In 1981, thousands of followers of a mystic guru named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh left India to start a new society based on free expression and free love on a ranch in rural Oregon. One doesn’t need a deep understanding of the American West to guess how that went down with the local ranchers and townspeople in nearby Antelope, Oregon, population 40.

Yet the details of the years-long conflict are so bizarre that one observer commented at the time that people looking back on the saga would consider it too fanciful to be true. The six-part documentary series , out March 16 on Netflix, confirms that prediction, telling a twisted story filled with bombings, bioterrorism, and the largest illegal bugging operation ever recorded on U.S. soil—all set against the barren, beautiful backdrop of Wasco County, Oregon. Executive produced by brothers Mark and Jay Duplass and directed by brothers Chapman and Maclain Way, it’s a commendable retelling of a largely forgotten piece of history that feels familiar today. Indeed, many of the series’ themes—religious freedom, xenophobia, fighting for control over land, even voter suppression—make the story disturbingly relevant.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh began attracting followers in Pune, India, in the 1960s. His basic vision involved taking the best parts of Western and Eastern societies and creating a “new man” not weighed down by the baggage of traditional societal norms. This philosophy included but was not limited to sex, but that, naturally, is what attracted the most attention. When the Rajneeshees later became an American obsession, one late-night talk show host asked a follower if they believed in free love. “We don’t charge for it, if that’s what you’re asking,” was the pithy reply.

When tensions with Indian authorities began to mount, the Rajneeshees went looking for a new place to grow. They came up with the Big Muddy Ranch, a 70,000-acre property in Oregon’s gorge country.

Early on in the series, one local recalls seeing an early arrival to the Big Muddy—which was renamed Rajneeshpuram—speaking to just how unaccustomed the area was to other walks of life. “I figured he was not an American. You can spot Europeans by their shoes. They were fashionable leather shoes, not cowboy boots.” And it was downhill from there. The shoes weren’t the only thing different about the Rajneeshees. They dressed only in shades of pink and red and were inclined to spontaneous singing and dancing. Facing pressure from the tiny Antelope City Council over development plans, the Rajneeshees—who numbered 7,000 on the Rajneeshpuram at one point—mobilized to take over the council, which resulted in their taking over the police force as well. This led to a spectacle of pink-shirted officers patrolling the no-stoplight town. There was also a harebrained scheme to sway Wasco County elections by busing in thousands of homeless people from across the country to become voters and an allegation that they tried to poison a reservoir with ground-up beavers. Wild Wild Country has plenty of such light moments that revel in the pure strangeness of the story.

For the most part, though, the story is a sinister one, with nerves raw and violence always in the offing. Following a mysterious bombing at a Rajneeshee apartment complex in Portland, followers at the RajneeshpuramÌębegan hoisting assault rifles for protection. “I don’t believe in ‘turn the other cheek,’” Ma Anand Sheela, who ran the day-to-day on the ranch and rarely missed a chance to call her neighbors “stupid,” told a TV station. A 1984 salmonella outbreak in the Dalles, the largest city in Wasco County, was linked to the Rajneeshees. The same year, several public officials opposed to the group received chocolates laced with the bacteria. In 1985, an armed woman was dispatched to Portland to assassinate a U.S. attorney, a plan that did not come to fruition. And undercover footage from a Rajneeshee compound suggested that the line between “free love” and rape could be a blurry one among followers.

Belligerent as the Rajneeshees come off, it’s also clear that the Oregonians who fought them had their own prejudices. While opposition to the group was often shrouded in concerns for the environment or infrastructure, it was a thin veneer. “I just don’t like ’em,” one old-timer says matter-of-factly to a camera.

The directors allow both sides plenty of screen time to explain their side of the conflict, using archival footage and retrospective interviews with some central players. Ma Anand Sheela, who sat for interviews with the Ways, emerges as the most compelling character, an unflappable provocateur in the face of rural American conservatism and, later, a pariah of the Rajneeshees. It is Sheela who oversees the largest illegal bugging operation ever, not against the enemies of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, but against Bhagwan himself (as well as the rest of the compound)—an act of palace intrigue that began the unraveling of the great social experiment on the Big Muddy.

Noticeably absent from the series is Rajneesh, who died in 1990. For years, he stopped speaking to his followers, which only enhanced his standing with them. Many followers sent him their life savings, allowing him to amass a very large .

If there is a reasonable explanation for this behavior from Rajneesh’s devotees, the Ways don’t try to explain it. That’s just as well. There’s so much going on here that it verges on overload, with questions raised one moment and dropped the next, such as one of Sheela’s plans to sedate the homeless by slipping drugs into their beer, which passes as a madcap aside. And at just over an hour per episode, Wild Wild Country is not quite bingeable like some other Netflix docs.

What ultimately undid the Rajneeshees was an immigration investigation that uncovered a conspiracy to defraud the green card system. On the verge of a multiagency raid, Bhagwan went on the lamÌębut was caught in North Carolina. The group’s connection to the salmonella outbreaks and assassination plots became public in 1985, leading to the arrest of Sheela—who was by this time in hiding from the Rajneeshees—on charges of attempted murder. By the end of the year, Bhagwan pled guilty and agreed to leave the country. The saga was over.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about all of this, and what inspired the Ways to make the docuseries, is how this episode of conflict slipped into obscurity as soon as it was over. Unlike other controversial sects—Jonestown, the Branch Davidians—the Rajneeshees left Oregon peacefully and faded quickly into history. By the late 1980s, the Big Muddy had fallen into tax delinquency and was seized by the state. It is now a Christian youth camp. The city of Antelope, meanwhile, holds an annual music festival featuring country and gospel music. Presumably, you can still tell an outsider by their shoes.

The post Free Love and Bioterrorism in ‘Wild Wild Country’ appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

These days, when Pelin and Selin Kesebir hear a song on the radio, they can’t help but listen for references to nature: aÌęflower, a sunset, or “the birds up above” (Paul McCartney, “,” 1963). But nature-related words, Pelin observes, “really are hard to come by in current song lyrics.”

This is no off-hand gripe from the 37-year-old identical twins, who both hold Ph.D’s in psychology. According to a , references to nature are disturbingly sparse in current pop culture, be itÌębooks, music, or movies—and they’ve more or less been in steady decline since 1950. This, the researchers suggest, likely corresponds with a general decline in the public’s engagement with nature. After all, artists tend to write about what they know or try to createÌęthings they think the audience can relate to.

To be clear:Ìęthe Kesebirs are not critiquing pop culture itself. That’sÌęa debate that extends well beyond the parameters of their study. What they do argueÌęis that music on the radio and books on the bestseller list provide a tidy capsule about what society is experiencing at any given time. That the experience involves less and less nature, they argue, is bad for bothÌęour minds and nature itself.Ìę

The sisters’ interest in nature references in art was piqued in 2015 when a number of high-profile writers protested the decision by the editors at the Oxford Junior Dictionary to jettison words like “clover” and “blackberry” in favor of words like “blog” and, um, “BlackBerry.” (How quickly tech lingo becomes dated.)ÌęTheyÌęrealized that while it seems almost self-evident thatÌęsociety is less connected to nature than it used to be, actually showing that with data is difficult. Some studies have looked at how much time people spend doing “nature-based activities,” like hiking, but the KesebirsÌęfound this approach lacking, since it doesn’t account for more ephemeral moments like spending a lunch break beneath a blooming cherry tree. Songs and books, they argue, have a way of capturing the zeitgeist of culture, making it a good proxy for measuring trends in society.Ìę

One of the strengths of theÌęKesebirs’Ìęresearch is that they analyzed thousands of works—they looked at some 6,000 songs released since 1950 alone—which allowed them to see clear trends in the din of millions of songs andÌębooks. To arrive at their results, the sisters compiled lists of common flowers, birds, trees, and general nature wordsÌę(like “rainbow”) and then, using various online databases, tracked how often they appeared in lyrics, movie plot summaries, and books since 1900. With slight variations, the trends followed a typical line, increasing between the turn of theÌę20thÌęcentury and 1950, then plunging in the second half of theÌę20thÌęcentury and beginning of theÌę21st. To make sure these declines were specific toÌęnature-related words, theÌęKesebirsÌęalso compiled a random assortment of human-related words—like “bowl” and “brick”—and looked at their trends as well. Those words became more and more common in art over the course of theÌę20thÌęcentury.

One may reasonably wonder whether these trends are the product of pop culture’s whims. Woody Guthrie, preeminent folk singer of theÌęmid-20thÌęcentury, wrote reams of music about green Douglas firs (seeÌę) and redwood forests (seeÌę). That was fitting for a man who grew up in rural Oklahoma andÌętraveled the country on freight trains. The modern British rock band Radiohead, held in equally high regard for itsÌęsongwriting but with a less nomadic pedigree, seems mostly interested in nature as metaphor forÌęparanoia and alienation (see 1995’sÌę). The 1960sÌęhappened to beÌęthe height of the Beach Boys’Ìęfame (just look at the cover ofÌęSurfin' Safari), andÌęJohn Wayne was popular in the 1950s, so lots of movies had sweeping panoramas of the . Does that mean the people watching the Duke were better connected to nature? The Kesebirs say yes. “Culture products are agents of socialization that can evoke curiosity, respect, and concern for the natural world,” they write. In non-psychology speak, this means that movies about New York City make people want to go to the city. Movies about the desert (unless they're horrifying survival stories)Ìęmake people want to go toÌęthe desert.ÌęIt’s a chicken and an egg situation: authors, musicians, and screenwriters write about what people are interested in, and in turn people become interested in what the artists are writing about.

What’s causing the decline? With people moving off farms and into cities over the course of theÌę20th century, it would seem inevitable that nature demanded less of their attention. But the researchers note that urbanization was a fairly steady fact of life in the English-speaking world over the entire century, meaning it doesn’t tell the full story of theÌęrise in nature words before the 1950s drop-off. A more plausible culprit, they write, is .

Beyond the psychological problems that this growingÌędisconnectÌęfrom nature presents, it’sÌę.Ìę“Emotional affinity for nature is associated with environmentally protective behavior,” the Kesebirs write. “In one experiment, participants who viewed a brief video of natural spaces engaged in more sustainable behavior than did participants who viewed a video of human-based spaces.”Ìę

Looking at the Kesebirs' research, one data set stands from the norm: between 2000 and 2010, nature references in popular music actually rose slightly. Selin says the rise is statistically significant and that she and her sisterÌęcan’t definitively say whatÌęcausedÌęit. Looking over the songs included in the study, one wonders if it wasÌętied to the mainstream success country music , which often evokes pastoral scenes of fireflies and sunsets, the way Jason Aldean does in his 2009 hit Or it could just be a fluke. Selin says that the trend could be a momentary blip in the downward trend. (AÌęsampling of Nikki Minaj’s latest offerings suggests she’s right.)

Regardless, the Kesebirs say “cultural leadership” is needed on the issue, given both the psychological and environmental benefits of appreciating the outdoors. “Public figures such as celebrities could…help spread a sense of the joys of nature,” Pelin says.ÌęTake a page, in other words, from Paul McCartney, who sang on the , in 1968:

Find me in my field of grass
Mother Nature’s son.
Swaying daisies sing a lazy song beneath the sun.

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When climbers in the North Cascades complete what they believe to be a new route, they write to Fred Beckey. They write because they think they’ve done something that Beckey did over and over and over in his legendary life of climbing. They think they did it first, and they want recognition from the man with perhaps more first ascents to his name than any other in history; they want to be known by the man who is known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the sport.
Ìę
Early in his climbing career—in the 1940s, a 20-something-year-old barely out of Boy Scouts—Fred Beckey began to search out peaks that the Mountaineers Club in his hometown of Seattle had marked unclimbable: spikes and blades of rock that members of the organization determined were unassailable by man. Then he'd climb them. He made almost a cruel sport out of it, taking the sober prescriptions of experts and whipping them with climbing rope.Ìę

Initially, many members of the Mountaineers resented Beckey. But such was his ability that, soon enough, the rift was gone for the simple reason that he had redefined what a mountaineer was.Ìę

“His climb on Midway, in 1948, was said to be the first modern rock climb in Washington,” says Matt Perkins, a climber and friend of Beckey’s, referring to a now well-known climb in the Central Cascades. “Rope, belay, intermediate protection. What we’d call fifth class climbing today.”Ìę

In 1973, the Mountaineers—hatchets by then well buried—published Beckey's first North Cascades Climbing guide. Today, the guide—which is published in threeÌęvolumes—has seen three editions and seven press runs. In the age of SummitPost and PeakBagger, the guides are still considered a necessary piece of gear for expeditions in the rugged Pacific Northwest country, a veritable canon of climbing routes in that splintered part of world. Countless climbers have schlepped the books to base camps, seeking an edge in the game that Fred Beckey all but invented.

The book, simply titled , was his formal answer to the question that came to every climber who gaped in awe of his accomplishments: How the hell did he do that?

When climbers today write him and brief him on their routes, there’s little doubt that Beckey will more or less be able to picture it vividly. Beckey will turn the route over in his head, running it through the most complete encyclopedia of American mountaineering in existence today—his brain. He may then dismiss the route as nothing special. Then again—and this is why they write—he may decide it’s a route worth including in the next edition of Mountaineering in the North Cascades.

“That’s a big part of what he’s doing now. Going through other climber’s routes,” says Perkins. “Climbers still report their routes to Fred, because Fred’s book remains the book of record in the North Cascades.”

Beckey is 93 now. His hearing is shot but his brain is sharp. He owns a modest two-story home in North Seattle, and he’s still singularly obsessed with the mountains.Ìę

When he walks, he does so hunched over and with the aid of two aluminum walking sticks, evidence of a life lived to test the limits of the human body. Yet when he complains to me that he's only been climbing a few times in recent months, I ask dumbly for clarification: Climbing? As in: With ropes?

“OŽÚ course with ropes! It's not climbing without ropes.”

Back in his early days, when his daring ascents were first making the papers, it was only natural that some resentment set in among other climbers. As Beckey achieved first ascent after first ascent, whispers circulated that he was reckless. He was burning hot, and he was bound to overheat.

True enough, death was close to Beckey early in his career. In 1947, Beckey was climbing the Waddington Range in British Columbia with a group of Harvard climbers when he and three others were caught in an avalanche. Beckey's hip was injured, another climber died. In 1952, on Mt. Baring in the North Cascades, he and his partners were descending at night, driven off the mountain by weather. The lead climber—a man named Dick Berge—took a wrong turn, which in that rugged country meant plunging to his death.Ìę

Decades into his career, climbing partner Peter Schoening put the doubts surrounding Beckey this way to the in 2003: “Fred would climb these spectacular things, and there was word that Fred was unsafe and he was going to get himself killed and it would reflect poorly on climbing.”

Yet he's still here today, credited with hundreds of first ascents—though the exact number is elusive, it’s widely considered to be the most of any American climber. There is little doubt that he will not be surpassed. There's just not enough mountains left to climb for anyone to catch up.Ìę

“There’s just no comparison with Fred,” Phil Powers, CEO of the American Alpine Club, told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű for an oral history of the man back in 2010. “I mean, it’s not one level, but ten levels of magnitude more than the second-place guy. If you travel the American West, open any guidebook, try to do any route, try to do any mountain, you’ll likely come across Fred’s name.”

His poor hearing makes conversation with him trying. But when questions get through, he’s sharp in his answers. So what about those rumors, Fred, that you were dangerous and wouldn’t last?

“I've always been a safe climber,” he says. His very existence proves that he's correct. Deep crevices are weathered into his face, and the lines are one of a man who spent most of his life either smiling or squinting up at a peak. His forehead has a divot so big a climber could probably get a toehold in it. It is not from a climbing accident but a car accident, Beckey being far less careful a motorist than mountaineer. He's lost his license on account of too many tickets, which public records show include driving without a seatbelt and driving 50 miles-an-hour in 75-mile-hour traffic while talking on a cellphone. And that's just what's on file at courthouse in downtown Seattle. According to his friend Megan Bond, you'd have to search a century of records across Idaho, Utah, Arizona, California, and Canada to truly grasp Beckey's inability to comply with traffic regulations.

At the peak of his career, in a typical year he’d drive his pink and black Ford Thunderbird on a months-long circuit of mountains, Arizona in the winter, Alaska in the summer, as many months as his finances would allow him. He kept a running list of climbing partners, and would pester them to come out with him. No one was able to climb as much as Beckey did—they had jobs, family—so when one partner dropped off, he'd call another. After a while, it became a seal of pride for climbers to get a call from the rock-obsessed Beckey. He has yet to give the practice up.

“He's constantly recruiting people to take him out. That's one of the motivations to meet the climbers. Fred will be asking if he wants to take him climbing,” Perkins says. If worst comes to worst, he'll even swallow his pride and go to a climbing gym.Ìę

“He's not a fan of indoor gyms,” says Bond. “But he'll go if he's wanting something to do.”

Perkins, who still has dinner with Beckey on an almost weekly basis, says Beckey reached out to him in 2002, just shy of Beckey's 80th birthday, asking Perkins to join him on a trip to the Monarch Ice Fields in the Coastal Range of British Columbia. The goal was to summit Cerberus Mountain, accessible only from a long traverse across the remote expanse of ice. Beckey arranged the helicopter flight and skied in four miles to the base camp.Ìę

Lore has is that Beckey can be a taciturn climbing partner, petty and bitter to those who stand in the way of his plans. Perkins says there's truth to that, but that you see another side of him when you're on the mountain together.Ìę

When the day of the Cerebrus climb came, Beckey was physically unable to do it, Perkins says; but when Perkins and another climber “staggered” back into camp at midnight, Beckey insisted on cooking them all dinner.

“He is self-serving in all the ways you read about, but he did want to get up and cook us dinner after climbing Cerberus,” Perkins says.

Bond, who also met Beckey later in his life, says many people only see Fred as the man he once was, and ignore the fact that, like all humans, he's changed over the years.Ìę

“The way some people think about him now is predicated on who he was 50 years ago, 70 years ago,” she says.

A lot of what Bond sees as a misunderstanding of Beckey grows out of the “dirtbag” label that has become synonymous with do-it-on-the-cheap climbing lifestyle Beckey pioneered. While it's true that Beckey would drive around with a McDonald's coffee cup so he could nick free refills during road trips, his dirtbag reputation has a way of distracting from his substantial intellectual feats. His climbing guides include deep research into the history of the mountains he's climbing; he's also published a memoir and a comprehensive history of human exploration of the Cascade Mountains.

“You hear about the dirtbag stuff, but you never hear about him going back to Washington, D.C., to look up old mining claims at the U.S. Geological Survey,” says Perkins.Ìę

“He's very upset at that word [dirtbag],” Bond says. “He's accomplished more than most people, he's done more research that most college professors. Needless to say his writings are up there with John Muir.” (That might be a matter of taste, but there is no denying that Beckey is a strong writer who doesn't suffer from the stunted or overwrought prose of many adventure authors).

One assumption about Beckey that is true, though, is that when it comes to his day-to-day life, it's nearly all about climbing, Bond says. He likes college footballÌęand will go to a bar to watch Pac-12 games; he takes a few trips a week to Safeway to replenish a supply of orange juice and donuts. But beyond that, it's rock.

In old age, “most people dial back,” says Bond. “He's dialed in. He's more tenacious.”

This near-inhuman singular obsession with climbing has long created a sense of mystery around Beckey—whether or not that mystery is real or projected.

Dave O'Leske has spent the last 11 years working with Beckey on a documentary about his life. When they began, Beckey was still driving the climbing circuit he’d refined over the decades, hitting the Southwest in the early spring and following the weather north into Washington state and British Columbia. A climber himself, O’Leske was fascinated watching the then-82-year-old work the routes. But he also was intrigued by Beckey’s life off the rock walls; he wanted to know who Fred actually was. He knew all about his mountaineering and a little bit about his roguish reputation as a lady's man. But none of that seemed to speak to the man himself. A life can't consist entirely of climbing routes, can it?

“I always looked up to Fred, and was intrigued by his mystery,” O'Leske told me in Seattle recently, where he was launching a Kickstarter campaign for the documentary, .Ìę(Despite his disdain for the word, Beckey is fully on board with the documentary.) “I just couldn't believe there wasn't anything else there.”Ìę

But when O'Leske would ask Beckey about more personal details of his life, Beckey would demure. “No one cares about that stuff,” he'd say. “Who would care about that?”Ìę

It’s not that he's protective of anything: as part of the documentary, he turned over his journals, which contain lots of discourse on climbing, but also some personal details on his life off the mountain—specifically, notes on women met along the way. Jason Reid, a producer on “Dirtbag,” said Beckey is aware that the documentary seeks to explore the personal side of his life. He doesn't object; he just doesn't understand why.

“Personal questions—he doesn't see the value in that,” Reid says. “Ask him about a route, and he can talk forever.”

At the Kickstarter event, Beckey took the stage before 500 fans who seem ready to clutch to every word like it was do-or-die overhang. Other men who'd lived long great lives, provided an audience of devotees, would likely talk about themselves in such a setting. Beckey, though, talked about Gengis Khan and Hannibal of Carthage and Horace Benedicte de Saussure—men whose exploits in the mountains he felt were more important to talk about than his own.

After this brief history of mountaineering, Beckey led a slideshow through some of his various expeditions. Watching him instantly recall the circumstances and outcomes of dozens of climbs by a simple glance at a rock face reminds one of a grandmother looking through a photo album of grandchildren. This one went to Harvard. She lives in Dallas


The mountains, after all, were the closest thing Beckey had to family. He never married, never had children.Ìę

One of the 500 people in the crowd is a woman named Vasiliki Dwyer, whose cosmopolitan outfit and lovely perfume draws a stark contrast to the REI aesthetic that dominates the room. Dwyer met Beckey skiing one day in 1952 on Stevens Pass outside Seattle. She lost a ski and Beckey, working on ski patrol, retrieved it. Beckey managed to convert that small act of chivalry into a brief courtship. They skied and hiked and played tennis together (Fred was lousy at tennis.)

“I knew the other side of Fred,” Dwyer says. “Fred also was very well-read, interested in good literature.”Ìę

Did he not want people to see that side of him? “No,” she says, “He just never thought that his climbing friends were interested.”

How serious Beckey's feelings for Dwyer were is a point of dispute. Timothy Egan included a now-famous profile of Beckey in his 1990 book .ÌęIn the piece, Egan makes Dwyer out to be the great love that got away; Bond insists things were far more casual. Regardless, Dwyer says today, “there was never any question of marriage.”

“What would he do with a baby?” she asks, a look of wonderment in her face as she asked it. “I can't even imagine. He couldn't be married. How could he be married? He's married to the mountains.”

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To understand just how serious Las Vegas has gotten about its water in the past 15 years, consider this scenario that Bronson Mack, who oversees water resources and operations in at Southern Nevada Water Authority, painted for me the other day.

Pack every hotel on the Strip—the Wynn, the Bellagio, Caesars Palace, all of them—full of guests. Now have them turn on every faucet and shower. For good measure, once they’ve got those running, have them flush their toilets over and over again. Gallons and gallons and gallons. Water waste at its wettest.

In most cities in the West, this image would put a water guy like Mack on edge. That’s because, in most places, all that water would flow through treatment plants and discharge downstream, removed from its water basin forever.

Not in Vegas. The city can’t afford to gamble on the weather. Rather, nearly every drop of water used indoors, not just on the Strip but across the valley, gets channeled through some 2,000 miles of pipe to treatment facilities, where the water is filtered, treated with bacteria that breaks down harmful compounds, and exposed to ultraviolet light that disinfects it. From there, it’s pumped back into Lake Mead, where Vegas can then draw it out again for use in those showers that are still running on the Strip.

“If Vegas had only indoor water use, we’d have a limitless supply of water,” Mack says. It’s a bit like the famous Bellagio fountain, a favorite punching bag for far-flung water activists: While the water cannons may seem like a massive waste of water, that same water is getting reused over and over.

The Mojave Desert’s premier resort destination receives, on average, four inches of rain a year, a paucity of precipitation that might have even a sun-chapped Phoenix homeowner feeling parched and thankful for the eight inches of rain his city gets. This hyperdry climate means that when you take the number of people who live in Las Vegas and divide it by the gallons of water that get flushed, drained, and—perhaps most important—jetted out of automatic sprinklers every day, you arrive at a figure that’s higher than most any other in America: about 219 gallons per person per day. Places more naturally bestowed with water—like my home base of Seattle—use less than half of that per capita; people in San Francisco, by comparison, use about 46 gallons per person per day. What’s worse, 90 percent of that water comes from the Colorado River via Lake Mead, ground zero for the megadrought that’s been bearing down on the western United States.

This is why, when the topic of water conservation in Las Vegas comes up, many environmentalists see any solutions that don’t amount to strict water rationing or growth limits as completely missing the point: As long as you insist on putting a metropolitan area of 2.1Ìęmillion people and rising (fast) in the middle of the desert, you’re going to be wasting water. As Steve Erickson, Utah coordinator for the advocacy group Great Basin Water Network, bluntly told the Los Angeles Times last year, “These people need to remember that it’s a city built upon an inhospitable desert. What were they thinking?”

So there is a viewpoint out there that Las Vegas should basically dry up and blow into the dust. We’re not going to go there. Rather, this story explores how Las Vegas hasn’t already dried up and blown into the wind.

The answer, Vegas people insist, is that the city has become a model of water conservation in the American West. It hasn’t undertaken any of its radical water-saving measures out of feel-good environmental altruism. That wouldn’t be Vegas’ style. Rather, like a house dealer looking at a bad hand against a water compact that allows it a pittance of Colorado River water, Sin City has been playing the conservative odds for more than a decade in hopes of keeping the casino alive to see another game.

“Vegas has done a pretty good job in the last ten-to-14 years now recognizing water is a scarce resource. They’ve done that despite incredible population growth,” says Michael Cohen, an expert on the Colorado River basin at the Pacific Institute, an independent think tank focused on water conservation. “They’re using less water now than they did 14 years ago. 
 They’ve been aggressive, and they seem to be, at least in the short term, on a reasonably good path.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The city Ìęwhen it banned new sod in the front yards of new residential developments, nearly banned sod in backyards, and outlawed watering during the heat of the day. Other cities are now taking note. “Las Vegas presents a model of how quickly the landscape can change when a city moves aggressively,” according to a 2013Ìę. But it’s a host of other initiatives that may allow Las Vegas to become the city that taught America not only how to sin, but also how to do it without wasting water.

The Bad Hand

You can’t talk very long about water in Las Vegas without the phrase “2 percent” coming up.

That’s the percentage of water from the Colorado River’s lower basin allocated to southern Nevada by the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which doles out water rights to the seven states along the river’s path. By comparison, 27 percent goes to California and 18 percent goes to Arizona. But while Las Vegas’ allocation is small, its dependence on that allocation is huge: The Colorado River provides 90 percent of the city’s water via Lake Mead, created with the construction of the Hoover Dam in 1931. (The remaining 10 percent comes from groundwater wells across the valley.)

Those allocations made sense back in 1922, when southern Nevada looked like much of the rest of the Mojave—barren, inhospitable, and fairly uninhabited—and just 2,000 people lived in Las Vegas. (About 4,000 more lived in the surrounding county.) Those few settlers survived on a small collection of desert springs.

But shortly after the Colorado River Compact, the stars of Las Vegas’ fate began to align. In 1928, the federal government signed off on construction of what would become Hoover Dam, a mere 30 miles from downtown. The dam had two effects: First, its construction spurred a small population boom as workers flocked to the area; second, it greatly enhanced western states’ abilities to harvest water from the Colorado River. Suddenly the desert town found itself next to Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir in the country, and water was no longer a pressing issue. Even 2 percent of the Colorado was a huge amount of water, and the dam ensured that it would always be available, even in dry years.

In the 1930s, Nevada began to come into its own as the libertarian paradise it’s known as today. In 1931, the state legislature loosened its laws on marriage—or, more precisely, divorce—and lifted its ban on gambling. A few years later, Congress moved to lift Prohibition. The groundwork for Sin City was set. Then, in the 1940s, with World War II driving a boom in both the war industries and military enlistments, the keystone for Vegas’ growth fell into place: A raft of young men from Los Angeles with steady income grew eager to take advantage of all that loose law and good water just across the border in Nevada.

Vegas was on its way. Liberace debuted at the Persian Room in 1944; Sinatra at the Desert Inn in ’51; Elvis at the New Frontier Hotel in ’56. None of them had trouble finding water to clear their famous throats.

The city’s population continued to grow steadily over the second half of the 20th century. By 1990, 770,000 people lived in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. Developers planted houses in the dun-colored hills with little regard for water use.

As much as the Strip is a symbol of Las Vegas excess, with its rows of garish casino resorts, it has never presented the kind of water consumption challenge you might imagine. While the media is keen to use images of lavish swimming pools and the to illustrate Vegas’ wasteful ways, casinos use a mere 7.6 percent of all the water in southern Nevada. The real water guzzlers have always been the city’s residents. Sixty percent of the state’s water goes to single and multifamily households.

That’s not because people in the city are prone to cottonmouth and drink more water than the average nondesert dweller. Landscaping accounts for about 70Ìępercent of water consumption at homes there. Grass is hard to keep alive in the desert, but it’s a foundational element of the iconic American home. Some homeowner associations even had covenants requiring residents to maintain a lush lawn in their front yards, despite the enormous amount of watering it necessitated. That ended in 2003 when the practice was banned.

As ProPublica , the seven different water agencies that govern the area from Las Vegas to the tip of the state 100 miles south and share Nevada’s Colorado River allotment for decades “didn’t know how much water the area had—let alone how much water they were committing to give out.” Water agencies were essentially running up their credit cards in hopes that there was enough water in the collective bank—Lake Mead—to cover the bill.

That was the situation facing Pat Mulroy in 1989 when she took charge of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, which provides water to the city and sprawling unincorporated country around it. Mulroy had worked for the district for much of her career, but by her telling it wasn’t until she was at the helm that staff made clear to her how out of hand water use had become in the valley. In the midst of an economic uptick that year, when Steve Wynn opened the Mirage (Vegas’ first new casino in 16 years at that point), the rate at which per capita water use was rising more than doubled.

“When we started seeing 17 and 21 percent [increases], we were in trouble,” Mulroy . Per capita use hovered at about 400 gallons. (That’s 75 percent higher than current levels.)

One of Mulroy’s first acts as water chief was to hire consultants to determine the city’s rate of water usage relative to its growth and the total amount of water available. The resultant report confirmed Mulroy’s fears that Vegas, were it to maintain its current rate of water usage, would be maxed out on water within a couple of years. She moved swiftly to halt new water allowances, which are necessary for new homes and casinos, in her district.

It was an unthinkable response; it stopped growth in Las Vegas. Mulroy says she was summoned to Steve Wynn’s office to explain herself. But the data was incontrovertible: At its rate of water consumption, southern Nevada was on pace to run out of water by 1995.

Mulroy explained that federal regulators in charge of the Colorado River had branded Vegas as a spendthrift when it came to water and were reluctant to help the city on its current course. The Interior Department, which oversees the water compact, could have allowed Vegas to draw higher flows from Lake Mead, but didn’t over concerns about encouraging irresponsible water practices. So Mulroy proposed creating a new water authority to oversee the seven different water districts and ensure a measure of consistency among them.

With Mulroy in charge, per capita water use began to ebb, thanks in part to public information campaigns. (Vegas residents in their 20s and 30s may remember receiving lessons from , a water droplet mascot character outfitted with a gold badge and cowboy boots, which the city commissioned in the 1990s.) Mulroy also increased the total amount of water coming into Vegas by, controversially, buying up water rights in rural Nevada and paying other Colorado River users to conserve water, which allowed Vegas to draw those saved gallons out of Lake Mead for its residents.

But then came the “wrecking ball,” as Mulroy : the drought. For three straight years, starting in 1999, precipitation in the Colorado watershed was well below average. In 2002, with the Colorado River watershed parched and Vegas’ metropolitan population now sitting at well over one million people, the water authority drew more water than it was allowed from Lake Mead. In other words, it had reached its limit. No more water. This didn’t mean faucets went dry, but it did mean that for all of Mulroy’s efforts the previous decade, Vegas had hit a wall.

“The drought changed everything,” Mulroy said.

That year should have marked the point where the gambler got his comeuppance, where the vacation story evolved into a cautionary tale of excess. Instead, it became the moment Las Vegas began drawing a blueprint for the rest of the American West on how to confront drought.

The Play

In an interview on NPR , Charles Fishman, author of The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, called Vegas “one of the most water-smart [cities] in the world,” concluding that water officials “have no choice.”

That’s because the city’s economy is based on attracting people to come to the middle of the desert, be it for a weekend getaway or to live out their golden years. There will always be economic pressure to push the limits with water, which means there will always be a tangible incentive to stretch the water as far as possible.

Water officials have leveraged technological innovations to help them track water and mitigate waste. For example, in 2004, the Las Vegas Valley Water District installed computerized monitors to detect leaks in its self-contained water system. (The district has installed more than 8,000 of these units to date.) This system has since detected more than 1,600 underground leaks, which has saved 290 million gallons of water—enough water to supply 1,800 Vegas homes for a year.

It has been even more aggressive with outdoor water use, which accounts for 70 percent of all water use in Vegas. Among its innovations:

• Since 1999, the water district has been paying people to pull up sod from their yards. (The current rate is $1.50 per square foot; in 2014, the city paid out $3 million to homeowners.)
• New houses cannot have sod in their front yards.
• Backyards must be 50 percent or less grass.
• During the summer, you can’t water your law between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., the times of day when the sun is most liable to evaporate water before it soaks into the ground.
• There’s an $80 fine if a water technician—known colloquially as a “water cop”—finds water trickling off your lawn and into a storm drain. (The Las Vegas Sun that water cops had investigated 830 various water violations that year alone.)

The efforts are paying off. Though total water use for the city rose only slightly between 2000 and 2010—by about 1.5 percent—Vegas added more than a million people. That works out to a 33 percent per person drop in water use. Vegas water officials hope to go even lower, with a per capita water-use goal of 199 gallons per person per day by 2035. That’s 20 fewer gallons a day than is used today.

Other cities in the West have followed Vegas’ lead, but Mack, with the water authority, says Vegas has never been out to set an example. It’s just doing what it needs to do to stay “in water,” as the saying there goes. Though Las Vegas is rethinking the way it uses water, city officials aren’t rethinking growth in general. Water authorities now sound more confident than ever in Vegas’ ability to expand.

As John Entsminger, Mack’s boss and Mulroy’s replacement at Southern Nevada Water Authority, put it to the Las Vegas Review Journal , “You could add millions more people and the water footprint would be fairly minimal.”

As the desert metropolis expands and drought continues to parch the Colorado River basin, city officials are looking beyond Lake Mead. One proposal calls for a pipeline from eastern Nevada to pump groundwater now reserved for agriculture into the city. Though the pipeline is hung up by a lawsuit arguing that the pipe would deplete rural water tables used by other landowners, the question in the courts is not whether Vegas will be able to grab water from the eastern desert—it’s how much.

An editorial in the Las Vegas Sun, “Whatever It Takes to Get Water to Las Vegas,” nicely sums up the logic of the valley: “The state could cap growth in Clark County, but that would effectively cap the state’s economic growth as well.”

Mack acknowledges that his city invites controversy but shrugs it off with the air of someone who’s heard it all before. “Las Vegas is an easy target. You either love Las Vegas or you hate Las Vegas. The reality is that Las Vegas is here, and I do not foresee Las Vegas drying up and blowing away. There’s no reason for the community to not continue to thrive.

“We get beat up for importing water from the Colorado River,” Mack adds. “Well, we’re not the only ones who import our water. New York City imports its water as well.”

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Life in Alaska is dominated by three factors: the state’s size, remoteness, and climate. During the 1950s, in the icy heart of the Cold War, that presented the FBI and military officials with a serious problem: If Soviet troops crossed the Bering Strait and invaded Alaska, who would be there to stop them? The territory (it was not yet a state) was simply too vast to fortify militarily, yet it was too strategically located to leave undefended.

For nine years, from 1951 to 1959, the answer to that quandary was something known variably as Operation Washtub or simply the Alaskan Project. The operation trained and armed regular Alaskan citizens—miners, pilots, and fishermen—to mount a counterinsurgency against an invading Soviet force, all while surviving in the merciless Alaskan bush. The project was secret until last year, when detailed the plans—and the James-Bond-meets-Jack-London characters who were tapped to carry it out.

The fear of a Russian invasion into Alaska wasn’t just a symptom of McCarthy-era paranoia. Following World War II, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. acted toward one another like angry dogs circling the steak that was Europe. As Washington and Moscow locked eyes across the Atlantic, their tails wagged within three miles of each other in Siberia and Alaska. Fighter jets engaged in sorties over the Bering Sea and Russians in the Arctic occassionally jammedÌęAmerican radio frequencies. In the eyes of American military strategists, the Soviets taking over Alaska would provide the enemy with a bounty of airstrips from which to launch raids on the west coast in the Lower 48. This was before the advent of countermeasures like intercontinental missiles and long-range bombers.

[quote]“He has only one arm
,” reads a surprisingly imaginative FBI report on who should be recruited into the program. “He is possessed of sufficient physical courage as is indicated by his offer to guide a party which was to have hunted Kodiak bear armed only with bow and arrow.”[/quote]

Stephen Haycox, a historian at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, notes that throughout the 1950s there were B-52s “in the air over Alaska all the time, prepared to be dispatched to the Soviet Union,” as well as four active ground-to-air missile sites near Anchorage. “There was always anxiety in Alaska during the Cold War,” Haycox says.

The government responded by training dozens of Alaskans to wage a wilderness insurgency. Among the declassified documents was an FBI profile of the type of American citizen it would like to employ, covertly, to defend against such an invasion.

“[He is] a professional photographer in Anchorage; he has only one arm and it is felt that he would not benefit the enemy in any labor battalion
,” reads a surprisingly imaginative FBI report on who should be recruited into the program. “He is a pilot of small aircraft; he is reasonably intelligent, particularly crafty, and possessed of sufficient physical courage as is indicated by his offer to guide a party which was to have hunted Kodiak bear armed only with bow and arrow.”

While it’s doubtful the government ever found its one-armed bear hunter, it found plenty of men who were willing to participate. In a 1977 report for the Air Force Office of Special Investigation, Captain Kurt K. Kunze claimed that 89 agents had been trained to run clandestine missions in Alaska after a Soviet invasion. The operation’s planners sought out men who were accustomed to spending extended amounts of time in the harsh Alaskan wilderness. (In a startling bit of institutional racism, Native Alaskans would not be used for the operation because their loyalty to the U.S. was supposedly suspect and alcoholism was thought to be too rampant.)

Those chosen were flown to Seattle to undergo a hundred hours of further training in air drop and pickup techniques, scouting, patrolling, map reading, arctic survival training, secret ink, and surreptitious photography.

Once trained, they needed equipment. While working at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage in the 1980s, John Cloe, a retired military historian, says that he saw a 16mm film showing the caches being stocked for the operation. The caches were often remote. The Air Force knew it couldn’t defend the vast spaces in Alaska, so it decided that the military would only protect bases. “So they established caches of whatever they needed for a guerrilla type operation,” says Cloe.

Initial plans called for 100 supply outposts to be built, but those designs were scaled back greatly due to the difficulty of building equipment stores in the Alaskan wilderness. What caches were built—the exact number is unknown—closely followed the railroad line between Seward, Anchorage and Fairbanks, with others located near Nome and Galena. In places where there were trees, the military typically built them on stilts as high as 14 feet so the equipment could be accessed in the snowy winter. In the tundra, six-foot-deep pits were dug into the permafrost.

Inside each supply were survival goods like a 150-foot length of climbing rope, crampons, a parka, “eskimo type trousers,” mukluks, gloves, a fur cap, snowshoes, skies, boots, poles and wax, a portable stove, a sleeping bag, a Mae West life jacket, 1,000 gallons of gasoline, maps, compasses, flashlights and signaling mirrors, and a canvas canoe with a paddle. Dog-sled equipment or outboard motors were included in special circumstances.

Then there was the stuff for the insurgency: a 30-06 rifle with 4x telescopic sight, a small calibre pistol fitted with a silencer, a sniper scope, a garroting wire (the steel cables thugs use to strangle people in mob movies), and explosives that could be used to demolish the cache if it was at risk of falling into enemy hands. There was also $500 in gold, or $5,000 in today’s dollars.

The agents were then divided into cells of six or seven, headed up by a civilian “principal,” according to documents. In the case of an invasion, the principal would go to the cache and begin work, sending his fellow agents on missions as the group deemed necessary. Some documents suggest that a major responsibility of the principals would be to facilitate mass escapes of American civilians from occupied areas; others say they would be on the lookout for American pilots shot down in combat and needing rescue. They were expected to stay in the wilderness for a long while: the caches could sustain a man for an entire year.

While the declassified documents make clear the contents of the caches and how they should be used, it’s less clear who was recruited into the operation. The names of agents are redacted in the declassified documents and all of the recruits—who would have been in their 40s and 50s when in the early 1950s—are likely deceased.

But background-check requests submitted to the FBI on a few of the recruits give glimpses of the kind of men who were recruited. There was Ira Weisner, a man of unknown occupation who was living in Rampart, Alaska, a gold mining town along the Yukon River. There was Guy Raymond, a heavy-set tin miner in Lost River, who was born in 1900 in Hardy, Nebraska. He had a tattoo on each arm—a dagger on the left and an eagle on the right.

Yet another background check redacts a name, but not the individual’s job: general manager of Reeve Aleutian Airways. The only person to hold that job was the founder of the airline, Bob Reeve, better known as “the glacier pilot.”

Reeve was born in 1902 in Wisconsin, and as a young man seemed determined to not die there. He enlisted in the army at age 15 to fight in World War I, then worked on merchant ships in China and the U.S.S.R. After returning stateside, he first learned to fly a Curtiss JN-4, a biplane also known as a Curtiss Jenny, and then took a job flying mail between Lima, Peru, and Santiago, Chile. That’s where he began flying a Fairchild 51, the plane he would fly for the rest of his career. His wanderlust unsated, Reeve stowed away on a steamer headed to Alaska, arriving there in 1932.

Over the next four decades, Reeve would become . He was given his sobriquet for his propensity for daring ice-field landings. He first made headlines when he got caught in a fog bank while flying a family across Alaska with an infant baby in tow. Reeve landed his plane on a frozen river and kept everyone alive overnight as temperatures plunged so low that a hot cup of tea left a few feet from the fire froze solid within a few minutes.

When Reeve’s daring exploits began making the newspapers, people began sending him fan mail. One of the letters came from a woman named Janice who grew up in a Wisconsin town just a few miles from where Reeve grew up. After some correspondence, Janice flew up to Alaska in 1935 to meet Reeve. By 1936, they were married. They would go on to have five children. In 1946, immediately after World War II, Reeve founded Reeve Aleutian Airways, serving as its president and general manager until his death in 1980.

Over his heavily documented career, he never let on that he may have been recruited as part of a secret anti-Soviet force in Alaska, his son, Richard Reeve, says. But it was definitely within the realm of possibility, he adds. His father was always very friendly with the security at Elmendorf Airforce Base. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” says Richard.

Operation Washtub was finally disbanded in 1959 due to the costs of retaining the agents (each one received between $2,500 and $3,000 a year—the equivalent of $30,000 in today’s dollars) and maintaining the caches, which took a pounding from the deep freezes and thaws of Alaska.

Deborah Kidwell, OSI’s current official historian, wrote last year that the caches “served peacetime purposes for many years to come.” The caches were turned into survival stores for downed aircrafts, presumably denuded of its sniper rifles and silenced pistols, not to mention the gold. By 1961 they were abandoned completely. An account published in another military history journal in 1988 claims many were “looted by trappers and others.” An attempt by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1989 to find them proved unsuccessful.

As for Bob Reeve, if he were involved in the project, he may have given a cryptic nod to Operation Washtub in the 1950s, when someone asked him whether Alaskans were afraid of the Russians, given that they could wave to each other just over the Bering Strait.

“Hell no,” he replied, according to his biographer Beth Day. “If we don’t knock ’em down like pigeons before they get across the Alaskan Range, we Alaskans, each with a half-dozen guns and ammunition, will just kick their teeth out.”

Or strangle them with a garroting wire.

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