Straight shooter: a Wyoming hunter fights for a West left wild - Profile - Tory Taylor

Sierra, March-April, 2003 by Marilyn Berlin Snell

Tory Taylor says it's just the way he's put together, and can't explain beyond that, but he prefers looking at the world from horseback. It may have something to do with the easy way the day and distance unfold before him, how crushed sage smells under hoof, or the intimacy he experiences with sun, snow, stars, and wind. Whatever it is, Taylor moves most often through the western landscape slowly, with care and attention, and at an elevation of 16 hands.

Raised in the shadow of Colorado's Pikes Peak, Taylor has always liked to be outdoors. As a youth he spent summers working on his grandparents' farm in the eastern part of the state. He raised chickens and turkeys for 4H, winning puffy blue ribbons for champion poultry two years running at the Colorado State Fair. Both prizes hang in Possum Lodge, the office/guest house I stay in the night before Taylor and I head into the wilderness for the beginning of elk-hunting season. The ribbons are accompanied by plaques he won as the 2000 Budweiser Outdoorsman of the Year and the Wyoming Wildlife Federation's Conservationist of the Year for 2001. The trophy wall maps the life of this quirky westerner-who's made a name for himself, and plenty of enemies, as both a hunter and an environmentalist.

When the young Taylor wasn't working he was riding and hunting near the farm or in the Rocky Mountains above his parents' home. On an outing with his father and brothers when he was 15, Taylor got his first elk. "I love to ride, hike, and hunt," says Taylor, who translated that passion into a profession as an outfitter in Wyoming, where he now lives and works.

Taylor's move toward Wyoming began in 1971. His number hadn't come up for the Vietnam draft, but college didn't suit him either. Like a character from a Cormac McCarthy novel (the unromantic, lamentatious ones), with his parents' blessing Taylor took two of the family horses and headed out alone. "I didn't know where I was going, exactly," says Taylor, now 52. "It took a month, just ambling along. I covered 500 miles, met people, and began to understand better how the land is put together." He ended up in the upper Wind River valley near Dubois, Wyoming. A "gruff-acting rancher and wonderful character" was out on the range breaking a horse when he caught sight of the lone rider. The rancher rode out to have a talk. "He saw a young guy looking for a life and wanted to help," says Taylor of Jay Richardson, who died several years ago. "A couple of days at his place turned into weeks. He and his wife had a cow I milked, trying to earn my keep. He was also a logger and helped me get a job in the woods, working timber."

During Interior secretary James Watt's tenure in the 1980s, Taylor jumped to more lucrative work as a pumper, roughneck, and roustabout on Wyoming's oil wells. It was the drill rigs, ironically, that provided the perfect forum for an environmental education. The areas where Taylor worked were "well roaded, well trashed," he says. But when Exxon proposed drilling an oil well in "pristine land, on top of a mountain that was critical habitat for bighorn sheep," Taylor began attending meetings and writing letters of protest to politicians, the U.S. Forest Service, and local newspapers. Since the drilling project would entail building miles of road, power lines, and pipelines through public land, the Forest Service conducted an environmental-impact study, which recommended airlifting equipment to the mountaintop, an expensive endeavor. The oil company dropped its plans. "When I was protesting drilling in other areas of Wyoming, my boss knew about it and said one day, `You must really love those mountains.' He could have fired me but he didn't."

Wyoming was a different place then, more tolerant, says Taylor. He remembers how ranchers and others weren't afraid to take a stand when they saw something destructive going on. He refers to "Teddy Roosevelt types" like the Shoemaker family, who owned and operated the C-M Dude Ranch. "Les and Alice, both gone now, came to Dubois in the `40s. They were grassroots environmentalists long before that label was invented, working to create elk-hunting regulations, stop large-scale logging by Louisiana-Pacific, and get grizzlies listed [as an endangered species] and protected. They inspired, mentored, and shared a dream of a West left wild."

Taylor, lanky, grizzled, and bespectacled, pushes his Day-Glo orange cap back on his forehead. "These days, folks stay silent rather than risk being associated with environmentalists," he says. "If you're going to fight for wildlife habitat around here now, don't wear your nice clothes."

A year ago, Taylor and his wife, Meredith, were at a Dubois watering hole when he nearly got into a fistfight with a local outfitter over the supplemental feeding of elk in Wyoming during the winter months. Many outfitters maintain that feed grounds are essential for sustaining large elk populations. Taylor argues that these feed grounds foster the spread of brucellosis, a bacterial disease that causes fever and spontaneous abortion. (Named to a governor's task force on the illness in 1991, Taylor has studied the subject extensively-Wyoming Game and Fish biologists I contacted bear out his argument.) "Financially strapped wildlife-management agencies continue to pour scarce dollars into monitoring and vaccinating game against brucellosis," says Taylor. "I'm for free-ranging, indigenous animals living on adequate habitat, not human-fed and vaccinated `wildlife.'"