Cold Wind - C. J. Box [10]
Joe had called in the situation to Cheyenne dispatch, and they’d relayed the message via SALECS (State Assisted Law Enforcement Communication System) to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department and all relevant law enforcement agencies. As he drove, he heard the exchanges, and he could only imagine what Sheriff Kyle McLanahan was thinking. And he wondered how quickly and how far the word would spread beyond the local law network. Plenty of citizens in Saddlestring monitored the police band, and rumors shot through Twelve Sleep County like rockets. He hoped Marybeth—or Missy, for that matter—wouldn’t get hit with speculative phone calls until he knew for sure what the situation was.
He braked at the gate between the Lee and Alden ranches, perplexed at what he found. The Earl had replaced the old chain and lock system with a ten-foot electronic gate. This was one of the issues locals had raised over the last few years, how The Earl had shut off access to and across his holdings to people who had used the roads for generations. Joe knew Alden had every right to secure his property, but questioned the need to do so. It was like rubbing his wealth and power in the nose of those who had short supplies of both. And the gate in front of Joe was a monument to the controversy.
Instead of calling Alden Ranch headquarters for the keypad sequence, since that would alert Missy, Joe simply parked his pickup to the right of the gate where it joined with the four-string barbed wire fence and got out, leaving the motor idling. He climbed into the bed of his pickup and rooted through his metal gearbox until he found his bolt cutters. As he walked toward the fence, he could hear a cacophony of voices from the radio. Dispatchers talked to dispatchers, and sheriff’s department deputies, highway patrolmen, and local police officers all weighed in. He ignored them as he clipped through each strand of barbed wire on the fence top to bottom. He wanted to be the first to the scene.
Like the gate itself, the fence was perfect and new, stretched tight. His bolt cutters bit cleanly through the shiny metal wire. Each strand snapped back into a curl until he had clearance for his vehicle. He was surprised what pleasure it gave him to break through the fence.
Joe was familiar with the layout of the wind farm, although he had never approached it from this direction. The rough two-track gave way to a smooth, graded, and banked gravel road that was part of the development, and he was able to switch from four-wheel drive to two and increase his speed. He roared toward the slowest turbine.
The rapid development of the installations across Wyoming and the West had created new wildlife and environmental concerns. Wind turbines required a significant footprint on the land, at least fifty acres per structure, or three rotor distances apart from one to the other. Alden’s huge project of one hundred units stretched across five thousand acres of his land, not counting the well-engineered roads connecting them all. As yet, no transmission lines coursed over the horizon to export the electricity to downstream substation transformers.
Because wind companies obviously chose open areas with plenty of wind, they were often located in untrammeled terrain where there had been no previous impact and no person in his or her right mind would want to build a home. Unfortunately for the wind developers, many of these locations brought out concerns regarding impacts on the winter range of big game animals and their migration routes. The impact on the sage grouse population—strutting, flinty native game birds about the size of chickens—was of immediate concern. Since half of all the sage grouse in existence