Photographer's eyes on reservation oil rigs

In 2009, the first new oil exploration on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation began, just a few miles from Glacier National Park and the Rocky Mountain Front.

East Glacier photographer Tony Bynum was there to record the scene. Over the past two years, more well rigs have gone in, and roads have been carved across once vacant prairies.

Bynum continues to take his pictures. He charters flights to shoot the development from the air. He's set up a Web site with an interactive map that shows well locations and photographs. To date, he's spent about $15,000 of his own money on the project.

"The purpose is to give people a sense of the drilling and the proximity to Glacier National Park," he said last week.

In one scene, a drill rig reflects into a pothole lake with the Park's Rising Wolf Mountain in the background. In another, a bison stands in the shadow of a drill rig and the Rocky Mountain Front.

Bynum knows he can't stop the drilling, but he can tell the story of the boom that appears to be coming, and he hopes to exact some reaction from it.

"If people can see this, maybe they'll start asking questions and making phone calls," Bynum said.

He's worried not just about aesthetic impacts, but culture and wildlife as well. For example, it's been documented that grizzly bears travel far out on the prairie grasslands. Bynum questions whether their journeys will be safe if they run into an oil truck.

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates as much as 180 million barrels of oil and 903 billion cubic feet of natural gas could be trapped in two different rock formations east of the Park.

For Darrell Norman, there are more questions than answers with the drilling. An artist, Norman owns the Lodgepole Gallery and Tipi Village. Last spring, an oil company began exploration about a quarter of a mile from his home.

Norman doesn't own the mineral rights under his property, and the company wouldn't tell him much about the exploration. Norman said over the course of the past year, rigs would go up and come down.

Most oil exploration in the area uses a technique called fracking, where water, sand and other chemicals are used to create cracks in rock formations thousands of feet underground. The cracks release the oil.

Fracking recently was confirmed as the probable culprit for groundwater pollution in a Pavillion, Wyo., aquifer, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report.

Norman questions who will profit from energy development on the reservation and wonders if royalties from oil will ever get to tribal members. He also notes that companies need surface rights-of-way to go across private property. Rights-of-way payments are small and come with big impacts - new roads, noise and truck traffic.

So far, he and his neighbors have resisted allowing roads across their property.

"We don't want them going across here," he said. "It's a pretty piece of property."

More than 50 wells are planned for the reservation, but both Bynum and Norman have heard that as many as 500 wells eventually could go in. If that happens, the reservation could look like Williston, N.D., where the oil boom is in full force and men live and work in camps.

So far, Bynum said he's documented about 20 wells, but Norman said everyone is tight-lipped.

"When they don't talk, it makes you suspect and skeptical," Norman said.

Bynum said he plans to shoot photos for years to come. The photos will have a lasting impact, he hopes.

"Memories are all that is left when you no longer can see something in person," he said on his Web site http://tonybynum.com. "Images sharpen and stimulate memories. Images are likely to persist through longer spans of time and are more dependable than memories."