After the boom became a bust

Four and a half years ago, oil company executives negotiated for drilling rights at our dining room table. We are ranchers with some mineral rights and the drilling clamor was well underway in the West. Talk turned to the future, and they suggested our 19-year-old son postpone college. "Buy him a backhoe!" they urged. We remembered the last boom, which ended with a bang, not a whimper, on May 2, 1982. We were herding our own sheep, moving toddlers from winter desert to summer high country, while all around us, drilling dominated the local economy. Today, we have grown children and are fighting the fight to stay on the ranch established six generations ago. Oil and gas has long been a part of our Wyoming community. In recent years, it again swept everything before it. When we moved a sheep camp or checked our desert cows, semis and tankers swarmed the roads. Backcountry vistas were dotted with drilling rigs. Beer cans lined highways and two-tracks alike, and formed pyramids outside the man camps which sprang up to house new workers. This boom, we were assured — everyone in the oil patch was assured — would last 50, 70, 100 years. Young people found jobs, found a future at home. They did not have to migrate to faraway places and long for the mountains, for the West's open spaces...DenverPost

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