by Jim Robbins, CondéNast Traveler

December 01, 2007

The search for fossil fuels across the American west is turning some of the nation's last open spaces into industrial zones and putting protected areas and wildlife risk. Jim Robbins reports on how the U.S. government is allowing energy companies to carve up treasured landscapes—one well at a time

Beyond the country's national parks is a second tier of wild landscapes that are neither as well known nor as dramatic but are nonetheless beautiful and were also set aside for the enjoyment of the American people. One of them is Largo Canyon, a broad red-and-dun sandstone cleft in the desert outside Farmington, New Mexico.

Several miles off the highway, Largo branches into the smaller Crow Canyon. Centuries ago, the Anasazi and later the Navajo etched into its dark-red walls a series of petroglyphs, including images of men on horseback believed to represent an encounter between Spanish explorers and the Navajo.

Some canyons like this are protected as state or national parks, but this area has instead been turned into a de facto industrial zone. Largo Canyon is studded with dozens of methane gas wells and a network of pipelines, water tanks, and metal sheds. Scars from buried pipelines score the red juniper–studded hills. Each day, hundreds of white pickup trucks roar along the gravel road in clouds of dust, and water tankers lumber by. The occasional hiss of escaping methane gas fills the air, and the towering skeletons of pumps pierce the landscape.

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