Great Wyoming land rush spurs conservation push

Facing rural sprawl, landowners clamor to preserve open space, ranching, community ties.

JACKSON — Bob Budd shook his head when the truck in front of him flicked on its turn signal.

“Here’s one of the problems with all this influx of traffic,” he said, half in jest, half serious. “Nobody ever used to use a blinker because you knew whose car it was, and you knew they were going to turn. Now you’ve got to have a damn blinker.”

Budd’s great-great-grandfather first came to western Wyoming in the late 1800s, intending to return to Kansas. But the seasons changed while he was in Green River, and he drove his cattle upstream until he found an old trapper cabin and hunkered down for the whole winter. As Budd tells it, he stayed in the cabin all season, and when the weather warmed in the spring the cows were still alive. His ancestor decided to stay. One half of the family formed Big Piney, where Budd grew up. The other half formed Marbleton, just a few miles east.

But now, roughly 150 years later, Budd is watching the area change. A different kind of homesteader is arriving in Wyoming: newcomers from all over the United States looking to live in rural areas. Longtime ranching neighbors are facing pressure to sell, and some are doing so. As much as that’s changing the faces of the western Wyoming community, it’s also changing the land. Working ranches — where both livestock and wildlife graze — are being sliced up for rural development.

Some see that as a slow-moving assault on a Western way of life centered around ranching, open space and the pursuit of abundant wildlife.

“That’s what the rancher does,” Parker Greenwood said. “He keeps God’s country, God’s country.”

Greenwood was born and raised in Sublette County, which contains roughly 9,000 people, far more cattle and sprawling rangeland. His ancestors, like Bob Budd’s, were among the first homesteaders in Sublette County. Now, Greenwood manages the Little Jennie Ranch in Bondurant. His family’s ranches have been sold, and he worries about the steady march of development impacting ecosystems and people.

“It’s killing the land to put in concrete, to build these cities, to build houses,” Greenwood said.

“The faster we do that, the faster we’re out of here, in my opinion. We’re advancing so much that we’re going to put ourselves out in the long run.

“We’ve got to keep some of this alive,” he said.

Budd directs the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resources Trust, an independent state agency launched in 2005 to enhance and conserve wildlife habitat and other natural resource values throughout the state. As he works to conserve landscapes for wildlife and people, he has seen a similar story play out across Wyoming. After the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for rural living is at an all-time high.

He sees Sublette County, his family’s home for over a century, as the “belly of the beast.”

It’s changing, quickly.

“It was so rural,” Budd said. “It was community. Everybody went to everybody’s brandings.

“But now you have that development pressure in places where you didn’t used to have it.”

Budd said as much over lunch at La Cabaña Mexican Restaurant in Big Piney. He was taking a break from driving around Sublette County to survey properties that owners want to place under conservation easement or preserve in other ways.

Coincidentally, the restaurant is on Budd Avenue, named for the gregarious state official’s family.

People from outside Wyoming are flocking to Sublette County. In Pinedale, the county seat, subdivisions and government offices have sprouted on once-open ranch land, threatening to block wildlife migration corridors. Farther north in Bondurant, Joe Ricketts, a Chicago billionaire, is carving up the Upper Hoback River Basin for a new resort that he’s branded “Little Jackson Hole.”

Elsewhere in Wyoming, the story is similar. Teton County has faced development pressure for decades, but the pinch across the Cowboy State is newer.

Sublette County is the fastest-growing county in Wyoming, and Crook County is a close second. People are flocking to the northeastern Wyoming community to be within striking distance of the Black Hills. And people are pouring into Park County, on the east side of Yellowstone National Park, which is in turn putting development pressure on the scenic North Fork Highway that connects Cody to Lake Village in the park.

In the years before the COVID-19 pandemic the number of annual subdivision requests in Park County was climbing, reaching 16 in 2019. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Park County planners processed 37 applications for subdivision. In the last two years they’ve handled about 25.

“With subdivisions come houses, come garages. Everybody wants an arena,” Joy Hill, Park County’s planning director, told a crowd of Wyomingites last Wednesday at Gov. Mark Gordon’s Wyoming Sportsperson Conservation Forum in Dubois.

She described the attitude around development in four words: “I gotta have something.”

Steve Meadows is the son of the late Clarene Law, who was a Jackson Hole tourism mogul and state lawmaker. Meadows now runs the family business in Jackson Hole and serves as president of the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resources Trust. He said the land rush is statewide.

“You’re describing the acceleration of a process that’s been ongoing throughout my lifetime,” Meadows said. “It’s inevitable.”

But, even as development pressure expands across Wyoming, some landowners are pushing back, trying to conserve their properties.

Budd and Meadows are working with landowners to chase conservation over subdivision.

In eastern Park County alone, Budd knows of at least 80 potential applicants for easements and other habitat preservation projects with the trust. This year he’s evaluating 40 projects from landowners who formally applied.

“You got to have an economic signal that is different, that gives a guy the option,” Budd said. “I do not know a landowner who willingly sold for development for subdivision.”

The trust’s budget is small. Alone, it typically can’t offer landowners enough money to conserve their property. And, at the moment it doesn’t have the funds to encourage conservation via leasing, Budd said. But the trust has funded over 750 projects across Wyoming, doling out roughly $99 million. In doing so it has attracted another $600 million from nonprofits, land trusts and federal agencies interested in conserving large landscapes.

All of that is an attempt to do conservation in a Wyoming way: Respect people’s private property rights, don’t tell them what to do, but encourage them to avert the consequences of development.

Rural Wyoming is home to some of the last, large intact migration routes in the country — migrations that sustain deer and elk herds and serve hunters who pursue the ungulates every fall. Those animals cross vast swaths of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and National Elk Refuge. But they also cross private lands as they migrate from winter to summer ranges.

In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, about 40% of elk winter ranges are “covered in private land,” Jerod Merkle, the Knobloch Professor in Migration Ecology and Conservation at the University of Wyoming, said at last week’s forum in Dubois.

Wildlife in western Wyoming’s portion of the ecosystem depend on 1.9 million private acres.

Those critters should be able to tolerate some development, Merkle said. But mule deer, elk and pronghorn already have to navigate a latticework of public and private land that’s developed for oil and gas extraction, fenced off for ranching and carved up by highways. Deer, in particular, avoid otherwise available habitat around oil and gas wells, which deprives them of otherwise available food in those areas. Ungulates of all kinds can get caught in fences designed to keep cattle in. And vehicles claim the lives of thousands of animals a year in Wyoming, a death toll the state is working vigorously to offset with wildlife crossings.

On top of all that, carving up that same landscape for residential development threatens to eat up vegetation wildlife rely on to survive crushing Wyoming winters.

Previous research has shown that elk avoid areas that are more than 2% developed. Merkle is now trying to extend that research to mule deer and pronghorn to determine how much housing will preclude them from using important habitat.

That data will help answer questions like, “How much density do we want to allow? And how much are these animals going to respond?” Merkle said.

One thing is already clear, Merkle said: Connected landscapes are key to animals’ survival.

“This is not all about our public lands,” Merkle said. “Private lands are very important. And development is increasing within the state.”

Budd and Merkle agree: Demand for conservation is following increasing development pressure.

For many Wyoming landowners, protecting their land from subdivision is as much about keeping the land open for cattle and wildlife as it is about preserving a Western way of life, Budd said.

Without financial incentives, preservation doesn’t pencil. Cattle, sheep and hay prices are volatile. Meanwhile, the price of land is increasing across Wyoming, driving up property taxes and increasing pressure on landowners to sell.

Just north of Big Piney, George Kahrl is one of the landowners looking to preserve his property, a 3,500-acre ranch once owned by the family of Parker Greenwood, the Little Jennie Ranch manager. It’s also just north of Budd’s original family ranch, which is still owned by his cousins.

Kahrl, originally from Ohio, has owned ranches across the West for 35 years, recently in Montana. He’s considering placing an easement on his property, which abuts the foothills of the Wyoming Range and is home to deer, elk and all manner of waterfowl during irrigation season.

“It’s a business decision,” Kahrl said. “But it’s also a decision to go, ‘This is my value.’”

For Kahrl, one “value” is maintaining large, intact agricultural lands. Even if the only people who can afford to own large ranches are multi-millionaires, he said the operations still employ people from the local community and contribute to the local economy. Those ranches preserve a way of life.

Kahrl said the changes Wyoming has been seeing are being felt all over the West.

“The thing that has changed the West is the land value,” he said.

And that, he said, starts a cascade of subdivision.

He doesn’t see the threat of subdivision start when houses are built. Rather, he sees it when large ranches are divided in 320-acre or 160-acre parcels — something that might not immediately be visible from the road. That, he said, changes the landscape. Rather than running cattle over thousands of acres, property owners operate over smaller acreages. Fences go up, impeding wildlife movement, and properties are more likely to fall into the hands of recreational owners.

“Even at 320 acres, it changes how the land is used,” Kahrl said. “So when I think of subdevelopment, that’s really what I think of: the early stages.”

For Meadows, preserving land is about preserving a way of life for future generations. He wants his kids to see the same vistas and hunt the same Wyoming Range that he has all his life. That vision erodes once development starts.

“If I run the wrong cows, if I run too many one year in one place, I can undo that. I can fix that,” Budd said, driving through Big Piney.

But what’s on the horizon isn’t as reversible.

“I can’t fix pavement,” he added.

This story was published on May 29, 2024.