Dan Sharps as a tack.

Photo: David Mayfield.

“Lost arm,” Sharps says, gesturing toward one tree clipped of a big branch. “Lost leg,” he says, pointing to another.

Straight ahead lay the splinters of what was a large pinyon — a hearty tree but not when stomped on by an Army tank. “I’d pretty much call that one a fatality,” Sharps pronounces.

At the Army’s Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site in southern Colorado, this shaggy, red-bearded range conservationist has a tough job — to fix the damage done by the hundreds of tanks, armored fighting vehicles, and trucks that play war games on this fragile land several times a year.

Think of him as a mechanic with 237,000 acres to repair. Sharps, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has been the backbone of land restoration at Pinon Canyon since shortly after the Army opened the maneuver site in 1985. He is the only year-round resident of the installation nestled alongside the Purgatoire River northeast of Trinidad.

It’s lonely work. Two-thirds of the year, there’s no Army presence, and only about a dozen civilians work at the site. Of them, nobody covers more ground than Sharps. He estimates he spends at least 90 percent of his time alone — regrading torn-up land, reseeding with native grasses and shrubs, building erosion-control structures.

At play in the fields of war.

Photo: David Mayfield.

His home on base is a rugged, old ranch house more than 10 miles from the nearest state road. He carts in his own drinking water and survives evenings without a TV by faithfully plowing through the boxes of books a librarian sister periodically mails him.

ptime he spends off-site is mostly to tend some nearby cropland that he bought six years ago. Friends wish he’d get out more, worrying that his devotion to Pinon Canyon has gotten the better of him. It’s the only place he’s worked since graduating from the University of Wyoming in 1986. But the soft-spoken Sharps says, “I don’t think I’d trade this for anything I know.”

Range Rover

Standing in the middle of the installation’s high prairie, he can turn a circle and look out across thousands of square miles, with stunning mountains like the twin snow-covered Spanish Peaks and the Sangre de Cristos just part of the backdrop. Descend into the redrock canyons, climb the basalt spine known as the Hogback, or wander through Pinon Canyon’s tens of thousands of acres of pinyon-juniper woodlands — and there are close-up wonders to explore.

In a rut.

Photo: David Mayfield.

Sharps can look at a grid map of the installation and, from his walking-around experiences, reel off some oddity, sublime or spectacular, in each of the hundreds of squares: a logjam of petrified wood, a fern-lined spring, a remnant of Ponderosa pine. He likes “going around looking at things.”

When it comes to Army impacts, the 40-year-old Sharps studies the land with the eye of a forensics examiner. He knows tank trails from the trails of Bradley fighting vehicles, Hemmets from Humvees — how long ago the vehicle left its mark, the wetness of the soil when it passed.

And everywhere he can gaze with pride on his own impact on the land, where he turned trenches and dug-out fighting positions back into grasslands through hours behind the wheel of a grader or a tractor, scooping out the little depressions where rain can settle, cross-stitch planting the seeds of western wheat grass, blue grama, alkali sacaton.

Sharps’s parents were geologists. The family moved throughout the West when he was growing up, but everywhere they went his dad planted trees. They spent their spare time outdoors, camping, fishing, hiking. Sharps studied range conservation at Wyoming, determined to make a living from working outside.

He arrived at Pinon Canyon not long after the Army had finished a long and bitter buyout of dozens of cattle ranches. Local residents predicted the Army would trash the land. Without doubt, the training impacts have been hard. There are places where the land is so rutted from tank traffic that a 5-mph ride in Sharps’s pickup turns into a head-banging bounce-a-thon.

But the Army has often delayed training after rains or snowfalls to allow the land to firm up. And it has built more than 160 small erosion-control dams that have actually reduced soil runoff into the Purgatoire.

The biggest change since the Army takeover is its banishing of cattle. Without competition from cows, Pinon Canyon’s antelope population has steadily grown, to over 1,300 at last count. Elk are flourishing as well. And many of the installation’s native grasses have recovered, to the point now that Army officials say the increasing plant cover will let fire take a larger role in shaping the landscape.

Casualities of War

Sharps thinks Pinon Canyon’s land condition is neither better nor worse, just different, with the Army presence. “Basically, we’ve traded cattle trails for tank trails and Humvee trails,” he says.

Cannon bawl.

Photo: David Mayfield.

He’s dismayed when Army units, most of which come from Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, destroy a lot of trees. About 400 pinyons and junipers, some hundreds-of-years-old, were flattened during two months of maneuvers that ended in March. Units whose commanders disregard recommendations to delay training until lands firm up after rain or snow cause some of the longest-lasting damage, he says.

“It just takes a few bad apples here and there to leave their marks for centuries,” Sharps says. “But for the most part, they’re pretty conscientious about what they’re doing.”

There’s little to do for the junipers and pinyons except to maintain the fences that put some of the woodlands off-limits to vehicles. Sharps mostly concentrates on recontouring and reseeding grasslands. About 3,000 acres are reseeded at Pinon Canyon each year. Much of it is by contract workers, but Sharps’ dusty flannel shirts testify to his hands-on penchant. Come summertime, when his allergies to seed dust grow most acute, so does his constant wheezing.

“July and August, I’m working on half a lung,” he says.

His hardest lesson has been accepting the fact that “anything I do has the potential to go back to ground zero again.” The Army often digs battle positions where he has worked hard to get grasses regrowing.

One afternoon earlier this year, Sharps is nudging his mud-splattered pickup up over a knoll in a far corner of Pinon Canyon. A blasting snow has cut visibility to 10 yards.

“Antelope,” he says matter-of-factly. A few seconds later, a half-dozen pronghorns dash in front of his truck. He’d smelled them first through his slightly rolled-down window.

These are the times he likes best on Pinon Canyon, Sharps says. When the weather’s socked in so tight, he navigates by his nose and his well-worn memories of the land’s contours. Nobody to rely on but himself.

Later, he says, “It would be nice if someday all of mankind realizes that we don’t have to have all these guns and tanks and the Army decides it doesn’t need a place like this.” Pinon Canyon would be perfect for a national wildlife refuge, with its mix of plain, woodl
and, and canyon habitats, he says. If ever it happens, “I’d like to be the guy in charge.”

Charles Wilkinson, law man.

Photo: Larry Harwood, University
of Colorado at Boulder.

But on this December morning, during the last meeting of Wilkinson’s natural resources law course at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the professor comes to a sudden stop. He’d like to read something from The Eagle Bird, a book he wrote some years back.

Wilkinson picks up the tattered hardcover stuffed with page markers and thumbs a few pages in.

“I would like to consider here the language of the law,” he reads, “why it is that the words of our laws do not carry the high pitch so evident in the arts and literature, why it is that laws do not speak of the wonder and majesty of the bald eagle.”

Lawyers say “that statutes must be absolutely precise,” he continues. “But why is it that a word like majesty does not help us a great deal in measuring something? . . . How is it possible to be precise about eagles without knowing of majesty?”

Laws must speak more reverently of forests and wild creatures, he says; language’s power to protect mustn’t be squandered.

The reading ends. “Thank you, my friends,” Wilkinson says quietly. And then the applause begins — spontaneous, heartfelt, an outpouring of thanks. For four months, these hundred students had toured the West with the lanky Wilkinson as their guide. They had clawed with him through the thickets of mining, water, timber, and grazing laws, and they had followed their professor as he ambled along irrigation ditches, scaled dam walls, and swam alongside salmon struggling to reach ancestral spawning grounds.

They had, with him, put themselves in the place of miners, ranchers, farmers, log-cutters, dam-builders, fishers — all determined to scratch wealth, or at least a living, out of the mountains and deserts of the West. They had learned of injustices suffered by Indians and Hispanics, of treaties broken and lands taken away.

Legal Eagle

In the West these days, no one is better equipped than Wilkinson to cover this vast legal terrain. He is among the region’s leading legal authorities in three major areas: natural resources, public lands, and Indian affairs. Certainly, no one cuts so skillfully across all three bodies of law. With these legal roads often converging in conservation debates, Wilkinson has established himself as one of the West’s leading voices on issues ranging from wilderness protection to Native American fishing rights.

But it’s more than his ability to explain and draw connections between complex issues that makes the 59-year-old Wilkinson influential. It’s also his willingness to share self-discoveries made while exploring red-rock canyons or squinting through the mist of a lush Northwest rainforest. Sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating, often inspiring, Wilkinson’s feelings for the land are always close to the surface.

Few manage the dual role of analyst and rhapsodist so deftly.

He has greatly influenced numerous other conservation writers, including Terry Tempest Williams, author of the best-selling Refuge, who has hailed him as “a force in the American West like wind, like water, like love.” His passionate intellect has also landed him on the board of groups ranging from the Wilderness Society to the Grand Canyon Trust. In 1996, he drafted the proclamation signed by President Clinton establishing the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah.

Professing his love of the land.

Photo: Ken Abbott, University
of Colorado at Boulder.

More than a decade after he joined the faculty of CU-Boulder’s School of Law, Wilkinson concedes that there are still some colleagues who “wonder what the hell I’m doing . . . who think I bring too much emotion to what I’m doing.” But increasingly, he says, there is an acceptance “that if you don’t consider the way a place makes people feel, you’ve got an incomplete analysis” of conservation issues.

Which is why Wilkinson revels in the language of the U.S. Forest Service’s sweeping new management guidelines. Adopted in November, the guidelines make “ecological sustainability” the driving factor in managing national forests, allowing only timber harvests that don’t hurt the forests’ long-term health. Wilkinson helped craft the change, as the lone non-scientist on a Forest Service scientific committee that first proposed the new guidelines for forest management. Among the benefits of forests that the committee proposed be factored into management decisions are “beauty, inspiration, and wonder.”

Wilkinson smiles as he repeats the words, now part of the Forest Service’s administrative law. They speak of benefits not easily measured or cranked into a timber-cut analysis, he concedes, but benefits nonetheless.

A Connecticut Yankee in the Wild, Wild West

Wilkinson credits his father most for the passion that underlies his work. Their troubled relationship drove the younger Wilkinson west to Stanford Law School in the early 1960s. He had no interest in returning home to Connecticut after college in Ohio. Instead, Wilkinson recalls in his 1999 book Fire on the Plateau, he sought to get as far away from his father as he could.

But his father had also worked a positive influence — the native Southerner’s deep hatred of racism had stoked in the younger Wilkinson a burning desire to practice civil rights law.

He got his chance in 1971, as a staff attorney with the nonprofit Native American Rights Fund. By then, Wilkinson had been in the West for nearly a decade and couldn’t imagine living elsewhere. He had read every history of the Western states he could find. The landscape he’d once dismissed as barren now captivated him.

Wilkinson’s job with NARF took him to dozens of Indian reservations, some of the remotest lands he’d experienced. In countless walkabouts and late-night conversations, he was deeply moved by Indian people’s reverence for wild places. He witnessed first-hand their ancient ceremonies for expressing unity with nature, some weeks or months in the making.

“The Indian world view is, I think, the most sophisticated view of nature that exists anywhere,” he says — “a serious working philosophy.”

Wilkinson explores the application of the philosophy in his latest book — Messages from Frank’s Landing, the story of Billy Frank, Jr., and his leadership of Washington state’s resurgent Nisqually tribe. Wilkinson points out that 600 generations of “fish people” harvested salmon sustainably for 12,000 years in the rivers of the Northwest, before whites nearly wiped out the fishery in barely over a century. “An equality with the natural world, an actual belonging to the same community, is in the bloodstream of Indian people,” he writes.

Wilkinson’s vision of a healthy West doesn’t eliminate those who live hard on the land. Though his exhaustive analyses of the West’s tortured environmental history cut them little slack
, he still advocates a place for miners, ranchers, log-cutters, and even dirt-bikers. His spirit of inclusiveness — rare among the West’s leading conservation advocates — has won him respect among people on both ends of the environmental spectrum.

But the bottom line, he says, is clear: The region’s antiquated and shortsighted natural resources laws, which encourage a get-it-while-you-can approach, must be changed to emphasize sustainability.

More than anything, he argues in The Eagle Bird, the West needs to develop “an ethic of place,” premised on “the recognition that our species thrives on the subtle, intangible, but soul-deep mix of landscape, smells, sounds, history, neighbors, and friends that constitute a place, a homeland.”