how expensive it is to sue the government, this is an important protection of an individual’s right to try to correct government mistakes,” says Susan Schneider, director of the graduate program in agricultural law at the University of Arkansas, which also houses the National Agricultural Law Center.

EAJA “is important overall as a safeguard of individual rights when dealing with government action,” Schneider said.

Route to ‘Billions’

According to a December 2009 article in the Wyoming Livestock Roundup, concerns about the attorneys’ fees going to environmental groups arose during a 2007 meeting of the Idaho Cattlemen’s Association, and led that group to join with a Farm Bureau coalition to form an organization called the Western Legacy Alliance.

Legacy Alliance President Jeff Faulkner stated in the article that people at the meeting “gave us $30,000 in five minutes” to investigate.

“We knew we wanted to de-fund environmental groups, but we didn’t know what was going on,” Faulkner said.

Faulkner said Budd-Falen has helped the group with research on the issue.

“We’ve had folks tell us that if we do away with EAJA [Equal Access to Justice Act], we’ll lose funding ourselves, “ Faulkner said in the article. “Karen pulled the same numbers for the Idaho court to see how much our side had garnered through EAJA and it was zero.”

In Budd-Falen’s widely reprinted 2009 opinion piece, she began her journey to the “billions” by noting that from 2003 until mid-2007, payments from the federal government’s “Judgment Fund” ^[1] totaled $4.7 billion. But the attorney fees to environmental groups, which are the target of her campaign, are mainly paid from the Equal Access to Justice Act^[2], not the Judgment Fund.  When Congress had re-authorized EAJA in 1985, it amended the statute by removing the Judgment Fund as a source of payment.^[3] Payments from the Judgment Fund are authorized under nearly 100 federal statutes — including damages awarded under the Federal Tort Claims Act.  Only seven of those are environmental protection statutes.

After stating the billions paid out of the Judgment Fund, Budd-Falen presented her finding that eight environmental groups had filed 1,596 lawsuits against the federal government between 2000 and 2009. Then she asserted: “On the other end, these same environmental groups are receiving billions of federal tax payer dollars in attorney fees for settling or ‘winning’ cases against the federal government.”

]]> http://wyofile.com/2010/02/green-fees-cheyenne-lawyers-crusade-on-us-legal-payments/feed/ 4 http://wyofile.com/2010/02/blogging-cheyenne-blogs-on-the-legislative-budget-session/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://wyofile.com/2010/02/blogging-cheyenne-blogs-on-the-legislative-budget-session/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:40:29 +0000 wyofile http://wyofile.com/?p=1627 Blogging Cheyenne:

Secret Wolf Licenses; The Kerfuffle Watch

Blogs on the Legislative Budget Session

In addition to WyoFile’s own intrepid Sage Grouse, RT Cox, a number of journalists, state politicians, policy wonks, environmental activists and political party henchmen are blogging the 2010 Budget Session of the Wyoming Legislature now in full swing in Cheyenne.  Their blog vignettes, sometimes written after the cocktail hour, offer an inside-the-sausage-factory look at how our laws are addressed and undressed.

In her blog, for example, the Casper Star-Tribune’s Joan Barron, doyenne of the capital press corps, offered this item on a little-celebrated bill offering exceptional anonymity to those who are issued grey wolf hunting permits: “The bill, sponsored by Rep. Pat Childers, R-Cody, creates an exception to the state’s public records law for people who apply for grey wolf licenses and want their identity kept secret. Childers said he heard reports of wolf hunters elsewhere who were threatened when their names were made public. The bill is now in the House, Travel, Recreation and Wildlife Committee.”

In his Capitol Outlook blog for Wyoming Public Television, Geoffrey O’Gara, inspired  by the legislature’s full-of-sound-and- fury posturing on state sovereignty, introduced what he called “The Kerfuffle Watch.”  Writes O’Gara:  “Now, most everyone has some aspect of federal government that they find intrusive or unwarranted. Of course, they may not always agree which: for some it may be restrictions on gun rights and for others it may be restrictions on abortion rights. Perhaps more important, though, is whether these time-consuming resolutions are an effective way to rock the halls of Congress in Washington D.C. So, we’re instituting the Kerfuffle Watch (“kerfuffle” (Merriam-Webster): a disturbance, a fuss, to become disheveled). Let’s hope not too much time is spent fulminating about rewriting the federal Constitution from Cheyenne, when there are citizens in Wyoming worrying about jobs, educating our kids, health care and keeping our energy revenues flowing.”

Blogging on the same subject, Equality State Policy Center’s Dan Neal wondered how honest Abe would take it all:  : “This is the resolution that claims if the state finds the federal government exercises powers the state does not believe it surrendered, the Act of Admission is breached — and Wyoming, presumably, could secede. One wonders what the nation’s great Civil War president, Abraham Lincoln, would think of this resolution.”  Meanwhile, Wyoming Public Radio news director Bob Beck has his own insightful blog.

Leading the pack in blogging power is the Casper Star-Tribune.  The Casper newspaper not only offers website blogs from Cheyenne bureau reporters Joan Barron and Jeremy Pelzer but also from State Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander) and State Rep. Debbie Hammons (D-Worland). In her Feb 10 blog, Hammons tells of an approach from an aggressive lobbyist: “(the lobbyist) told me that not only would her organization stop my proposed bill, but that their numbers were growing with the advent of the Tea Party in Wyoming. Clearly, from my perspective, she was threatening me.”

Environmental issues are ably addressed in a blog by Richard Garrett Jr., Energy & Legislative advocate for the Wyoming Outdoor Council. From Garrett, for example, we learn that WOC is “neutral” on the controversial wind excise tax proposals from Gov. Dave Freudenthal: “That said, we are probably going to push for a smaller number of turbines as a threshold for triggering the Industrial Siting process. This doesn’t seem unreasonable since a 30-turbine wind farm can occupy as much as 700 acres (or considerably more)…”

The minority Wyoming Democratic Party offers a lively blog. The majority Wyoming Republican Party does not. But Republican Party officials referred a caller to the Cowboy State Free Press whose executive director is Republican State Rep. Sue Wallis of Recluse. More of a Capitol news service than a blog and less-partisan than the Democratic Party blog, the Cowboy State Free Press features timely stories from veteran Cheyenne reporter Phil Noble and others. __Rone Tempest, WyoFile Editor

]]> http://wyofile.com/2010/02/blogging-cheyenne-blogs-on-the-legislative-budget-session/feed/ 0 http://wyofile.com/2010/02/big-piney-co2-storage-pilot-nears-ok/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://wyofile.com/2010/02/big-piney-co2-storage-pilot-nears-ok/#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:34:10 +0000 Environment & Energy Daily http://wyofile.com/?p=1595 Reprinted from LandLetter with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net. 202/628-6500
By Scott Streater, E&E reporter

Federal regulators are nearing approval of a natural gas development project in southwest Wyoming that would serve as a testing ground for new mineral extraction technology while becoming one of the largest carbon sequestration pilot projects in the world.

Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co. has asked the Bureau of Land Management for permission to drill three new natural gas wells and a large acid gas injection well where more than 3 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) a year would be injected thousands of feet underground.

[editor’s note:  while the Cimarex effort is the largest pilot project of its size, it is not yet of a scale to deal with massive C02 storage challenges faced by the state.  For example,  the Exxon Shute Creek  facility near Opal discharges twice the amount of C02 that will be injected by Cimarex.  The Jim Bridger Power Plant east of Rock Springs discharges six times the Cimarex amount]

The $350 million Rands Butte project would involve nearly 38,000 acres of BLM and Forest Service land west of Big Piney, Wyo.

Cimarex said the operation could produce 365  million cubic feet a year of helium — an increasingly rare gas that is critical in the aerospace and research industries. In addition, the project would extract as much as 39 million cubic feet a day of natural gas from the rich Madison Formation, according to federal records.

The problem is that the project would also produce large volumes of waste gases, including CO2 and toxic hydrogen sulfide, which can be fatal at high concentrations.

While federal approvals are pending, Cimarex has already begun construction of a facility on nearby state land that will employ groundbreaking technology to separate helium and methane from CO2, hydrogen sulfide and other unwanted byproducts.

If the technology succeeds, it could aid in the extraction of billions of cubic feet of gas worldwide that remains untapped because it is mixed with CO2 deposits, said Scott Stinson, a Cimarex Energy project manager.

That is why the Rands Butte carbon sequestration portion of the project “would absolutely help development sequestration on a commercial scale,” said John Talbott, deputy director of the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership, a federally funded program that wants to partner with Cimarex on its research.

“We will be handling a large volume of CO2 and putting it back into the ground,” Stinson said. “We’re hoping this effort will help demonstrate how to sequester a large volume as safely as you can.”

Wildlife, geologic impacts

But a number of difficult questions remain, including possible impacts to air quality in a region that already violates federal ozone standards, as well as the threat of hydrogen sulfide leaks triggered by seismic activity in the geologically unstable region. Such seismic activity could be caused by natural events, such as earthquakes, or by the pumping of CO2 into underground pore spaces, according to a BLM draft environmental assessment (EA) released this month.

Cimarex has agreed to take extensive mitigation steps to minimize these risks over the 40-year life of the project, Stinson said.

Cimarex Energy Co., which seeks BLM permission to drill three natural gas wells and an acid gas injection well on BLM land in southwest Wyoming, already has production wells in place on adjacent state land. Photo courtesy of Cimarex Energy.

But even with precautions, some impacts may be unavoidable.

For example, Cimarex’s plan calls for a 230-kilovolt electric transmission line to power the helium and methane recovery plant. But such a line would have to pass within a half-mile of a sage grouse breeding ground, or “lek,” where “significant adverse impacts” to the rare bird would be expected, according to the EA.

“That has been identified as a potentially significant impact to that lek,” said Bill Lanning, the BLM’s lead manager on the Cimarex project.

Sage grouse have become a huge impediment for all forms of development in Wyoming because the birds have become so rare that they may warrant special protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. The Fish and Wildlife Service is set to decide next month whether to list the bird as a federally threatened species.

With FWS’s decision looming, Wyoming state officials have taken extraordinary steps to try to steer development away from state-designated sage grouse “core areas,” but it remains unclear whether such measures are enough to prevent an ESA listing.

Lanning said BLM has proposed an alternate route that would move the transmission line an additional half-mile away from the lek. But Stinson said moving the line — which crosses a patchwork of federal, state and private lands — could be difficult. One private landowner who agreed to allow the line to cross his property, for example, may be resistant to a redesigned right-of-way.

“We will do the best we can to honor what the BLM wants and what the landowners want,” Stinson said.

Another potential problem involves the injection of large volumes of CO2 and H2S underground because the pumping of the gases could create a shift in underground pressures, leading to a seismic event. The proposed project area “is in a tectonically active area with complex faulting,” according to BLM’s draft EA, “and earthquakes of moderate magnitude are possible.”

U.S. Geological Survey models indicate the general project area has a 10 percent chance of experiencing an earthquake strong enough to produce “perceived shaking and light damage” over the next 50 years. However, the draft EA notes the project location “is very near” a more susceptible seismic zone where a much stronger earthquake is possible.

Wyoming regulators last year granted Cimarex Energy permission to begin construction of a gas recovery plant that will employ new technologies to separate the valuable helium and methane gas from unwanted carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. Photo courtesy of Cimarex Energy.

“These statistical probabilities indicate that the chance of an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 or greater occurring at some point during the life of the project is possible at any time,” according to the EA.

While BLM concedes such an earthquake is unlikely to “alter the current geological conditions of safe containment” in the project area, the EA was careful to caution that a quake of that magnitude “could cause failure of well casings, sour gas pipelines, injection well pressure controls, or [create] rupture or leaks” at the project site.

Regulators noted that the Cimarex project must be engineered to account for such risks, but Lanning noted that other nearby facilities that have done just that.

He pointed to a Exxon Mobil Corp. gas plant 42 miles south of the Cimarex site that has been injecting H2S into the Madison Formation for years. According to the EA, ExxonMobil had by September 2008 “successfully and safely injected” 23.6 billion cubic feet of gas into underground formations.

As an added precaution, Cimarex has said it will place air-monitoring sensors in several locations that would signal leaks and prompt plant managers to begin emergency shutdown operations.

Ozone concerns

A secondary concern involves potential impacts to air quality in southwest Wyoming.

The Rands Butte project would be located in Sublette County and a portion of neighboring Lincoln County, neither of which meets current federal health standards for ground-level ozone. A formal “nonattainment” designation from U.S. EPA could be forthcoming (Land Letter, March 19, 2009), and Wyoming’s oil and gas industry could find itself in the regulatory crosshairs if EPA tightens its ozone health standard even more, as the agency proposed last month (Land Letter, Jan 14).

A 2009 technical analysis of air quality in the region by the Wyoming Division of Air Quality found that a significant portion of ozone-forming pollution in the area came from oil and gas fields. And ozone’s two primary ingredients, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), would be emitted from the Rands Butte project.

According to BLM’s analysis, the facility would release an estimated 8.3 tons of NOx and 13.7 tons of VOCs annually.

But Stinson said Cimarex is working with regulators to address the air quality concerns, taking measures such as upgrading pneumatic equipment at another natural gas operation in Sublette County and donating $1.5 million to help fund habitat improvement projects in the region.

“We worked with the state air-quality people very early in the process, and we think we’ve come up with a good plan,” Stinson said.

The EA is open for public review and comment through Feb. 25, and BLM expects to render a final decision on the project by mid-April.

Streater writes from Colorado Springs, Colo.

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