ROCK SPRINGS – The Kinney Rim South roadless area in the southwestern Red Desert has just been targeted for large-scale oil and gas leasing by the Bureau of Land Management. Kinney Rim is an imposing ridge of high country that dominates two roadless units that together make up a quarter of a million acres of the southwestern Red Desert near Adobe Town. The lease sale includes six parcels with over 4,000 acres of roadless lands.

“The BLM’s main priority for public lands over the last 20 years is oil and gas, and the wildlife and public recreation are seen as obstacles rather than part of multiple use,” said Cleve Holloway, a former geologist with the Rock Springs BLM. “The Kinney Rim is a very diverse area with a lot of scenic values, and it’s an area where I’ve personally gone for professional landscape photography – it would be a shame to turn the entire area into gas field.”

The sale of these leases in the February 1st auction would allow the Vermillion Basin gas field to spread deep into the roadless area. Intensive field inventories by Biodiversity Conservation Alliance in 2002 identified over 125,000 acres in the Kinney Rim South unit that qualified for wilderness status. Following a less thorough inventory, BLM disagreed with BCA’s conclusions on wilderness characteristics, but the agency did not dispute its roadless character.

“The Kinney Rim is one of the last big tracts of primitive country left in the Red Desert, and provides important wildlife habitat for desert elk and birds of prey,” said Erik Molvar of Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. “Here in Wyoming we have some of the last natural ecosystems in America, but they’re rapidly being gobbled up by oil and gas development.”

Each oil and gas lease confers a property right to explore and develop for ten years, which can be extended indefinitely if oil or gas is found. The development of leases can convert landscapes into industrial zones crisscrossed with roads, pipelines, and drilling sites.

“This is one more example of the BLM’s rush to appease the federal government’s greed for oil and gas development in the West,” said Liz Howell, Director of the Wyoming Wilderness Association. “The least the BLM could do is to let their own agency finalize the Great Divide planning process where the citizens have identified the Kinney Rim as a special landscape worthy of protection--before they commit these lands to oil and gas.”

Also offered in the lease sale are lands in the Kinney Rim North proposed wilderness and several parcels along the Powder Rim, which due to its importance to a desert elk herd as well as rare birds and wildflowers has been proposed as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern for the revision of the Great Divide plan. The upcoming lease sale comes on the heels of a December lease offering in which the BLM sold new leases in the Powder Rim and the Adobe Town proposed wilderness.