In the Northwest: Gas drillers poised along Rocky Mountain Front

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Wednesday, October 8, 2003

In the Northwest: Gas drillers poised along Rocky Mountain Front

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

CHOTEAU, Mont. -- We began our walk up Blackleaf Canyon amidst groves of golden aspens, with walls of the Rocky Mountain Front rising half a vertical mile above us and the Great Plains stretching beyond the horizon to the East.

A sow grizzly bear and her cub scampered up a hillside to the south, and a golden eagle lazed in the air currents scouring the terrain. On this afternoon, the eagle had red-tailed hawks, prairie falcons and northern harriers as competition for prey.

Just north of the canyon, on a bench far above us, the Calgary-based Startech Energy Corp. wants to drill a natural gas well on federal land officially classified an "Outstanding Natural Area."

The Bush administration recently ordered federal land managers to start removing restrictions to natural gas and oil development in five Rocky Mountain states.

The most sensitive drilling targets for oil lie here, in the sparsely populated big-scale country southeast of Glacier National Park.

The Rocky Mountain Front is where horizontal grasslands of the plains collide with what writer Ivan Doig called "a steel-blue army of mountains." The eastern face of the Rockies is notable for a line of sharp, barren peaks, long serrated ridges and deep canyons.

National attention has focused on Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Equally, however, "the Front" represents a major test of whether the petroleum and mining industries have the political clout to drill, dig and build anywhere they want.

But a lot of Montanans, at the base of North America's greatest mountain range, are restless.

"They're trying to make a political statement here. Why, then, are they going into the No. 1 wildlife habitat in the 'lower 48' when lots of places have more gas?" asked Karl Rappold, who runs a ranch founded by his grandfather in 1882.

Bill Cunningham, a guide-outfitter whose family has been in Montana since the 1880s, noted America's ongoing celebration of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial. Once pristine, their route now stretches from a channeled Missouri River, run for barge operators, to a reservoirized Columbia River.

"This is the last 5 percent of the Lewis and Clark route that they would still recognize today," Cunningham said.

Dr. Charles Jonkel, a retired University of Montana professor, is one of the world's ranking bear experts. He lives west of the Continental Divide, but believes the state's heart -- and the soul of the West -- lies where mountains meet range.

"I love the Front," said Jonkel. "I live on the dark side.

"But this place has 10 times the stars, the brightest moonlight. It has nice people, nice scenery, nice animals -- the whole damned stretch of these canyons is of national park caliber."

By dint of its remoteness and harsh climate -- temperatures reach 50-below in winter, and Chinook winds have blown freight cars off their tracks -- "the Front" has escaped depredations visited on other parts of the West.

Show-offy rich folk have built gated communities in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, and multimillion-dollar homes with heated outdoor porches in Jackson, Wyo., and Aspen, Colo.

Not along "the Front." Its one part-time celebrity resident is a very private David Letterman, whose big spread up Deep Creek is treated with a taste often absent in "Late Show" monologues.

The local county seat, Choteau, is mercifully free of Bozeman's yuppie boutiques, or the kitsch one finds at the entrance to national parks. Colorado- style suburbs don't sprawl toward the mountains

As well, the oil industry has not visited the land with pipelines, branch pipelines, haul roads, compressor units, pumping stations and noisy plants to "sweeten" natural gas.

Vice President Dick Cheney loves to talk about the "tiny footprint" his former industry leaves on the land.

"Our overall objective is to ensure the timely development of these critical energy resources in an environmentally sound manner," in the words of U.S. Bureau of Land Management Director Kathleen Clark. The proposed lease above Blackleaf Canyon lies on BLM land.

Just north in Canada, one sees a very different picture. Shell runs a big, noisy yellow-green sweetening plant in Pincer Creek -- just outside Waterton Lakes National Park -- with gravel roads headed up nearly every canyon.

R.L. "Stoney" Burk is a country lawyer who has practiced for 21 years in Choteau. A decorated former fighter pilot, Burk is conservative to the core in his suspicions of federal power and the exercise thereof from Ruby Ridge, Idaho, to Waco, Texas.

When it comes to oil and gas leasing on "the Front," he sounds like John Muir.

"They'll road it, contaminate it, leave it and step on our faces on their way out," Burk said. "They've done it again and again in Montana."

Fighting words, but there is much to fight for.

Mary Sexton, a Teton County commissioner, lives just outside one of the canyons. In the summer, wildlife tend to the high country of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. During the winter, well, let Sexton describe what comes down out of the mountains ...

"The mule deer congregate right around here. They like the juniper. We have a pretty healthy elk population. We have mountain lions, lynx, bobcats, bighorn sheep, wolves, wolverines and grizzly bears.

"Oh yes, about a month ago I was walking one evening just east of here. Whoops, there was a bear about 100 yards away."

Lowland grizzly spottings are no big thing in Teton County. They are a very big deal in the heritage of the West.

"The grizzly bear was a creature indigenous to the plains: We drove them into the mountains," said Randy Gray, mayor of Great Falls, the nearest sizable population center.

"Wildlife of the West has been forced into smaller and smaller pockets, with populations isolated from each other. Bears migrating out of the Bob Marshall, this is the last remnant population of the 'plains grizzly.'

"And this is exactly where they want to put in their gas wells."

Monday: The political battle over whether to drill for natural gas along the Rocky Mountain Front. P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com

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