WYOMING RANGE, Wyo. (AP) - At nearly 10,000 feet in the Wyoming Range, I'm riding Secretariat's love child - or rather, love descendant - Boots. The amorous Triple Crown winner apparently hopped a fence to pursue Boots' grandmother or great-grandmother, who despite her unremarkable breeding still swayed the oversized heart of the world's most famous racehorse.

Dustin Child explains as he leads a horseback tour of two abandoned wells near Dry Beaver Creek, near Daniel.

Child doesn't look like an environmentalist. He doesn't wear Birkenstocks, tie-dye shirts or a peace sign tied around his neck with a length of hemp rope. He looks and talks more like a rancher, with a cowboy hat and a weathered face. Child doesn't really act like an environmentalist either. Instead of ambushing mink coats with cans of spray paint, Child makes a living leading hunters into the woods to kill elk, deer, moose, antelope and mountain lions.

It's July 27, five days before the BLM will lease roughly 12,000 acres of land on the Wyoming Range for energy development including Child's camp and most of the land where he takes his clients to hunt.

Child represents a recent addition to the environmental movement. Ever since the Forest Service earmarked Child's hunting grounds for oil and gas development, the owner of Trophy Mountain Outfitters has joined a growing coalition of sportsmen working to preserve the wild lands where they work and play.

Outfitter Gary Amerine, owner of Greys River Trophies, follows close behind, leading the rest of the group. Child teamed with Amerine in his quest to protect the Wyoming Range from oil and gas leases that could, they say, turn the Wyoming Range into another Jonah Field, one of the densest gas fields in the nation.

For these outfitters, protecting this land isn't just a moral duty, it's a matter of survival. Many of the hunters who pay top dollar to hunt big game at Child's and Amerine's hunting camps said they wouldn't return if wells marred the landscape.

"No one in their right mind would pay to take a scenic pack trip through oil and gas wells," says Amerine who, with his wife, Jenny, hosted the trip. "The Wyoming Range is on the front burner right now. It's gonna set a precedent for a lot of other areas."

Like Child, Amerine looks like a rancher, with a steely-eyed gaze that must terrify boys who come to see his daughter Sara, a college-bound high school student and a future rodeo star.

Earlier that morning, Amerine drove us past Merna Butte, part of 12,000 acres up for lease in August. "Right along the base of it are about six families that live right there," he says. "If they are as accommodating as they have been in the Jonah Field, there's potential for a real mess up here."

All in all, more than 200,000 acres of the Wyoming Range could be pockmarked with oil rigs, much of it situated in delicate, high-elevation ecosystems that provide important habitat to a multitude of animals, including bears, wolves, deer, elk, moose, Canada lynx (listed under the Endangered Species Act), snowshoe hares, and mountain lions.

Some of Amerine's neighbors don't know a well could soon appear in their backyards.

"Can you imagine coming here and seeing nothing but oil rigs," he says, as pronghorn dart across the road. "Once they get their claws into the forest and are successful, the pressure to go to other areas is going to be intense."

About half an hour into the horseback ride, we pass hillsides and fields with sagebrush interspersed with wildflowers like Indian paintbrush and purple lupine. But up on the top of a meadow, the sage and flower landscape switches quickly to a uniform sea of grass. Off in the distance, we see a well that was capped roughly 30 years ago, nothing more than a large metal pipe fitted with a bolted collar.

Cathy Purves of the conservation group Trout Unlimited explains that three decades after operators capped the well, the land still hasn't recovered. The exotic grass and weeds are entrenched.

A few hundred feet up the hillside, another well, capped in 1971, looks even worse. Instead of grass, dandelions choke out the natural flora and we can easily make out linear patterns where earth moving equipment evened out the ground. "If me or Dustin did that to our camp, we would lose our permit," says Amerine.

"It's like comparing ants to elephants," Child says.

On the way back to the horse trailer, Boots picks up the pace, eager for a drink of water and some rest. Tom Reed, another Trout Unlimited conservationist, points out crushed culverts on the road that could prevent fish like the Colorado cutthroat from traveling upstream to spawn.

Child jokes that his wife, Laura, who plans to attend medical school, better finish her degree before the wells are completed. Child took out substantial loans to start his outfitting company and 3-year-old Haze Child, his 2-year-old brother, Jamin, Dustin, and Laura depend on the business for their income.

"My girls grew up here," says Amerine. "We've got pictures of Sara less than a year old riding in front of me. A place like the Wyoming Range should be preserved as a legacy."