Teaching Time: Red Desert Resource Management with SSR5

When you work behind a desk every day, it is beneficial to remind yourself why the work you do is important. That’s why the NOLS Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability staff was so excited to have the chance to visit the SSR5 students at the NOLS Three Peaks Ranch in Boulder, Wyoming last week. We caught up with them just before they began the last section of their semester- horse packing in the Red Desert.

The Red Desert is one of our more special course areas and has also been a place where we have had to protest oil and gas leases. The Red Desert, including the Jack Morrow Hills area, contains a unique combination of exposed geologic features, wildlife habitat, and paleo-indian artifacts, making it a great recreation area. As part of our lesson, students brainstormed other uses for this multiple use BLM land and learned about the BLM’s oil and gas leasing process. NOLS has protested a few leases in the Jack Morrow Hills that would have developed areas critical to our courses – water sources, campsites, and beautiful spaces with the “wilderness” qualities that are essential to the NOLS experience.

We ended the day with a mock scoping meeting – a meeting at the beginning of an agency’s planning process in which the public is invited to weigh in. Students and instructors were broken up in to groups and assigned roles to play: oil and gas executive, wildlife advocate, state representative, hunting outfitter, non-motorized recreation advocate. Each of these characters has different thoughts about how public land should be used and the groups had to compromise to come up with a map of how the Jack Morrow Hills should be managed. It was fun to see how different each group’s map was, depending on which characters were most influential!