In the Medicine Bow National Forest’s Rock Creek Roadless Area, rare animals like black bears, pine marten, and boreal toads still fulfill their role in the forest life-cycle. In this special place hikers can traverse a breathtaking trail along a steep canyon and anglers can find a wonderful trout stream. In this special place children can experience a truly wild landscape for the first time, and families can share with one-another moments that will last a lifetime. In this special place the Forest Service would like to fly helicopters, set off explosions, and scatter heavy machinery in a month-long effort to explore for oil and gas.

We can keep this from happening and save what makes Rock Creek special, but only if we all speak out together. Please send a letter out to the Forest Service by June 12 (addresses are listed below).

The Forest Service is Poised to Sacrifice this Wildland

Last March, the Forest Service notified the public that it planned to allow oil and gas exploration inside Rock Creek Roadless Area without any environmental analysis, but later withdrew the notice when the project was challenged by the public. Unfortunately, the Forest Service has reissued the notice and now plans to move forward with this destructive proposal. If you spoke out and wrote a letter the first time, we need your voice again.

The exploration would place drilling rigs in eighty different locations throughout Rock Creek and would drag seismic lines across the heart of this pristine landscape. There is no doubt that the oil and gas foray would harm animals sensitive to human impacts, like elk and northern goshawk. But the greatest harm might not happen until later down the road.

An oil and gas company would not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an exploration project unless it was likely that oil and gas existed below the surface. Exploration today may mean full-scale drilling tomorrow.

Together, We Can Save Rock Creek

To the Bush Administration and the oil and gas exploration giant Western Geophysical, nothing is sacred and every landscape is reduced to one value: how much oil and gas it contains. This drilling-rig duo has pushed for exploration in publicly owned wildlands immediately outside Arches National Park in Utah, amongst Native American ruins and religious sites inside Colorado’s Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, and has now set its sights on southeastern Wyoming’s wild gem.

But exploration outside of Arches met huge public opposition and was stopped cold in its tracks. Public opposition can save the Rock Creek Roadless Area as well, but it simply won’t happen without your involvement. With all the passion you can muster, please tell the Forest Service that Rock Creek is just too special to be squandered for a few drops of oil and gas. In a letter or email, you may want to:

• Let the Forest Service now how special the wild and undeveloped nature of Rock Creek is to you.
• Urge the Forest Service to give this world-class landscape the wilderness protection it deserves.
• Tell the Forest Service that now is not an appropriate time for oil and gas exploration because the agency is currently revising its long-term forest plan for the Medicine Bow. The discovery of even small amounts of oil and gas will make it less likely that Rock Creek will receive the protection a revised forest plan can provide.
• Ask the agency to complete a full "environmental impact statement," if it should continue to pursue this ill-conceived project.

Thank you for speaking out to keep this amazing place just as it is today - wild and drilling rig free!

Please address your letter to:

Mary Peterson
Forest Supervisor
Medicine Bow National Forest
2468 Jackson St.
Laramie, WY 82070

or send an email to:
mhpeterson@fs.fed.us