Who’ll clean up when the party’s over? In the shadow of a sandstone outcrop a few miles east of this northwestern New Mexico outpost, a life-and-death struggle is playing out in the hard desert soil. A few feet from a natural gas well known as Riddle #8S, delicate shoots of alabaster rice grass spring up from a swath of sandy loam. To the casual observer it's just another scraggly patch of bleached-out grass, but to Sherrie Landon, it's a biological triumph. "This looks good," says Landon, a reclamation specialist with the Bureau of Land Management's Farmington, N.M., field office. "The vegetation is coming back very well." The same can't be said for the dirt around a nearby older well, Riddle WH 3C. Here, only 50 yards away, the seeds didn't take. The lifeless, eroding hillside stands as a cruel reminder of the challenge of growing anything in the desert. The San Juan Basin is the nation's second-largest natural gas basin. Unfortunately, the West's most productive fossil fuel basins -- the San Juan, the Powder River on the Wyoming/Montana border, Colorado's Piceance and southeastern New Mexico's Permian -- share another distinction: They are some of the harshest and most biologically stubborn environments to reclaim after drilling. If it doesn't rain, or if it rains at the wrong time, a season of work can be wasted....