After maybe half a mile, Ellis pulled over, and we got out. We were perhaps thirty feet below the projected waterline now. The air was thin and clear and dry, and was scented with the vanilla odor of ponderosa pine mingling with the pungence of fringed sage. Ellis scrambled up a steep slope of coarse orange nuggets of crumbled Pikes Peak granite, too fine and firm to be called scree but not organically developed enough to be called soil. "F. Martin Brown calls it Grape-Nuts," Ellis said. "It's real stressful for plants, because it has no water-holding capacity, and whenever it rains the stuff comes right down. Look at this rill." He was straddling a crevice cut into the slope by runoff. "There must have been a gully washer here last night. The sliding helps keep the slope open. Open is what montana likes-the parts of the canyon that are most like the Plains, especially the south-facing slopes, which get more sun and are drier, so the pines are more widely spaced. The premier habitat of montana is ponderosa-pine parkland, up to seventy-four hundred feet."

       Looming high above us were the smooth, rounded orange crags, spattered with green lichen, known as Cathedral Spires. Such a majestic formation must have been sacred to the Indians. I asked who the Indians had been around here. "Cheyenne and Arapahoe may have made seasonal use of the canyon," Dale said. "They never lived here full time." The Water Department was lucky that it had no Indian rights to contend with. A large bird of prey, which Ellis and Dale agreed was a goshawk, flew over. All around us, male grasshoppers were crepitating-snapping their wings-in an effort to attract mates.
 

       HOSTILE though the slope was for plants, quite a few species had managed to take hold on it. Some were ubiquitous roadside plants, like smooth sumac and velvet-leaved mullein. Others were xerophytes, adapted to the dryness-yucca glauca, Plains prickly pear. "Here's some blue grama -montana's food plant," Ellis said. We knelt before a clump of grass whose spikelets, unlike any grass I'd ever seen, shot off from their stalks at right angles, like a pennant. Equally unusual was the arrangement of kernel-like flowers: they were on only one side of the spikelet-the undersideand it looked like a toothbrush. "Blue grama is one of the dominant grasses of the short-grass prairie," Ellis said. "It's also the food plant of pawnee. The feeding ecology of the two subspecies is the same. In fact, the differences between them are purely visual. Montana is a penetration of leonardus that may have been isolated in this canyon sometime after the last Ice Age, and, once here, it began to develop characteristics of its own. Only five miles of hostile habitat, at the bottom of the canyon, separates it from pawnee. Given the opportunity, the two would interbreed. Maybe they do on occasion. Maybe every once in a while, a pawnee blows in here from the foothills."

       At that moment, a little orange butterfly-so small and swift and well camouflaged against the orange Grape-Nuts that I wouldn't have noticed it on my own-landed on another clump of blue grama, several yards away. "A female montana," Ellis whispered excitedly. He crawled until it was within a foot of his nose. "All right! I think she's going to oviposit. This has only been seen a few times. Come on, baby." But the montana flew off, leaving Ellis searching vainly for an egg. "It's big and bright and pearly white," he said. "You can't miss it. The females lay one at a time, maybe fifty to a hundred during their brief lifetime." He got to his feet and slapped his thigh. "Damn! That's what's so frustrating. They sit and fly around all day and nothing happens."

       Another female landed on my shoulder. "She likes your shirt," Ellis explained. "It's the same color as Liatris." Liatris punctata, which has several common names-blazing star, prairie gay-feather, dotted gay-feather -is montana's nectar plant. Not far away, under a ponderosa pine, we found a clump of it. It had half a dozen flower clusters dripping with feathery lavender petals and bristles. The lavender was a little rosier than my shirt. As if on cue, a third female montana landed on one of the clusters, delicately uncurled its proboscis, and tapped the nectar deep within one of the plant's little trumpets. We were so close we could see velvety green hairs coating its chunky brown body. Still another landed on Dale's jeans. Suddenly, there were dozens of them, flying all around us. Had they come to check us out, or had they been here all the time and were we just now getting them in focus?

       Ellis explained what all the montana were doing here: "They are locally abundant wherever both components of their habitat matrix-Liatris and blue grama-come together. But there aren't many spots like this. Over their entire range, their distribution is patchy." That August, he and five assistants had counted montana in forty-eight belt transects. A belt transect is a strip four hundred metres long and ten wide. The transects were selected at random, both above and below the proposed waterline. The counters found an average of only one montana per transect, maybe from one to three individuals per acre. I asked how many there were altogether. "That's a hot controversy," Ellis said. "Everybody wants a number. Very cautiously-we haven't really looke at the numbers yet-I'd say anywhere between seventy-five and a hundred and fifty thousand." And how many of them would be flooded? "We don't know that yet, either. But a lot more than the seventeen per cent we came up with last year. I'd say maybe even as many as forty per cent."

       IT was getting hot. We sat under the pines, and Ellis reviewed the butterfly's life cycle from the moment, in late August or early September, when the female lays one of her big white eggs on a blade of blue gramaactually glues it on, with some kind of secretion. The egg hatches in a week or so, and a little larva comes out: pale pinkish, nondescript-no horns or tufts, gaudy spots or stripes. Secretive and solitary, the larva feeds on the grass only at night, and when winter comes it burrows down into the base of a clump of the grass and passes into a torpid state called diapause. Around April, it revives, and probably in the last half of July it pupates. It emerges from its cocoon no earlier than July 31st (at least in the laboratory). By August 15th, the emergence of the males is well along. The females really start coming out between August 20th and 25th. By now-September 5th-the females were dominant. The only males still around were occasional "rags"-old, tattered butterflies. Why the sexes emerge at different times is a mystery. It would seem to be maladaptive, since it reduces the opportunities for reproduction, unless it is a mechanism for population control.

       The adult males spend a good deal of the time patrolling-flying from flower to flower taking nectar and trying to find females. Unlike hummingbirds and bees, they don't have a fixed route, a sequence of plants that they visit-they don't "trap-line." They wander around haphazardly within their rather small home range. Few of them probably go more than several hundred yards from where they are born, although they are such strong fliers that they can go a hundred yards in one burst. "They're aggressive, pugnacious little butterflies," Ellis said. "They'll challenge all comers." We watched as a male rag sunning on a boulder was dive-bombed by another male, into whose area he had evidently intruded. They rose to a great height in a kind of dogfight. With their robust bodies, skippers have thermal-mass problems. They have to start the day warming up on a rock, vibrat ing their wings, as bumblebees do.  

       "When a male spots a female, he flushes her and tumbles around in the air with her and maybe wafts sexually arousing pheromones in her direction
from his stigmas, or wing glands," Ellis said. "If she's receptive, she'll land and remain stationary while he walks around her a couple of times. Then he comes up parallel to her and, bending his abdomen into a U -butterflies have the most awkward sexual practices-latches on to her abdomen with his claspers, and they copulate. If she isn't receptive-which is usually the case-she flaps her wings briskly or, if she's into a major rejection, opens them, then flies away. The male gets the point."

       We drove on down past a group of cabins. Somebody had built a boat in his back yard which looked like a small ark. I wondered if he knew the plans for the canyon. "He must be waiting for the flood," I said, to which Ellis replied, "The species diversity is going to be really low when he sets out." There was an abandoned hotel at the meeting of the North Fork with the main stem of the South P1attea relic of the Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad. Otherwise, the canyon there was pristine, gloriously wild, sun-drenched, and filled with butterflies. We stopped to investigate a stand of musk thistle that was a mecca for them: half a dozen montana (musk thistle is one of their next-favorite nectar plants), several Hesperia comma (same genus, but much more common, ranging over Eurasia as well, differentiated from montana ,by well-defined whitish chevrons on the hindwing undersides), a ragged Aphrodite (a large, silver-spangled orange fritillary). We drove up along the South Platte to the little town of Deckers and stopped for lunch at a log-cabin restaurant, slated to be under a hundred and forty feet of water. I felt like a condemned man eating his last burrito. Even if the future of the Pawnee montane skipper weren't at stake, I thought, the loss of this canyon would be a real shame.
 

       THE West has always been a land of lucrative contracts. Th.e big money in the nineteenth century was made by the people who won the contracts to survey and build the railroads and to supply beef and grain to the Army and the reservation Indians. Since 1969, the year of the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the federal government, before it makes any major decision affecting the environment, to evaluate the decision's consequences, consulting for environmental-impact statements has become a big business in the West, where so much of the land is federally owned.

       As a genre of writing, the environmental-impact statement is-in a word-deadly. It has a standard form, dictated by the Council on Environmental Quality: Chapter 1 contains the executive summary; Chapter 2 explains the purpose of and need for the project; Chapter 3 lays out the project proposal and its alternatives; in Chapter 4, the existing environment of the site and its flora and fauna, and the environment and flora and fauna of other sites on which the project might have an impact, are identified and described; in Chapter 5, the impacts and the possibilities for minimizing them are assessed; and the rest is boilerplate -who wrote what, and that sort of thing.

       The study for the Two Forks project-including the system-wide and site-specific impact statements-is thought to be the most extensive and expensive in history, and it is being financed locally. The technical documentation it has generated so far stacks to six feet. By the end of this year, its millions of words and accompanying art will be boiled down to a three-hundred-page draft; the final version will be published by the Corps of Engineers, the "lead federal agency," a year from now unless it is delayed by negative
feedback from the other contributors. Fifty-eight consultants and consulting firms, five principal federal agencies, a group of environmental consultants, and thirty Denver Water Department employees have been working on it. The Corps is getting $1,450,651 for its participation, and is asking for threequarters of a million more. To "coordinate" the statement, Engineering Science, a California outfit, has been retained by the Corps and is being paid $4,602,057, which the Corps feels should be increased by eight hundred and fifty thousand. And fo~r and a half million dollars is being paid to the Water Department for supplies, salaries, and services. Twenty per cent of the document's cost is being passed on to the Water Department's existing customers in the form of a three-to five-dollar annual increase in their water bills. The remaining eighty per cent is being billed to forty-four suburban "participants," who will get most of the additional ninety-eight thousand acre-feet; each one's share of the water will vary according to its contribution to the costs of developing and operating the dam.

       That afternoon, the department's special-projects coordinator, Stephen Work, traced the history of the system-wide statement for me. It was on Halloween of 1982 that work on the statement began. The growth projections and the water-demand-andavailability figures all had to be verified. "Fifty-some alternatives for increasing storage had to be evaluated, and all but three scenarios, each with two long-term nuances, were ruled out for environmental, economic, engineering, or geological reasons," Work said. "We asked what's going to happen after Two Forks, and looked fifty years down the road, at what the Corps calls the linkage issuewhether Two Forks would predispose the system to further environmentally undesirable transmountain diversion projects. Our conclusion was that it wouldn't. The system-wide statement came in at six million nine hundred thousand dollars-very near the estimate of six million seven hundred thousand."
 

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