The Mad Gas Rush

It's commonly believed that the HD Mountains were named for the Hatcher-Dyke (HD) Cattle Company, except that—although there were a bunch of cattle running around with HD brands—there never was a Hatcher or a Dyke anywhere near the area. In the mid-1880s the feds decided that the southern Utes—hunter-gatherers who each fall followed elk and deer down from what is now the Weminuche Wilderness—needed to be ranchers. So the agency gave them 3,000 head of cattle branded with an ID, for Interior Department. Another, far more credible, explanation for the sudden appearance of the HD brand has been offered by local historians: It was the work of rustlers who edited the ID with a vertical and a horizontal bar. At any rate, neither the Interior Department nor the Beaver Creek Land Company (which owned the HD brand) had any idea how all these cattle might affect the native ecosystem. It was an experiment. The cattle ate everything they could eat, nuking the HDs, which haven't fully recovered to this day. Then they died, the wildlife starved, the Indians were moved onto reservations, and the Beaver Creek Land Company went belly-up.

In the 1940s an old man appeared in Bayfield and announced that he was going to hike back into the HD range, where he'd worked as a young foreman. “Bring plenty of water,” the locals told him. They stared at him condescendingly when he explained that this wasn't necessary, because the country was full of springs. When he stumbled out later that day he said only this: “My heart is broken.”

“We changed the ecology of the West,” declared Fitzgerald as we pushed our way through old, spindly gambel oaks that should have been robust trees. “We didn't know what we were doing back then. But now we do know, and we're behaving the same way.”  

Editor-at-large Ted Williams heats with oil and wears down vests.

What You Can Do

Support the San Juan Citizens Alliance (970-259-3583; www.sanjuancitizens.org). To comment on draft environmental-impact statements for the gas-development plans BLM and Forest Service field offices have been ordered to complete before the fall elections, go to www.fs.fed.us/r2/sanjuan/. For the San Juan Basin office, call 970-385-1211. Contact information for other resource areas is available from the Northern Rockies office of the Wilderness Society; call Peter Aengst at 406-586-1600, extension 105.