Rocky Mountain High

By James Kelly

COVER STORY

The energy boom brings soaring prospects--but some woes as well

"What do we want with this worthless area, this region of savages and wild beasts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts and these endless mountain ranges?" -- Daniel Webster

When the esteemed U.S. Secretary of State from Massachusetts uttered those words in 1852, he was only echoing the haughty contempt that many Easterners felt toward what map makers then labeled the Great American Desert. Even today, the eight states strung out along the Rocky Mountains are collectively the nation's most thinly settled (12 inhabitants per square mile, vs. 62 overall in the U.S.) and the most arid (12 in. rainfall, vs. 29 nationwide). Yet in addition to their wild beauty, these Mountain States contain such a magnificent array of national treasures that they are now being developed at a rate that may within a lifetime enrich them, or ruin them, or both.

In the dusty Wyoming prairies, where Buffalo Bill Cody ended his pursuit of bison, the black rocker arms of oil wells thump to and fro through the night. In southern Montana, where the proud Sioux won their great victory, bulldozers scrape away the topsoil of cliffs to reveal vast seams of coal below. In western New Mexico, where legends tell of the Spanish explorer Coronado searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola, drills sink into the earth in search of uranium. The Mountain States hold vast deposits of the nation's coal, oil and uranium; they are at the heart of any U.S. energy program, and thus of the nation's future. The boom is sweeping far beyond the coalfields and oilfields. Construction cranes pierce the skies over Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Boise, cities that already bristle with high-rises undreamed of ten years ago. Modernistic electronics plants sprout alongside gleaming shopping malls and clusters of ranch houses. The new pioneers keep streaming in--young parents in station wagons, roustabouts in pickup trucks, elderly couples in trailers--to work and live among these mountains and deserts that Daniel Webster scorned. Says Colorado Governor Richard Lamm: "There is no hyperbole that can do justice to how fast the West is changing. We are seeing a decade of change take place every month. We have everything coming at us."

These soaring prospects fill many Westerners with a Panglossian sense that the boom provides the best of all possible worlds. "It's great," says Charles Page of Colorado's Gunnison County Chamber of Commerce about a planned molybdenum mine. "It will diversify the economy and give jobs to people who really want to work." But this same growth begets among other Westerners a fear that they may be witnessing not only the ravaging of their landscapes but also the destruction of values that they cherish: the unhurried pace of traditional Western life, the neighborly feeling of the small towns and above all the sense of individual independence. "There's a way of life disappearing," says Orson Rollins, 69, a retired rancher who now operates a service station in Craig, Colo. "We never used to lock our doors. That's gone." Says Postal Clerk Helen Stout, whose onetime sheep town of Parson, Wyo., is now filling up with oilfield workers: "Life isn't as quiet as it used to be. Or as nice either."

Central to the contradictions of the region's future is the fact that the Mountain States, unlike most of the U.S., have a huge absentee landlord: the Federal Government. Of the eight states, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, which occupy 863,524 sq. mi., an area considerably bigger than all of Western Europe, Washington owns about 80% of the resources and nearly one-half of the land. These landholdings range from 30% of Montana to 87% of Nevada. The Government is not only the largest landowner but the largest employer and the overall regulator of how life is lived.

Washington has a great say over who gets how much of the waters of the Colorado River, and what will be charged for the right to graze cattle. Washington decides how much timber will be cut from the forests and who will mine gold on the land.

Washington even sets the price of lift tickets in some ski areas in Colorado. And it is Washington that now plans to install in Utah and Nevada the $33.8 billion MX missile system, the biggest public works project in history.

Struggling with federal regulations sharpens the resentment of Westerners who remember how the region was once exploited by Eastern railroads and financiers. "Billions of dollars came out of here, and none of the money remained," says Colorado's Lamm. "Can you blame us for feeling like a colony?" Says Montana Governor Thomas Judge: "They want to take our coal and take our water, and what do we have left? A couple of national parks."

That feeling helped the birth in 1977 of the League for the Advancement of States' Equal Rights (LASER), the main force behind what is known as the Sagebrush Rebellion. Led mostly by local government officials, state lawmakers and ranchers, the Sagebrush movement is attempting to wrest control of as much as 400 million acres of the land now owned by the Federal Government. Several states, including Utah, Arizona and Wyoming, have passed resolutions laying claim to their federal land, and Nevada is planning to sue the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Land Management to win the rights to the federal land within its boundaries.

Though the rebellion has been mostly smoldering for the past three years, the election of Ronald Reagan has suddenly given supporters new hope. Reagan, who won 60% of the popular votes cast in the Mountain States, sent a telegram to a meeting of 500 rebellion sup porters held in Salt Lake City last month relaying his "best wishes to all my fellow Sagebrush reb els." Added the President-elect: "I renew my pledge to work toward a Sagebrush solution ... to insure that the states have an equitable share of public lands and their natural resources."

Republican control of the new U.S. Senate has also increased the influence of such fellow "rebels" as Paul Laxalt of Nevada and Jake Garn and Orrin Hatch of Utah. Sagebrush Rebellion leaders now plan to concentrate their battle for control of the federal lands in Congress, where both Hatch and Nevada's Democratic Representative Jim Santini have introduced bills that would set up a commission to establish an "orderly process" for transferring land to the states. Though they have little expectation of getting such legislation passed in the near future, Nevada State Assemblyman Dean Rhoads expresses their optimism when he says: "Because of the November election, it's a whole new ball game."

There is a tremendous irony running through these protests, for in a purely financial sense, the region lives on the federal dole. Tot up a year's spending by the Federal Government in the Rocky Mountain States-- $20.5 billion on land and forest management, aid to agriculture, water of other projects, federal military bases programs and -- a and saddlebag compare that with the total received from the states in taxes and other revenues -- $14.5 billion --and Washington comes up $6 billion short. Admits Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church, who was voted out of office last month: "As beneficiaries, we are reluctant to confront or confess the federal largesse because it cuts across the grain of our pioneer spirit."

The land that is being so hotly contested still remains, much of it, a primeval wilderness of snowy, pine-covered mountains and silent deserts. In an area that stretches 1,260 miles from Canada to Mexico and almost 1 ,000 miles from east to west, there are still only 10 million people, hardly more than live in New York City and its immediate environs. Venture ten minutes out side smoggy, clogged Phoenix and you suddenly enter an eerie desert that sweeps on for hundreds of miles. Drive north along Highway 13 in Colorado, away from the bustle and lights of a coal town like Craig, and you quickly find yourself in a land of buttes and canyons and endless sky, with gophers and prairie dogs scampering across the two-lane road and magpies fluttering overhead. Go down into southeastern Utah and head toward Moab. Take a right at the entrance to Canyonlands National Park and proceed along the paved road until it turns into a red clay rut. You are going along at 30 miles an hour, then 20, then 15. The road dips and rises, twists and turns. The car clatters, the body shakes. Finally, Grand View Point comes in sight. Walk to the edge, 6,000 ft. above sea level. To the northeast, the La Sal Mountains loom, while before you in the distance tower the Abajo Mountains. Spread out below is an immense rock garden, burnished red and brown and buff. The sun bursts through the clouds, first lighting the Six-Shooter Peaks, then Cathedral Butte. The Colorado and Green rivers meander deep in the shadows, carving their signatures into the mesa with canyons 1,200 ft. deep. Five miles away, the joined rivers let out a thunderous roar, but up here all is silence. The space is awesome, the stillness complete, the solitude absolute.

It is under such silent lands as these that the boundless riches lie, awaiting the power shovel and the drill. Energy developers first began arriving in droves in 1973, when OPEC hiked its prices fourfold and jolted the nation's oil and gas companies into searching for additional supplies. Jimmy Carter gave the developers a big assist in 1979 when he announced his intention to tap the region's energy supplies by setting up an Energy Mobilization Board to speed up the building of refineries, pipelines, coal mines and synthetic fuel plants. He also proposed an Energy Security Corporation to funnel public funds for further research on developing the synthetic fuel industry. Though Congress voted down the board last summer, it approved a $20 billion program of loans and tax incentives to spur development of the industry.

And so in many pockets of the West, the hard hat is edging out the Stetson. From their skyscrapers along Denver's 17th Street, energy company executives are organizing new drillings for oil and gas all along the Overthrust Belt, a wide twist of rocky ground that stretches 2,300 miles from northwestern Montana through southern Arizona. The Overthrust Belt was formed eons ago, when two tectonic plates of the earth's crust heaved and crunched together, crinkling one plate over the other. Geologists have known for decades that the region hid pools of oil and gas some 12,000 to 20,000 feet below the earth's surface, but exploration and drilling had proved too expensive.

As the price of fuel continued to spiral upward in the mid-1970s and drilling technology became more sophisticated, the cost of pumping those reserves suddenly became competitive. The rush was on, with Amoco and Chevron the first major companies to leap in. Today, in 16 fields with more than 100 wells, each costing up to $25 million to build (five times the price in Texas), production has reached 30,000 bbl. of oil and 75 million cu. ft. of gas per day. Geologist Richard Powers estimates that as much as 15.5 billion bbl. of oil and 62.5 trillion cu. ft. of gas lie beneath Wyoming, Idaho and northeastern Utah--a resource larger than the proven reserves on Alaska's North Slope. By 1982 Natural Gas Pipeline Co. of America will have finished an oil pipeline from Wyoming to Nebraska. Says one of Amoco's production chiefs, James Vanderbeek: "So far, we've only scratched the surface."

Though oil and gas now are the region's most valuable energy resources, coal could easily replace them if Washington so decides. The Mountain States hold some 50% of the nation's recoverable coal, with Montana and Wyoming containing the richest reserves. Wyoming alone has eight times as much low-sulfur coal as West Virginia and Kentucky combined. At the moment, the Powder River Basin straddling Montana and Wyoming attracts the most mining. Arco, Exxon, Sun and Kerr-McGee are already clawing the land, while Shell, Mobil and Peabody are laying plans to share in the basin's 40 billion tons of recoverable coal.

Electric shovels that weigh as much as 3 million lbs. eat into the hillsides while dump trucks carrying 160 tons of coal roar out of the pits 24 hours a day. During the first year of operation in 1977, Arco took 40,000 tons out of its Black Thunder mine. It has now extracted 1 1 million tons, and will take out 20 million tons by 1986.

The Department of Energy predicts that by 1985, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah will produce 316 million tons of coal a year, compared with 22 million tons in 1967. After the digging is finished, the whole landscape will have to be rebuilt. "We'll just widen the valley some and drop the hills," says George Larsen of Arco, "and the land will just be 40 feet lower."

But no fuel in the West holds as much promise--so far unfulfilled--as shale oil. The slopes of northwestern Colorado, southwestern Wyoming and northeastern Utah are layered with marl, a limestone in which a fossil fuel called kerogen is embedded. When heated to 900DEG F, the marl bleeds its kerogen, which can then be used as a low-grade variety of crude.

Though research on extracting kerogen from marl began in the 1920s, shale oil went undeveloped because its production cost always exceeded the market price of crude. Promises still outpace production, but during the past few years Occidental Petroleum, Atlantic Richfield and Union Oil have spent millions experimenting with shale-oil extraction in Colorado's Piceance Basin. Occidental Chairman Armand Hammer believes that his company will be able to begin commercial production by 1985, keeping costs below $25 per bbl. Today other companies are digging mines near Grand Junction and Rangely, Colo., and Vernal, Utah. Exxon is the most enthusiastic: last May the oil giant paid Atlantic Richfield $400 million for its share in the Colony oil-shale project in Colorado, and now plans to spend $500 billion over the next 30 years to build 150 installations on Colorado's Western Slope. Estimated output by 2010: 8 million bbl. of oil per day.

Oil, gas, coal and oil shale are only part of the Mountain West's buried wealth. Ninety-one percent of the nation's uranium lies in the Mountain West, with New Mexico and Utah supplying most of the region's ore. From Arizona comes more than half of all the copper dug in the U.S. each year; the Kennecott Copper Corp.'s Bingham Canyon open-pit mine in Utah, at two miles wide and a half-mile deep, the largest excavation in the world, alone has produced copper--over 11 million tons--than any other mine in history. The Climax mine near Leadville, Colo., last year supplied 49 million lbs. worth of molybdenum, a blue-gray mineral used primarily in strengthening steel. Mines in the Coeur d'Alene district of Idaho led the Mountain States in production of lead ($49 million) and zinc ($24 million) last year. Silver and gold, those minerals that helped build and bust 19th century boom towns like Goldfield, Nev., and Silver City, Idaho, are still being mined in great quantities. The Mountain States produce 70% of the nation's gold and 50% of its silver. Not all of the companies streaming into the Rockies come with drilling equipment and mining machinery. By 1975, for the first time in history, manufacturing added more to the area's economy than ei ther agriculture or mining, and that lead is widening. Electronics firms head the rush; many have picked up their chips and headed east from California's Silicon Valley. Though Denver still draws the energy companies, lots of the newest arrivals are moving into Salt Lake City, Boise, Tucson and Albuquerque. In four years Hewlett-Packard has built a four-building plant employing 2,800 people in Boise, joining longtime residents Boise Cascade (34,000 workers) and Morrison-Knudsen (17,000). Hewlett-Packard has also settled in Colorado Springs, along with Texas Instruments, TRW and Honeywell. Intel, the hottest microchip company in the country, plans to join Internetics in Salt Lake City, as well as start a plant in Albuquerque. Last year National Semiconductor opened a factory employing 275 people in Tucson; this year IBM completed a factory on 1,800 acres just outside the city. Boasts Tucson Lawyer Donald Pitt: "What makes Tucson so desirable is that Phoenix is three times larger. Tucson offers for the next 30 years what Phoenix offered 30 years ago."

One attraction of these Western cities is a lower cost of living than elsewhere in the country. "The newcomers end up with more house, on a larger lot, with more amenities, and still have money left over," says Tucson Developer Peter Herer. The median price of a home there is $65,000, only two-thirds the price in California's Santa Clara Valley. Wages also tend to be lower--an electrical technician in San Jose, Calif., makes an average of $9.77 an hour; his non-union colleague in Colorado Springs makes $7.84--but there are many other compensations. As Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk told TIME Correspondent Michael Moritz: "Refugees from the East and California pull up stakes, take a cut in salary, and trade the loss in money for psychic income."

Many people are willing to strike that bargain. In 1970, 8.3 million--4% of the nation's population--lived in the Mountain States region; the latest figure of 10 million represents nearly 7% of all Americans. Arizona gained the most residents --up from 1.8 million to 2.3 million --while Montana gained the least--from 700,000 to 766,000.

The wave of settlers has by no means crested: the Census Bureau predicts that during the 1980s, seven of the eight Mountain States will be among the country's ten fastest growing states (the one exception: Montana, which will rank seventeenth).* Within the next 20 years, the population of the region is expected to grow by 50%.

A surprisingly large number of new settlers come from California, where the golden dream of a generation ago seems to have been darkened by overcrowding, high housing prices and rising unemployment. Some may come with jobs waiting, some come looking, some may not need jobs, but almost all come because the Mountain West offers them things they have been unable to find elsewhere: more space, cleaner air, fewer people, less crime. They arrive with their own lifestyles and slowly begin to transform the places where they settle. In Sandpoint, Idaho, a favorite refuge of disillusioned Californians, boutiques and craft shops flourish and stores sell wooden tubs for outdoor bathing. Newcomers may even revive an entire town in their image. Twenty-five miles south of Santa Fe, in the Ortiz Mountains, lies the hamlet of Madrid (pop. 250). Until 1955, the community scraped together a living from nearby coal mines, but when the coal business fizzled, Madrid faded away. In 1975 an enterprising group of outsiders began buying the hillsides and the abandoned, ramshackle miners' cottages. Today the sound of power saws and drills echoes through the valley as the new pioneers rebuild their ghost town. Melvin Johnson, 45, a former instructor at the Art Institute of Chicago, owns 15 acres and runs a clothing store. He cherishes "the peace, the sunshine and fresh air," and adds, "I'm living twice as well on half the money." Says Quinn Fortune, 32, a Los Angeles refugee who is now part owner of the town's gas station: "We're self-sufficient, surviving by our own muscle and living the way we want. We are here only because we want to be. Not too many people can say that."

A similar transformation, on a much larger scale, has brought the boom to downtown Boise. One example: the Idanha Hotel was an 80-year-old turreted monstrosity that once boasted visits by Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan but eventually deteriorated into a seedy flophouse. In 1977, two entrepreneurs from New York City, Alan Minskoff, 33, and Calvin Jensen, 39, bought and renovated it for $3.2 million. Today the Idanha is the city's social hub, featuring weekly jazz sessions, the best breakfast in town and a vintage Packard for chauffeuring guests to the airport as well as around town. "Boise was about to self-destruct," says Minskoff.

"The city hadn't grown at all between World War II and the late '60s." But during the 1970s several companies, including Boise Cascade and Morrison-Knudsen, expanded their operations, and Hewlett-Packard opened a plant employing 50,000.

John B. Fery, 50, chairman of Boise Cascade, is fond of pointing out to visitors that he can leave his office and be skiing in 30 minutes. Says Fery: "In New York, some people might ask, 'Boise who?' But each one of us lives here for some very special reasons of our own.

We've got a sense of what good things are, and a sense of the need to preserve our heritage." Boise City Councilman Mike Silva says, "A lot of people come here as a way of changing their lifestyle.

I've lived in St. Louis, Detroit and Chicago. I just found that I didn't want to live that way any longer." Councilman Silva predicts that Boise's population will double to 300,000 in the next 20 years. "Many of the people moving here are conservative in bent," says Silva. "They're individuals living out the frontier experience while there is still a frontier experience to live out. Having arrived in Boise seven years ago, I would now like to shut the gates and stop it all. Growth does give us what we like most. Our development can either be the greatest thing in the world or it can destroy us."

The desire to shut the gates is understandable, for the West enjoys the most spectacular scenery in the continental U.S. Skiers by the thousands crowd the slopes of Utah's Alta, Colorado's Vail, Aspen, Snowmass and Steamboat Springs and Idaho's Sun Valley. Trout fishermen cast their lines into the churning waters of the Gallatin and Madison rivers in Montana, while hikers trek through the sandstone canyons of Arizona. Says one enthusiast, Al Seibel, 22, of Table Rock, Wyo.: "We've got everything here."

Millions of tourists stream into the region each year, spending more than $3 billion along the way. Though gasoline shortages have thinned the trampling hordes of visitors somewhat, Yellowstone National Park is still attracting over half a million people a year. More than a few return to the Rockies to stay. Says Idaho's Church: "The problem for the growing Mountain West is how to respond to what the hucksters call Progress. Will we let it ruin our towns and our countryside?"

That challenge faces all Mountain West residents, from ranchers whose grandfathers homesteaded there a century ago to transplanted Californians who got off the plane last week. The argument is not whether development should take place at all, but rather how to control that growth so that the special qualities of the Rockies are not ruined. Even those Westerners most concerned about the environment realize that an energy-hungry nation needs what lies underneath the mountains. "These projects are going to happen," admits Kevin Markey, a regional representative of the Friends of the Earth. "The politics has changed from two years ago when we could say no, no, no. That is not going to happen any more. Now we are interested in moderating the velocity of development and preserving the freedom of choice on energy sources for the future." Governor Lamm agrees: "In these explorations, the question is no longer if, but how."

The early signs are not encouraging. Towns across the Rockies are suffering from what Psychologist Eldean V. Kohrs has called the "Gillette syndrome," named after a once bucolic ranching town in northeastern Wyoming. As oil and coal developers moved in to exploit what lay underneath Gillette, the town ballooned from a population of 3,580 people in 1960 to 12,125 in 1975. House trailers crowded in among the billboards and ramshackle storefronts, water supplies dwindled, the schools bulged with students. Crime, alcoholism and violence were commonplace. The town officials were simply unprepared to cope with the ugly side of the boom.

Symptoms of Gillette syndrome can now be found in nearly every Rocky Mountain state. Until a new grammar school was built in Colstrip, Mont. (pop. 3,000), students had to convene for classes in the town's shopping center. In Grants, N. Mex., the self-proclaimed "Uranium Capital of the World," the population has gone from 9,000 in 1975 to about 14,000 today. In the past decade, crime has doubled, rising to 1,421 felonies last year. In Rock Springs, Wyo., where the population grew from 11,000 in 1970 to 26,000 today, one-third of those who need hospital care must go 185 miles to Salt Lake City.

The most threatened area in the Mountain West may be Colorado's gorgeous and still half-empty Western Slope. It is estimated that if Exxon does build 150 oil-shale plants there, the population in Rio Blanco and Garfield counties could shoot from 75,000 to 1.5 million. Colorado Senator Gary Hart has figured that the Exxon project alone would require enough new schools, hospitals and roads each year to accommodate a city the size of Grand Junction (pop. 54,000), now the largest city in western Colorado. Water would have to be imported from as far as 1,000 miles away, if it could be found at all.

Exxon is reconsidering the scope of its plans, but the development already taking place in western Colorado is leaving its mark. In Craig, which has doubled to 8,000 since 1975, businessmen boast of the new mall with 26 stores; clapboard houses that sold for $30,000 in 1974 now go for better than twice that amount. But Sheriff S.L. Valdez is handling three times the calls he did two years ago, and Carl Andrews, an Episcopal priest, reports a heavy incidence of depression and child abuse. Says he: "A lot of the hopes and dreams never materialize. All of the fast-moving frenzy, people living crowded in their neighbors' lives, is more than some can bear."

Boomtown officials find little sympathy in Washington for their plight. Washington is providing about $50 million a year to help towns disrupted by coal and uranium mining build new sewers, water lines and schools and hospitals. Westerners claim the funds are not enough, but Administration officials blame that on Congress. "Congress is still dominated by the East," says Paul Petzrick, director of the Office of Shale Resource Applications of the Department of Energy, "so it seems to be loath to support funding for programs to ease the impact of energy development in the Mountain States. For four years Gary Hart has been putting up legislation to soften the impact, and Congress has been battling it down."

The Hart legislation, called the Energy Impact and Assistance Bill, proposed granting loans to energy boom towns to build the schools, hospitals and other facilities needed to accommodate new settlers. The bill was finally passed by the Senate this year, but was voted down in the House; Hart sees little chance of winning the measure's passage in 1981. Says he: "At issue in the Eastern opposition to the bill is the contention that small growing Western towns don't need help while large decaying Eastern cities do. At a time when we are trying to reduce the size of the federal budget, that is a powerful argument to fight." Even so, Hart believes that the Government has a clear responsibility to help pay for sacrifices that Western communities are making in supplying energy to the rest of the country. Says he: "The nation will enjoy the benefits of the energy. Sharing a small part of the local burden is not too much to ask."

Many local officials blame federal bureaucrats for tying up assistance funds in spools of red tape. In Grants, Mayor Mitch Wells won approval 23 months ago for federal funds to buy land for three firehouses, and he is still waiting for the check. Complains Wells: "We're still dotting i's and crossing t's. They've changed the rules half a dozen times. It just doesn't work."

Officials who try to plan ahead for anticipated growth complain that no one in the Federal Government will listen to them. Says Utah Governor Scott Matheson: "We're growing so fast now that we can see almost unmitigable problems --even without the development of synthetic fuels or the huge MX program. We estimate that in the next ten years the state will increase in population from 1.4 million to 2 million. That's explosive. Now all these things are supported by the Federal Government, but the Feds never sit down and tell you that all these things have to be planned together for management purposes." Adds William D. Howell, director of the Southeastern Utah Association of Local Governments: "Usually, you can't even get an audience in Washington unless you've already been impacted. If you go to them well prepared and say, 'We expect this much development to happen and so we will need this much money,' they say, 'Fine, come back and ask us when you've been hit.' "

Of deepest concern to Westerners is the demand that the growth will make on the water supply. Throughout the region's history, water, or the lack of it, has determined the pace of development. Historian Walter Prescott Webb once called the Mountain West "virtually an oasis civilization," and ranchers formerly fought pitched battles to control water holes for their herds. As long ago as 1893, the explorer Major John Wesley Powell warned the First International Irrigation Conference in Los Angeles: "I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation of water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land." Today nearly every river in the West is either fully used or overused. Throughout the 1,400-mile meandering of the mighty Colorado, for example, water is siphoned off to Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and (this infuriates mountain people) California. The river finally ends as a salty trickle at the Gulf of California. By official agreements between Washington and the states involved, the river is supposed to deliver 16.5 million acre-feet of water, but nowadays only 14 million acre-feet (not counting storage facilities) course through its bed.

Yet the plans for developing the energy resources of the Rockies require prodigious quantities of water. Shale-oil production, for example, will require 1 to 5 bbl. of water to extract 1 bbl. of oil. Westerners are greatly disturbed by the proposed coal-slurry pipelines, which will use water to swoosh pulverized coal through pipelines to the Eastern and Southern U.S. Two such pipelines are now on the drawing boards, one from Wyoming to Arkansas and New Orleans (1,387 miles), the other from Montana to Gillette, Wyo., and Houston (1,260 miles).

The Department of Energy has decreed that there is enough Western water to be shared by coal processors, wheat farmers and kitchen dishwashers alike. The White House's Water Resources Council, moreover, claims that the West wastes its water by growing crops that require heavy irrigation and by not utilizing runoff waters properly. Early in his presidency, Jimmy Carter outraged Western voters by insisting that the area should not be awarded additional funding for dams and irrigation projects until the region tightened its water tap. "The White House definition of water conservation amounts to a brick in the toilet!" exclaims Utah's Matheson. "There are considerable differences between water management in the West and in the East."

Hardest hit by the water shortage in the coming decade will be the farmers, who have long been on the decline for many reasons.

Farming provided 10% of the region's in come in 1958; its share has slipped to less than 3%. Farmers nonetheless use nearly 90% of the area's water, and they will not be able to afford the steep rises in water prices expected over the next ten years. Nor are federal officials in Washington in any mood to grant the farmers more water than the energy developers. "We are promising them really cheap long-range energy with minimal, inexpensive use of water, while the farmers are asking for expensive irrigation out put for uncertain crop yields," says Petzrick of the Department of Energy. "Where does the justice lie?" Not with the energy companies, the farmers insist. "The people out there care about their lands, their farms and their rustic way of life," contends David Alberswerth, a Washington lobbyist for the Western Organization of Resource Councils. "It is not that they don't care about the needs of the rest of the country, it is that they don't understand why they have to sacrifice everything that they live for."

Yet that sacrifice will most probably be made, as will innumerable others throughout the Mountain West in the years just ahead. This vast and glorious part of America is changing at a pace nobody could have dreamed of a mere decade ago. Though a region of such natural beauty can never become the "worthless area" described by Daniel Webster, it can become so despoiled that life there is no longer very special. "What counts is the opportunity to be alone, to see the stars, to look through clear, clean air for hundreds of miles," says University of Arizona President John Schaefer, explaining why he enjoys living in Tucson. "We have lost that in much of the country. If this town becomes like Los Angeles, what's the point?"

-- By james Kelly. Reported by William Rademaekers/Salt Lake City and Richard Woodbury /Denver

* "The predicted ten fastest growing states in order: Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Alaska, Flonda, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon.

With reporting by William Rademaekers; Richard Woodbury

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