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The Red Desert: Among Dead Volcanoes and Living Dunes

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Presenters

Gary P. Beauvais

Dr. Gary P. Beauvais is the Director of the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database, a service and research unit of the University of Wyoming and member of the Natural Heritage Network. He has researched the vertebrate wildlife of Wyoming and surrounding states for 18 years, focusing primarily on biogeography, habitat use, and conservation. Most recently Dr. Beauvais has established a program of producing predictive distribution models and maps for several vertebrates of conservation concern in Wyoming and the region. He earned a B.A. in Biology (1990) from Colorado College and a Ph.D. in Zoology and Physiology (1997) from the University of Wyoming.

Melinda Harm Benson

Mindy works at the University of Wyoming’s Ruckelshaus Institute and Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources. The Ruckelshaus Institute is a partnership among UW faculty and students; a prominent advisory board composed of leaders from business, industry, environmental organizations, education and government; and the resources and outreach activities of the University. The Institute's mission is to advance effective decision-making on environmental and natural resource issues through research, policy analysis, education, process support, and proactive outreach. Mindy provides a legal perspective to the Institute’s work and teaches undergraduates environmental law and policy. Mindy graduated summa cum laude from the University of Idaho College of Law in 1998. After law school, she served as law clerk for Judge Stephen Trott on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was the Natural Resources Law Fellow at Lewis in Clark College of Law in 2002. As a litigator, Mindy represented conservation groups in natural resources cases in the Intermountain West.

Ken Driese

Dr. Ken Driese is a research scientist at the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (WyGISC) where he manages the remote sensing program and teaches remote sensing courses. Born in Virginia, he moved to Wyoming in 1981 and has spent the years since then exploring and mapping the state. He lives in Laramie.

Rod Garnett

Rod Garnett teaches classes in world music and flute at the University of Wyoming. He currently performs extensively at the University, regionally with classical guitarist Alex Komodore, nationally with the Irish Folk Ensemble Colcannon, and at the Boxwood Festival in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. In addition to teaching at the University of Wyoming he is coordinator and assistant instructor for the Wyoming Gamelan Chandra Wyoga and Sikuris de Wyoming, and is a teacher and assistant for the Boxwood Festival.

Garnett studied flute with Karen Yonovitz, Larry Jordan, Geoffrey Gilbert, and Thomas Nyfenger. He has worked extensively as a free-lance musician in orchestras, jazz and chamber music ensembles, and recording studios.

In addition to his duties in the Department of Music Garnett is currently pursuing a PhD in the UW Department of Anthropology. The past several years he has worked in Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Slovakia, Moldova, and the Czech Republic, studying and documenting traditional flutes and music.

Rod Garnett is a recipient of the Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award.

Charles Ferguson

Dr. Ferguson is a field-based structural geologist with an extensive background in volcanology, sedimentology, and stratigraphy. Interpreting the structural and eruptive history of volcanic fields throughout the southwest has become a specialty by default. Ferguson’s love for field geology started at the University of Kansas where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in 1981.

Ferguson’s most recent project, an essay on the geology of Wyoming’s Red Desert, led him into an unexpected line of research regarding the Plio-Pleistocene geomorphic history of southwestern Wyoming. The research ties in with recent work by colleagues Jon Spencer, Kyle House, and Phil Pearthree involving evolution of the Colorado River and formation of the Grand Canyon. The Wyoming research may provide an important missing link to the story of how the Colorado River suddenly and rapidly incised the Grand Canyon approximately 5 million years ago.

B. Ronald Frost

B. Ronald Frost is Professor of Geology as the University of Wyoming. He received his BA. from University of VIrginia in 1969 and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1973. He has been on the faculty of the University of Wyoming since 1978.

A. Dudley Gardner

A. Dudley Gardner (Ph.D History, University of New Mexico, 2000; M.A. History, Colorado State University, 1980) is an anthropologist, historian, expert field researcher, and teacher. He is renowned for his knowledge of 18th and 19th century non-native desert populations: trappers, overland settlers, Chinese railroad laborers, Japanese detainees, and boomtown gas drillers.

Rod Garnett

H. L. Hix

H. L. Hix teaches in and directs the creative writing MFA at the University of Wyoming. His latest poetry collection, Chromatic, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his other recent books include a collection of essays on poetry entitled As Easy As Lying, and an anthology, Wild and Whirling Words.

Robert L. Kelly

Robert L. Kelly (Ph.D., U Michigan, 1985) is Professor and Head of Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He is a past-President of the Society for American Archaeology and past secretary of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. He has authored over 100 books, monographs, articles, and reviews, including The Foraging Spectrum (Smithsonian Institution Press) and, with David Hurst Thomas, the textbooks Archaeology and Archaeology: Down to Earth (Wadsworth). He has worked on the archaeology, ethnology, and ethnography of hunting and gathering peoples since 1973; he has conducted archaeological research throughout the western US and ethnographic work on Madagascar. He is currently researching the initial Pleistocene colonization of the New World through the study of use of caves and rockshelters in northern Wyoming.

Karen King

Karen King (BA University of Colorado, MS NOVA University) is an independent consultant working with education, social service and environmental programs serving Native American communities. She has lived on and worked with the Wind River Indian Reservation community for over 30 years, grew up on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations and Boulder, CO, directed a Head Start program located in 33 Alaskan Native communities and was the National Training/Technical Assistance Network Director serving 178 Indian Head Start grantees. The Red Desert is her back yard for horse-tripping, hiking, camping and peace-seeking. She writes songs, novels and screenplays for therapy.

Frieda Knobloch

Frieda Knobloch has lived in Wyoming and taught in the American Studies program at UW since 1997. She is author most recently of Botanical Companions: A Memoir of Plants and Place (University of Iowa, 2005), a study of UW botanists Aven and Ruth Nelson. The Red Desert, and small towns of western Wyoming, along with Laramie, are her youngest daughter’s regular stomping grounds. Knobloch is currently working on a book about the desert’s cultural and environmental history.

Linda Lillegraven

Ms. Lillegraven wanted more than anything to paint the great open landscapes of the West. She has devoted her time to painting landscapes since 1987.

She was awarded residencies at the Ucross Foundation in 1988, at Rocky Mountain National Park in 1994, and at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in 2001. She won the Grand Prize in the Arts for the Parks Competition in 2000. Her work was featured in articles in Southwest Art (1997) and Art of the West (1998). She has created commissioned works for the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, United Medical Center West in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Casper Events Center, in Casper, Wyoming. She is represented by Big Horn Galleries, Cody Wyoming, and Tubac, Arizona; Kneeland Gallery, Sun Valley Idaho; and Wild Horse Gallery in Steamboat Springs Colorado.

Jeffrey A. Lockwood

Dr. Lockwood is a Professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities whose academic appointment is split between the Department of Philosophy and the MFA Program in Creative Writing. He worked at the University of Wyoming for 20 years in the field of entomology, specializing in grasshopper and locust ecology and management. A few years ago he began a metamorphosis which has now formally taken him into research, creative work, and teaching in the fields of the philosophy of ecology, natural resource and environmental ethics, and nature and spiritual/religious writing (along with the first-ever writer's course in "Interstellar Message Composition" through a NASA-funded collaboration with the Institute dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). He has published more than 100 scientific and technical papers, and his popular writing has been recognized with the John Burroughs Award, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in the Best American Science & Nature Writing anthology.

Carol Long

Born on a Friday the 13th in Montgomery, Alabama. The oldest of 10 children, 7 girls, 3 boys. Dad was a welder, jobs were not easy to come by, so we traveled. In the 50s we moved for good to Texas.

My husband, Melvin and 2 of our 4 sons came to Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1974, where Melvin was a pipe fitter at Jim Bridger power plant. It was there that we found the desert.

In 1976 we moved to Crook County, Wyoming where our sons finished high school in Moorcroft, Wyoming. In 1988 we bought a house in Casper and started a move that took a couple of years.

April, 1994 came news that there were environmental problems with the North Casper area where we lived. This moved into problems with the Old Amoco Refinery. Melvin and I have worked on this problem since.

Sharon A. Long

Sharon Long is one of a handful of facial reconstruction experts in the world. She has earned the enthusiastic respect and admiration of many noted forensic anthropologists, law enforcement officials, museums and educational institutions in the nation. She works mostly in collaboration with scientists at the Smithsonian Institution and has completed reconstructions on human skulls commissioned by many national/state agencies, law enforcement agencies and museums around the country. Her work has been featured in various international magazines, scientific publications and most major newspapers in the U.S. during the past 10 years. She has also been featured in documentaries for the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Ultimate Explorer TV, History Channel, NOVA and PBS programs and will be seen on “America Most Wanted” Nov 2007.

A Native of Wyoming, Long received her education in Sculpturing and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Her work has enabled her to accompany anthropologists to Easter Island, Chili as well as Jamestown Fort, Virginia in recent years and be involved with various fascinating historic and prehistoric excavations around the world. She has also taught workshops and given many public presentations and slide shows about her work to civic organizations, educational institutions, museums and law enforcement agencies around the country and in Wyoming for the past fourteen years.

Sharon first makes a mold and than a cast of the original skull to reconstruct the face on the cast after researching the time period of the subject. Another mold and cast is made of the completed facial reconstruction which is then painted, glass eyes and hair added for a realistic appearance. The process is a combination of science and artistic ability to produce the final product.
Some projects are: the Civil War Hunley Submarine crew of 8 men, 2 skulls from the 1607 Jamestown Fort in VA, Sgt. Floyd of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803, Lord Calvert’s wife from the 1500’s period, Spirit Cave Man who was a 10,000 BP mummy, a 10,000 year old female skull from Jordon, a 300-400 year old Philippine mummy skull, a Latte Period 1,500 year old skull from Saipan in the Marianna Islands, skulls from Easter Island, skulls from Peru, various Native American skulls and others too numerous to list.

Marc Moffett

Moffett grew up in Santa Fe, N.M. I studied philosophy, psychology, and math at New Mexico State University and did my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. My research specialties are Metaphysics and Epistemology (including the philosophy of language and logic), but I have a long-standing interest in environmental ethics and aesthetics. Personally, I am a lifelong outdoor enthusiast, bow hunter and conservationist.

Erik Molvar

Erik Molvar is the Wildlife Biologist with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, a nonprofit conservation group that works to protect wildlife and wildlands in Wyoming and surrounding states. BCA's work includes science-based advocacy for wildlife protection in the Red Desert, as well as field inventories of about three-quarters of a million acres of Red Desert potential wilderness. Erik is also the author of Wild Wyoming, which covers the Red Desert, as well as 15 other wilderness guidebooks that span the American West.

Joy Owen

Joy Owen works for wildlife enthusiasts, hunters and anglers through the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. She aims to protect and enhance habitat, to perpetuate quality hunting and fishing, to protect citizens’ right to use public lands and waters, and to promote ethical hunting and fishing. Born in Iowa, Joy moved to Wyoming in 2000 to continue her education at the University of Wyoming. She earned a Bachelors of Science in Environment and Natural Resources as well as Political Science. She now lives in Lander, Wyoming.

Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx (B.A. cum laude 1969, University of Vermont; M.A. Sir George Williams University, Montreal; doctoral orals passed; three honorary doctorates 1994-2000) is a Wyoming writer, Pulitzer prize-winning author, and intrepid researcher. She is the editor and historian for the forthcoming publication on the Red Desert (University of Texas Press; 2008).

Bryce R. Reece

Bryce R. Reece joined the Wyoming Wool Growers Association as Executive Director in 1993. Mr. Reece is the third generation from his family to be actively involved in Wyoming agriculture. He has been deeply involved in the sheep industry in his current position for the last 14 years. Prior to that, he was the manager of the Wyoming Lamb Marketing Project, a project funded by the Wyoming State Legislature and conducted by the Wyoming Wool Growers Association in conjunction with Southdown Meats in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Reece is a graduate of Riverton (WY) High School and the University of Wyoming. His educational background is in animal science (B.S. Animal Science, ‘82) and returned to UW where he completed graduate course work in reproductive physiology. He has a background in animal breeding and genetics and has been involved in a reproduction management company that utilized ultrasound technology for pregnancy diagnosis in sheep as well as scanning of rib eyes for ram selection. He is also a trained embryo transfer technician. Additionally, he owned and operated two retail agri-businesses prior to joining the WWGA.

William A. Reiners

Bill Reiners has been a Professor in the Botany Department at UW since 1983. He has been primarily interested in ecosystems processes, especially as they vary over space and time, and as they involve the spatial propagation of cause and effect in the environment. He has practiced ecology in many environments ranging from temperate and tropical rain forests, deciduous and subalpine coniferous forests of northeastern U.S., and the alpine tundra and sagebrush steppes of Wyoming.

Martin Stupich

Martin Stupich has been documenting the cultural landscape since 1975. Projects have included the architectural transformation of Atlanta and the construction of its subway system (MARTA), one of the largest public works projects in the post-Reconstruction South; space launch complexes at Cape Canaveral; Vandenberg Air Force Base’s Peacekeeper Missile silos; US military installations in Panama’s Former Canal Zone; rephotographing nineteenth century mining landscape panoramas in the Great Basin; and the Cham Temple in central Vietnam. He was also one of twelve photographers conducting individual projects the Water in the West Project. His work on this project is archived at the Center for Contemporary Photography at the University of Arizona.

Stupich is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Nevada Council for the Arts, The Nevada State Museum, Massachusetts Council for the Arts, and the Boston Center for Architecture. His work is collected and exhibited in museums, galleries and public archives in twenty-two states, in Europe, South America and Asia.

Russel Tanner

Russel Tanner is a retired U.S. Department of the Interior archaeologist and historian who has spent over 30 years studying the anthropology and history of southwestern Wyoming. He recently founded Kyak Marook Heritage Research, LLC a small organization of scholars dedicated to understanding the connections that exist between indigenous peoples and natural environments. He has degrees in anthropology and American studies from the University of Wyoming.

Margaret Wilson

Margaret Wilson is an assistant professor in Theatre & Dance, where she specializes in teaching modern dance, kinesiology and vertical dance. Her choreographic interests follow biographical studies, including ….the body through which the dream flows… (spring 2007) which explored the creative spirit in women across disciplines and through time. She and her partner, Neil Humphrey, present an annual performance of vertical dance at the Vedauwoo Recreation Area. Margaret is very interested in the interface between art and science and understanding the common threads which link all disciplines. She is the co-organizer of a campus conference on multidisciplinary study entitled Revisioning the (W)hole: Among Poets, Philosophers, and Physicists scheduled for September 26-27, 2007 at the University of Wyoming.