Tattle Trails
A group of hikers with cameras finds a way to keep
vehicles from ruining the West’s wildest lands
AS LIGH TNING STREAKED the canyon and rain
drummed on the red-rock walls of Recapture Wash,
Ronni Egan and Rose Chilcoat took shelter under a ledge,
delighting in the meteorological drama before them.
“Does anyone not feel alive?” shouted Chilcoat after
a deafening clap of thunder.
Egan, 63, and Chilcoat, 50, lead Great Old Broads for
Wilderness: 3,600 women (and a few hundred men) who
put hiking boots to the ground and take a stand for Mother
Nature by monitoring abuses of public lands. Recapture
Wash in southeastern Utah is one area they
watch. There, using Global Positioning
System devices and digital cameras, the
group has been documenting damage to
vegetation and streambeds by all-terrain
vehicles. The pictures have paid off: the
Bureau of Land Management closed a trail
that ATV enthusiasts had dynamited out of rock peril-
ously close to 800-year-old cliff dwellings.
“We’re not against off-road vehicles—or grazing cattle
or oil derricks,” says Egan, the group’s executive director.
“There’s enough room for everybody. But some of these
To contact Great
Old Broads call
970-385-9577
or go to greatold
broads.org.
things are just so destructive, they shouldn’t be allowed
in certain environments.” The Broads have worked to
limit snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park and
to establish Wild Sky Wilderness in Washington State.
On this visit to the wash, Egan and Chilcoat were
pleased to see the canyon recovering. The air was pun-
gent with juniper and sage. A wren’s song cascaded in
the breeze, and the cliff face bloomed with sunflow-
ers, blue asters, and scarlet gilia. Says Egan of the
landscape: “It’s my shrink, my church, my meditation.
When I’m out here, everything else goes away.”
Egan had never led anything but horseback trips
You do what you can, and you’re glad to know there are still wild places.”
—Rose Chilcoat
from her family’s dude ranch
in New Mexico before taking the reins of the Broads in
2002. The group, based in
Durango, Colorado, got its start
in 1989 after some older hikers
took exception to a remark by
Utah senator Orrin Hatch. He
opined that the United States
shouldn’t designate more land
as wilderness, because the
elderly wouldn’t have access.
Now the Broads have 22 chapters—called Broadbands—in
nine states.
“We’re not enforcers,” says
Egan. “We’re the evidence-
gathering arm of the envi-
ronmental movement.” And
though staunch advocates for
wild places, they seek common
ground rather than confronta-
tion. When Egan and Chilcoat,
a former U.S. park ranger and
the group’s second in com-
mand, invited a New Mexico
state legislator and rancher to
sit down and talk, “he said, ‘I don’t get why you’re inviting
the enemy to dinner,’” Egan recalls. Yet they found that de-
spite differences over desert grazing, they shared concerns
about contaminated water from oil and gas exploration.
NATURE AND COMPANY
Egan, topleft,and
Chilcoat; pottery shards
found in Recapture Wash.
Egan spends at least one week each month outdoors,
on monitoring trips or camping. By the end of their recent
foray, Egan and Chilcoat had jostled for hours over winding roads and waded calf-deep through a muddy flash
flood. Word of a mountain lion in the vicinity only added
to the excitement. “Icing on the cake,” says Egan.
“Backs fail, knees fail, the body might not do anymore
what it did,” Chilcoat notes, “but you do what you can, and
you’re glad to know there are still wild places.” —Beth Baker
