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Some of the wells remain uncapped, but Clark said she recalls no problems from the uranium miners on her ranch. She had few problems with oil-drilling companies, although one operator tore up her roads. “They had no conscience about tearing up our roads and leaving them in a condition that made it impossible to pull our horse trailers on them. You’ve got to have a good surface agreement to make them work with you.”

Wyoming ranchers pay attention to surface agreements, because the surface of their land is all most of them own. Seventy percent of the rights to minerals under the Clark ranch are owned by the federal government; 10 percent are owned by the state, and the remaining 20 percent are owned by the Clarks. These “split estates” create problems. The party who owns the minerals has a right to the land—the right to build roads, put in pipelines, and run power lines.

If uranium and oil were manageable under these split arrangements, CBM is not. “Methane has already caused a lot of problems,” Clark said. Four or five wells are often drilled at each well pad, and eight well pads are allowed on each section (260 acres) of land. Huge, roaring screw compressors pressure the gas into transmission lines. Methane is sometimes “vented” into the atmosphere. “Then there is the water,” Clark said.

Like Ed Swartz, Clark has lost some of her grass to methane water produced by one of Steve Griles’ former clients. Some water spilled out of a reservoir and ran down the creek near the ranch houses, killing several cottonwoods in a region where trees are rare and precious. When the vegetation began to return, the cattle wouldn’t go near it.

The problem, Clark noted, is the high SAR (sodium-absorption ratio). “An SAR up to eight is OK,” Clark said. “When you get to twelve, it’s considered a problem. Over twelve is dangerous. Well, the SAR on the water coming out of those wells was eighteen to nineteen. And there was a fifty- to two-hundred-fold change in the soil composition wherever there was methane water.” (You have to be a soil scientist to ranch in this part of the country.)

Clark has overcome a fear of speaking in public. She religiously follows the first rule of participatory democracy: “I go to meetings. Meetings with the BLM. Meetings with methane companies. Meetings with ranchers. Meetings with government. Every time I ask for help with a problem, I’m told the same thing. ‘That’s a civil matter.’ That means ‘I’m sympathetic, but that’s not my problem.’ When you hear that in town council meetings, at the county commission, in the state offices, and from federal officials, that’s when you turn to your local environmental group.” Clark is also a member of the Powder River Basin Resource Council.

By sheer persistence—and attending meetings—Clark got the director of the industry-friendly Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality to visit her ranch. She explained to him that the drilling company had produced 45 acre-feet of water in thirty days. She had him do the numbers: based on fourteen wells, the companies would produce 781 acre-feet of water. “That’s more than they can store in every one of these reservoirs they have planned here. So, you see, it’s a real big problem.” She persuaded the state agency to suspend the drilling on her ranch until the companies figure out what they’re going to do with the water.

Standing by a small reservoir on her ranch, the snowcapped Bighorn Mountains clear and sharp a hundred miles at her back, Clark pointed to the damage done by the methane water. It’s a clearly defined swath of brown, like a hole cut out of the native grasses. Farther down, on Willow Creek, it’s worse. “There is not a blade of palliative grass in there. One half of that crick is a waste to us. It used to be grass. And this is a ranch where we have to fight for every blade of grass.”

From an altitude of one thousand feet, Wyoming’s future looks even more disturbing. As he climbed out of the tiny Sheridan, Wyoming,