Wild ride: A feisty forester blazes her way across the New West

HELENA, Mont. - She drives fast, with no apologies. If you want to get anywhere in the American West, there's no time for muddling about. Gloria Flora knows this.

So we hurtle down Highway 287, two lanes curving south from Helena toward the Continental Divide. Fields blur by. A cloud of flies splatters against the windshield. Flora crests a rise to see two huge grain trucks and a car poking along up ahead, so she swings her Subaru Forester into the left lane and accelerates to 80, 85 mph.

A pickup truck appears far ahead in Flora's lane, coming this way, but Flora doesn't hesitate. She hits the gas harder, and the speedometer inches toward 90.

The pickup looms closer. Seems Flora's not going to make it. But she presses on. She noses past the car and draws alongside the trailing grain truck. No way she'll make it - and at last she flicks the wheel and squeezes between the trucks. She loosens her grip on the wheel and smiles. Her passenger breathes again.

''I love a good road trip,'' Flora says.

This is a story about the New West, and a woman who is helping create it.

From the time she hired on with the U.S. Forest Service 23 years ago, fresh from the East with a degree in landscape architecture, Flora has been at the forefront of social changes raking the rural West.

Best known for quitting her job last November in a nasty dispute over a Nevada forest, Flora faced conflict from the start. Part of her first job was to ask crusty old foresters if they couldn't please make their logging operations prettier.

Prettier? they snorted.

Prettier, she said, and it's a measure of how the Forest Service and the West had already begun changing that she wasn't run out of town.

She got promoted instead. And promoted again. Eventually, Flora was supervising whole forests - in her own distinctive way. Her business cards had flowers printed on them. She urged people to share their feelings about the land. She told the oil and gas industry to take a hike, and won her case in court.

Along the way, she became a hero to environmental activists and a villain to those who liked the Old West the way it was.

''I've become symbolic,'' she says. ''Some people see me as a devilish person. They hate me not because of who I am, but because of the myth that has built up around my name. They'll say Gloria Flora, she's a radical, she's a nature worshipper, she talks about Gaia.''

Flora insists she isn't that radical. But she does threaten the status quo, and she isn't alone. The mythic Old West of cowboys, loggers and miners is filling with new settlers of a most unsettling sort. They don't make their living off the land, and many would rather preserve trees and mountains for scenery and recreation than cut them down or dig them up.

If the transition makes for a rough ride, don't look to Gloria Flora to hit the brakes.

It's a six-hour trip from Helena to Jackson, Wyo., but Flora will get there in just over five. She's on her way to give the keynote speech at an Earth Day celebration.

She wears a loose black shirt and pants over Birkenstock sandals - her travel clothes, she says, noting a bit defensively that she has cowboy boots at home. Native American jewelry, in silver and turquoise, sparkles from wiry arms and hands well-scratched from tending her goats. Her long, brown hair is threaded with gray. She is 44.

As she drives, the West unfolds beyond the windshield. A band of cottonwoods marks the Madison River to the left. Fields roll off toward distant mountains on the right. The hills are dotted with the signs of old and new: modest ranch houses dwarfed by their barns, modern trophy homes with huge windows glinting in the sunlight.

Flora admires it all with a landscape architect's eye. A scene gets extra points for variety and verticality, she says, and the Northern Rockies rate high. She calls this her ecosystem, her home.

Growing up near Pittsburgh, she watched suburban sprawl claim fields and forests. When she was 16, her family went camping in the Colorado Rockies and Flora realized she had been born in the wrong place.

In summer 1977, after graduating from Penn State University, she headed west and found work in California as a landscape architect trainee on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

She was part of a new wave of Forest Service employees, hired to help the agency comply with recently enacted environmental laws. They called themselves ''ologists,'' as in biologists, ecologists, sociologists and the like. Old-school foresters hardly knew what to make of them.

Flora was full of ideas to soften the impact of human activities on the forest: Dark paint could hide fresh rock exposed by road-cuts. Bending the straight boundaries of logging clear-cuts could make them look more like natural meadows.

''There were a thousand things you could do,'' Flora says. ''The hard thing was getting others to agree to them. I was confronted by the philosophy of cut it down and scrape it clean.''

Year by year, though, public censure of unsustainable logging grew more pointed, even as pressures from timber companies increased the acreage cut.

In 1980, Flora transferred to the Kootenai National Forest in northwestern Montana. She had a gift for networking, especially among women and ''ologists.'' She even won begrudging respect from the agency's timber managers, who found that if they took her advice, they'd get fewer complaints about how ugly their clear-cuts were.

In 1986, Flora was named a district ranger on the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho. She was one of only 35 female district rangers on the nation's 617 forest districts. At age 31, she was younger than any of her employees.

Flora took some getting used to. Highway crews had been cavalier about cutting down old trees during road maintenance, but Flora put an end to that.

''If it's younger than you, then you can cut it. If it's older than you, come see me,'' she told them.

''That's not a very big tree,'' they complained.

''That's the point,'' she said.

The highway climbs toward Raynolds Pass, high in the Rocky Mountains on the Idaho-Montana border. Snow patches cling in the shadows. The hills are blanketed by six-foot-high lodgepole pines, the bushy regrowth from clear-cuts.

This is the Targhee National Forest - or, as Flora calls it, the ''rape-and-scrape Targhee.'' Logging ruled here for years, she says, until they ran out of good trees. Now times are harder for those who remain.

She says she sympathizes with Western communities enduring economic collapse. But logging was done at unsustainable levels for decades, she says. If limits weren't imposed, the timber would run out anyway, with even greater damage to the land.

''We don't accept bust,'' Flora says. ''We think boom is our inherent right. But current regulations will bust some communities that will not diversify. It's sad, but a fact.''

She moved to Jackson in 1990 and became the Ecology Resources Group Leader for the Bridger-Teton National Forest. While she and her husband, Marc, built a post-and-beam home in Driggs, Idaho, Flora saw her influence grow as the Forest Service adopted ''ecosystem management'' as its mantra.

Promoted in 1995 to supervisor of the Lewis and Clark National Forest, she soon faced the biggest decision of her career: whether to allow oil and gas drilling along the scenic Rocky Mountain Front, where the Rockies meet the plains in northwestern Montana.

When the Forest Service proposed a limited amount of drilling, Flora was deluged by objections from citizens who wanted no drilling at all.

Flora did more than just listen. She encouraged people to speak from their hearts, not just recite facts about pollution or imperiled wildlife.

''I told people it's OK to talk about beauty,'' she says.

Flora banned drilling for 10 to 15 years, despite estimates that as much as 2.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lay beneath the Front.

''It was the first time that human values - how people feel about the land, their sense of place, their relationship to the land - tipped the scales,'' Flora says.

The oil and gas industry was stunned. Gail Abercrombie, executive director of the Montana Petroleum Association, recalls Flora as charming, soft-spoken - and far off base in her ''New-Age type of look at land use.''

''The fact that land managers had done all these studies showing that there would be minimal impacts, and that any impacts could be mitigated, didn't seem to matter,'' Abercrombie says. ''It was real frustrating. If somebody says to a land user, 'This offends my sense of spirituality,' there's no response. You can't mitigate that.''

Flora's superiors backed her up, and a federal judge upheld her ruling in March of this year. The judge rejected one of the oil and gas industry's main arguments - that Flora had paid too much attention to public opinion.

If that episode gave her a taste of controversy, her next assignment was a banquet. In June 1998, she was named supervisor of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada, the largest national forest outside Alaska and also one of the most contentious.

It's at the heart of the Sagebrush Rebellion, which pits vociferous locals against the federal government, Nevada's biggest landlord, for control of public lands.

The day after Flora arrived, an Elko County highway crew tried to bulldoze open a washed-out road that the Forest Service wanted to keep closed to protect bull trout. That set the stage for months of bitter contention.

Elko County leaders compared Flora to a Nazi sympathizer. She referred to them as lunatics. They called each other liars.

She started getting hang-up calls at her home north of Reno. Her employees in the field complained about being refused service in motels and restaurants and being shunned by neighbors.

This ''irresponsible fed-bashing'' was tolerated or even encouraged by officials at all levels of government in Nevada, Flora says.

Last November, she quit - went on unpaid leave, technically - just before conservative Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, conducted a public hearing in Elko on Forest Service activities.

Flora said she resigned to draw attention to harassment of her employees. Elko leaders said good riddance.

''Her resignation was to cover up her activities,'' says O.Q. ''Chris'' Johnson, chairman of the Elko County Republican Party. ''She refused to bring her records, had some kind of a breakdown and decided she'd rather quit than testify. It was a matter of cowardice, not courage. All bullies are cowards at heart, and that's what she was - a bully.''

The car strains over Teton Pass and sails down into Jackson, Wyo., a resort town of million-dollar bungalows and wealthy vacationers who amble along wooden sidewalks in Western boots never soiled by a cow pie.

''Oh, make me puke,'' Flora says, driving by a new stretch of real-estate offices and gift shops. ''This place is so pretentious.''

At the Earth Day celebration, held in the Grand Room of the Snow King Resort, drum and flute music fills the air. Franz Camenzind, executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, takes the podium to praise Flora's ''courage and conviction'' in Nevada.

Flora sweeps onstage to vigorous applause, her rumpled travel clothes replaced by a cowgirl-meets-the-goddess look: a flowing green dress and high suede boots.

She talks of the need for sustainable development but also of compassion for those caught in the transition to the new Western economy. She suggests temporary subsidies for ranchers: ''Pay them to keep their cows at home,'' she says. She envisions retraining loggers to work at restoring damaged streams and hillsides.

After the speech, Camenzind says he wishes Flora would stay in the Forest Service, working the system from within.

That probably won't happen, Flora says, even though agency leaders have encouraged her to stay. Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck, on a trip to Nevada in February, called Flora ''a wonderful employee'' who had the courage to make hard decisions.

Support from above comes because Flora, while outspoken, is no rebel, says Perry Brown, dean of the College of Forestry at the University of Montana.

The West is being transformed by a growing population and a shrinking dependence on extraction of natural resources, Brown says, and the Forest Service has responded by adding employees like Flora.

''People have a strong interest in amenity resources: recreation, scenery, spiritual and other values associated with the land and water,'' Brown says. ''There has been a change in what's recognized as important. Gloria Flora may be an early leader on some of this, but I don't think she's radically different from the rest of the agency.''

Just different enough.

''The Forest Service doesn't have a template for dealing with people like me,'' Flora says. ''I think outside the box. The Forest Service doesn't want to get rid of me, but they don't know what to do with me.''

After two decades of following her career, Flora knows what she wants to do: Settle down. She and Marc are buying land 20 miles outside Helena. They want to build their dream house, off the grid. She's been entertaining job offers from conservation groups, tending her 10 goats and traveling the region, making speeches wherever she's invited.

Sometimes she thinks of how the sagebrush rebels gloated when she left Nevada, exulting that they'd driven her out. She has news for them: This is her West, too, and she isn't going away.

''I'd ask them: What did you achieve in the grand scheme of things? Nothing. I don't feel I left defeated. I feel like I've started something.''

EDITOR'S NOTE - David Foster is the AP's Northwest regional reporter, based in Seattle.