Wyoming Conservation Corps protects resources and changes lives. It’s worth fighting for.

It’s August 2015, and I am in the Red Desert on a job site with my Wyoming Conservation Corps crew. We are helping put up barbed wire fences around “hummocks,” curious turtle-shaped protrusions of ground left behind after cattle scar up the land. The work was hard and so were the sleeping conditions. We camped in a bowl and would wake to sub-freezing temperatures in the middle of summer. Worth it to be in the midst of a vast sage expanse with blue skies as far as the eye can see — beautiful. 

My friend is helping hold a tool to keep the wire taught as we wrap it around a post. He’s tall and lanky with large veins running down his arms. Some of the line flies free and one of the barbs perfectly punctures one of his lifelines, sending a comical if not slightly concerning squirt of blood across the sage sea. He quickly clamps a hand over his arm. A short time later, he returns, only for the next wayward wire to hit him in the same spot. “Goddamnit!” he yells, though mostly joking. 

WCC volunteers like that decade-old version of my friends and me are heading into the hills right now for what could be the last season the organization operates. Recently, the Department of Government Efficiency announced a $400 million cut to Americorps. Even with a recent court order to restore funding, it was only on behalf of 24 blue states; Wyoming won’t see this money flow back for the foreseeable future. 

The potentially fatal cuts facing the Wyoming Conservation Corps mean future rag-tag bunches of young folks won’t get to camp for days at a time, eat beans and drink instant coffee in return for 12-hour days working to improve public land and support natural resource management. Sounds rough, but would I do it again? Absolutely. 

I was a WCC crew member in 2015 when I was 22. I was wrapping up my political science degree at the University of Wyoming, but I yearned for hands-on work. It was also the summer Donald Trump announced his candidacy, and I looked at slowly loading news articles when we’d get spotty service between job sites. I still remember him coming down the gilded escalator and not quite knowing any of the implications that it would have. WCC always seemed so permanent then because it came to completely encompass my life for the better part of four months. In that time, I suffered tick bites, second-degree sunburns and once in a lifetime views of the Milky Way. People pay good money to see the things I saw. Instead, I got paid enough to keep my $250-a-month dingy basement apartment over the summer.  

Often, WCC “hitches” were negotiated with state and federal agencies that, even 10 years ago, were catastrophically behind on maintenance. It was usually advertised as trail building and dead-tree felling. Many times, we helped state agencies paint decaying facilities’ walls. These were 10-day ventures with a Suburban, five other team members, and two leaders who all work at 5 a.m. and worked until after 6 p.m. 

I would love to give you a complete history of each hitch etched into my heart. I could tell you about the lightning around Bear Lodge (Devil’s Tower), which lit the dark campgrounds so well you could swear it was noon. Or the time WCC’s crew coordinator drove out to take me to get cell service to call friends after one took his own life. I will never forget his kindness in the face of what seemed like overwhelming odds to help me throw a lifeline back home. I always fondly remember Pepsi, not because I love soda, but because after several days pulling cheat-grass in a canyon to protect petroglyphs, it might as well have been an ice-cold beer.

The same punctured friend from the Red Desert (who I still keep in touch with and roomed with for several years after) told another friend that even though I was smaller and not as physically strong, I had earned his respect because I never gave in to the grueling demands of the job. I would work my shift. I would eat my hastily packed sandwich. Then I would go back to camp and read (my favorite that summer was “All the Shah’s Men”). It was as close to a traditional lifestyle that a lot of folks cheering on Americorps’ downfall espouse, but I doubt we’ll see them out there volunteering to fix up trails and parks abandoned by DOGE.

But WCC is more than an opportunity for young people to prove themselves. We helped lighten the load for already overworked state employees. I won’t make the cost-benefit argument, mostly because WCC is a drop in the bucket as far as the national budget. It’s more than a drop though. Sometime between nearly giving in to heat exhaustion while spraying bull thistle in full PPE and seeing runners appear out of nowhere in the Red Desert (pilgrims on the Continental Divide Trail), I discovered a love for Wyoming I didn’t know I had. I’m a first-generation Wyomingite; I was born here but I have no long ties to ranching families or farmers. WCC gave me that identity as a Wyomingite, an identity that came flooding out of a wellspring. 

So, get out there. Don’t be afraid to tell elected officials what you think at their town halls. Vote a few out when the next election comes around. More importantly, though, visit all the cultural sites in Wyoming and record their demise. Note every single defaced marker that previously gave a parent respite to read on a trail with their kids. Watch those trails disappear off maps or be marked “closed” one by one, bleeding like the veins in my friend’s arm. Remind someone down the road of what was left to rot. Make someone mad. Anger can be a little corrosive, but it can also be clarifying, letting us know just what the hell is wrong.