THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 19
of himself on his sled on the summit of
Mt. Elbert, Colorado’s highest peak, also
off limits to motorized transport.) Con-
servationists and editorial writers de-
nounced him, as did three snowmobile
trade associations, in a joint statement.
“Stupid behavior for social media is never
OK,” the head of one of them said. Lesh
had lost even the sled-necks.
Other provocations and federal
charges ensued in the months that fol-
lowed. By last summer, Lesh had be-
come a Rocky Mountain pariah. Col-
oradans circulated a petition to have his
business license revoked and to have
him banished from the state. Death
threats piled up, targeting not just him
but his child (he doesn’t have one) and
his dog. He posted them all on his In-
stagram: “I hope you starve to death and
your whole family dies”; “You have TINY
DICK ENERGY”; “Lock your doors to-
night”; “Go suck a fuck.” People pro-
tested outside Virtika’s headquarters and
spat on Lesh’s car. Three of his spon-
sored athletes ditched the brand. In the
local press and on social media, people
unearthed earlier sins. Some years back,
Lesh had been arrested for arson, after
setting fire to a tower of shopping carts
and plowing through the blaze in an
old Isuzu Trooper for a Virtika video.
The same year, he got a ticket from the
Colorado Division of Wildlife for chas-
ing a moose. A Reddit user with the
handle FoghornFarts (actually, a chem-
ical engineer and his wife, a Web de-
veloper, in Denver) described witness-
ing his deplorable behavior on a 2019
trip through the Galápagos: Lesh and
a girlfriend had apparently sneaked away
from their guide to get photos of him
astride a giant tortoise. Lesh’s Instagram
posts prompted the Ecuadoran author-
ities to threaten to revoke the guide’s
and the outfitter’s licenses. One head-
line called him “the worst tourist
in the world.”
In October, Lesh posted a photo on
Instagram of him standing ankle-deep
in a beloved and federally protected
high-alpine lake near Aspen, before a
backdrop of the Maroon Bells, the
state’s most recognizable peaks. He’s
seen in profile, semi-crouched and
naked, shorts bunched below his knees.
Against the reflection of the sky on the
water, one can make out what appears
to be a descending turd. “Moved to
Colorado 15 years ago, finally made it
to Maroon Lake,” the caption read. “A
scenic dump with no one there was
worth the wait.”T
he big outdoor-apparel companies
like to proclaim their conservation-
ist values and their stewardship of the
wild places that their products enable
humans to visit. Patagonia, the North
Face, Arc’teryx, R.E.I.: such brands have
gone to great lengths to assure their cus-
tomers—as purchasers of factory-made
petroleum-based clothing and as guests
in places that would be better off with-
out them—that they are part of the
solution. Sometimes the companies
come by the rectitude honestly, and
sometimes it’s just marketing, or
green-washing. Either way, the pre-
sumption is that the public wants, or
can be made to want, to buy goods from
a company that takes pains to protect,
rather than poop on, the natural world.
Lesh has stalked a customer more
like himself: the gearhead, the flouter
of pieties, the exploder of gas tanks.
“Sure, that’s what appeals to a wider de-
mographic,” he told me, when I asked
him about the Patagonias of the world.
“But, me being a little guy, it’s not in-
teresting or unique. You’re not getting
noticed being super ‘eco this’ and ‘eco
that.’ It’s also just not my thing. I got
sick of all that crap when I lived in Boul-
der. It was just a bunch of Northern
California, Audi-driving trustafarian
kids, what I call ‘hippiecrites.’ Go get
your seven-dollar mocha latte with the
bamboo straw and think you’re saving
the world.”
For decades, the conflict over the
country’s public lands has followed fa-
miliar political and cultural lines: on
one side, miners, loggers, ranchers; on
the other, hikers, tree huggers, dances
with wolves. Ford versus Subaru, gun
rack versus fly rod, dam versus kayak.
Despite all the griping and the apoca-
lyptic talk, each side usually got some
of what it wanted. The wildlands and
open spaces are still vast; so are the clear-
cuts, oil fields, and uranium pits. You
could almost pretend there was enough
country to go around. But that delusion
has become tougher to sustain as new-
comers have poured in from the coasts
and money has got its way, and as the
stories people tell one another abouthow to live, work, and play in these for-
merly rugged places have grown to
reflect the national discourse, and all its
polarizing baloney, rather than any se-
rious consideration of common sense
or the greater good.
The pandemic has accelerated the
crowding and brought on intimations
of a reckoning. Bumped out of cities,
jobs, ruts, and schools, people have taken
to the road and, in many parts of the
West, overrun campgrounds and trail-
heads. Van-lifers and bucket-listers flaunt
their roseate pretenses on social media,
luring others with their filtered, unpop-
ulated sunrise shots of Yosemite or Zion,
while the locals, their trout streams now
bumper to bumper with drift boats, talk
grimly of Rivergeddon. Many of them
moved there to get away, and now the
get-away is moving in on them.
Colorado’s I-70 corridor, which runs
from Denver through the Front Range,
past Vail to the Colorado Plateau, is
probably the busiest, most domesti-
cated stretch of the mountain West—
heavily contested ground. A fair por-
tion of it is occupied by large second
homes whose owners, when they come
around at all, do so by private jet. The
association of conservationism with
wealth and privilege has created an
opening for the Internet troll for whom
the landscape is not so much a liveli-
hood as it is a backdrop for nihilistic
tomfoolery and self-promotion. Rocky
Mountain high: a green screen for a
goad. A crisis of ecology gives rise to
a comedy of manners.
Maybe there is room, in a land of
double standards, for some nose-thumb-
ing. The night before I flew to Denver
to meet Lesh, around Halloween, I
flipped through the new catalogue for
Stio, a small skiwear company based in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming. On page 54,
there was a spread depicting two fair-
haired women with a herding dog in a
snowy field. The caption read “Owner
of In Season baking, Franny Weikert, and
Ellen Stryker hang dry a batch of reus-
able bread wraps for a fundraiser in Teton
Valley, Idaho.” I could suddenly see the
appeal of plowing a Trooper through a
flaming tower of shopping carts. I thought
of Edward Abbey, the high-country scold
and original monkey-wrencher, who was
notorious for chucking his empty beers
out the window of his car. “Of course I