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Show JANET ROSS Claiming the Land on Her Own Terms By Amy Irvine She continues. “And the guy under her, the assistant wilderness coordinator, hated southern Utah. He didn't think anything deserved wilderness protection because there “Who were the homestead wives? Who were the gold rush brides? Does anybody know?" - 10,000 Maniacs, "The Gold Brush Brides" Janet Ross is nobody’s wife, nobody's bride. Not one to conform to Utah trends for women, Janet is absent from the kitchen and out on the land-—a contemporary homesteader of sorts. But unlike the homesteaders of the old Wild West, she doesn't seek gold——nor does she look to tame the place she has staked as her "spiritual home." Janet wants only to see the lands of southern Utah as undomesticated as possible. She says she always knew she wanted to come out West, to live in the middle of nowhere. At twenty-five years of age, Janet transplanted her roots to southeastern Utah, were no trees. And he had hemorrhoids. He just hated driving around in a Jeep on the wilderness inventories because it hurt so badly.” I shake my head in disbelief. I have never heard the comical details of the original BLM inventory before, only that it was botched, which is why the Utah Wilderness Coalition completed its own surveys—and why Department of Interior ordered another one. “So those were the bosses in charge of this program. As we prepared for the Mancos Mesa wilderness inventory, they decided it was too big [of an area] for the inventory specialists to walk across, so we were told we would inventory it by helicopter. The three PR 3 > 3 This unassuming woman has long been one of the revered mothers of Utah wilderness. She has taken under her wing the endangered lands of the Colorado Plateau through a fusion of hard-hitting activism and gentle community-based environmental education. from the flatlands of Missouri. She bought a 1920’s homestead nineteen miles outside of Monticello, complete with its original chicken coops and bunkhouses. That was twenty-two years ago. Her brown skin, sun-splashed hair, and muscled legs are testament to her years immersed in the Western landscape. If one overlooks the river sandals, she even looks like a local. When I arrange to meet her in Monticello for dinner, she arrives in her tattered green pick-up. Her cow dog Chaco sits next to her like a sentry. This unassuming woman has long been one of the revered mothers of Utah wilderness. She has taken under her wing the endangered lands of the Colorado Plateau through a fusion of hard-hitting activism and gentle, community-based environmental education. Her role in the original showdown over Utah wilderness is one reason why such a significant portion of Utah's red rock landscapes are now being considered for official protection under the 1964 Wilderness Act. As a staff member of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, I am embarrassed to say I hadn't realized the depth of her role in this. On the second day of my visit Janet and I hike to the top of Comb Ridge. On the way up, she shows me some of the most detailed rock art panels I've ever seen. We sit on the sandstone slabs and eat our lunch; the wind blows in hot gusts across our skin. Our dogs lie at our feet, panting recklessly. Janet tells them to go find shade, then turns in each direction and points out wilderness units proposed by the Utah Wilderness Coalition: Arch Canyon to the north, Nokai Dome to the west, The Tabernacle to the south, and to the east, Monument Canyon. She is a first-generation Utah wilderness activist. I am here to receive her gift, her knowledge of this land. She passes on to me too, an activist in my nascence, the lore of the event that birthed her role in the wilderness debate. In 1979, Janet was employed as a “wilderness specialist,” to assist with the Bureau of Land Management's mandated inventory of wilderness-quality lands in Utah. “The first inventory project we did was up near Price. I went out with the Moab district supervisor for wilderness,” Janet explained. When she asked the woman how to do a proper wilderness inventory, she recalls the reply, “Oh, it doesn't matter. Just make it up as you go along.” “So I said to her, ‘But isn't this a statewide effort? Shouldn't we all do it the same way? Aren't there some guidelines to follow?’ She just kept saying, ‘It doesn't matter.” Then Janet tells me how this woman refused to go to the bathroom in the outdoors. She says, “It sure makes it hard to do a wilderness inventory when you're always driving back to town to find a bathroom. “And this district coordinator was married to the president of the Cotter Corporation, a big southern Utah mining company. He'd come on these wilderness inventory trips with us. They'd get up late, go to bed early, and have to drive back into town to go to the bathroom in between. So not a lot of work was getting done.” of us “wilderness specialists” get in this helicopter; the idea was that it would drop each of us in a different area, we'd stand there and take pictures for 15 minutes, then we'd get picked up and taken to another spot until we'd done the whole thing. Well, the pilot drops us off at the first place. Then he comes back and picks me up but he can't find the other two...he's lost ‘em. He flies around some more, but he's running out of gas so he goes back to Grand Gulch and gases up. Then he decides it's time for lunch, so we eat. Meanwhile, three hours go by, and these two other folks are sitting out on Mancos Mesa waiting for us with their flight suits zipped up over their heads because the gnats are so bad. All this time they're not looking at wilderness, they're looking at the insides of their orange flight suits.” Janet tells this story in a calm, steady voice, but you can tell she is as irked by it now as the day it happened. “So after another hour we finally find them; he drops us all off at only one other spot. We take pictures; by then it's 4:30 and the pilot says it's time to go home. entire inventory of Mancos Mesa. That was the “We filled out our little inventory forms and we said [on the forms] yes, indeed there was solitude and primitive unconfined recreation out there. Well, it all got turned around and the report came back reading the opposite of what we'd reported.” Now, Janet stops to talk to Chaco, who insists that we play stick with her. Janet speaks to her dog in the same low gentle voice that she has used to tell me her stories, that she uses to speak at public hearings and at Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance board meetings, of which she is a founding board member. “You know, there's plenty of wilderness character out there on the mesa... but because Cal Black [the former San Juan County Commissioner] had a uranium mine on the edge of it, BLM wanted to throw it out. Then we'd go to these public meetings to speak on behalf of the work we did. At one meeting, Calvin Black said to us “You guys better start travellin' in twos and threes. because we're gonna get you.” And Paul Happel, who's my boss, said, “Is that a threat, Mr. Black?” And he said “No Mr. Happel, that's a promise.” Over the years, Janet has not only proved that she is completely unphased by such threats, but also that she is nobody's hired hand. Janet has single-handedly cultivated her property into the nationally recognized Four Corners School of Outdoor Education—of which she is executive director. Upon first glance, one might regard Janet's school as just one of the innumerable outdoor adventure outfits found throughout the West. But Four Corners was the first of its kind, and has plowed a stout environmental ethic into all of its programs. Using the Colorado Plateau as a classroom, the school's mission is to educate people of all ages and backgrounds about the need to preserve the natural and cultural treasures of the Southwest. TWENTY-FOUR |
