Beneath the beauty: natural-gas developers, preservationists struggle to coexist.

• Author: Luzadder, Dan

Sid Lindauer has grazed cattle on the spectacular Roan Plateau in Northwest Colorado since he was a boy. And from his family ranch near Parachute, Lindauer has watched decades of change sweep gradually over the countryside, most of it economic. Increasing numbers of hunters and anglers come each year to tramp the mountains and wade the rivers of the region's wildlife-rich federal and private lands. In the 1980s and '90s, the area's grand vistas attracted sprawling retirement homes to places like Silt, 20 miles up the road from Lindauer's home.

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But the rate and pace of change in Garfield County has quickened with the onset of a newly perceived threat to pristine lands such as Lindauer's.

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Garfield County--and particularly the Roan Plateau--is at the heart of what amounts to a growing range war over the wild beauty of the West and the nation's vast wealth of natural resources that lies beneath it.

With new federal energy policies encouraging oil and natural-gas drilling on federal lands--including areas like the Roan, which environmentalists want to see protected as wilderness--and with higher gas prices fueling new capital for expansion, that change is palpable. Lindauer says he can feel it, see it, and hear it.

The land he has loved his whole life, and where he hopes to retire soon, is increasingly subject to noise pollution, traffic, and debate over the disruption of wildlife habitat as well as the hunting and fishing economies that have long sustained communities there.

And although Lindauer pockets royalty checks from gas wells on his own land--like many of his neighbors who are benefiting from the latest economic boom of the Rockies--he still feels some anxiety about the future. The natural gas boom is a two-edged sword, he says.

"There are these large compression stations, about 10 of them ... north of our land, and they make a lot of noise," he says. "The traffic on the road in front of our ranch is way up. The gas-field workers speed down this road, and a lot of their pickup trucks run without mufflers. The gas company says it has spent about $200,000 trying to control the noise on their compressors, but so far it hasn't helped much. The county has posted some new speed-limit signs and noise-ordinance signs, but that hasn't done much either.

"Talk to me in six months," says Lindauer. "We'll see if they have really been listening."

Natural-gas producers, from major companies like Encana and...