Clay Bennett, 58, retired park ranger, nursing a Coors Banquet at the Mesa County harvest festival beer tent, was actively avoiding the city council candidate who’d been badgering him all afternoon to sign a petition he was convinced would kill the local ATV trails he’d ridden every weekend for 15 years. He’d left Wyoming after his ex-wife split for a 32-year-old rafting guide in 2011, built a one-room cabin 20 minutes outside Grand Junction, and spent most of his days fixing up old pickup trucks and pretending he didn’t care about the way everyone around him seemed to be fighting over every last scrap of the western slope he’d spent 32 years guarding. His left knuckle bore a thin, silvery scar from a run-in with a juvenile grizzly outside Yellowstone in 2019, his flannel was frayed at the cuffs, and he’d forgotten to put on aftershave that morning, so he smelled like sawdust and the peppermint gum he chewed to cover up the taste of the chew he’d quit two years prior on his doctor’s orders.
He leaned back to stretch his legs and knocked his beer bottle hard against someone’s forearm. “Shit, sorry,” he said, already bracing for a lecture from some tourist in Lululemon who’d yell at him for being careless. Instead, he heard a low, warm laugh. “No harm done. You’re still as clumsy as I remember, Clay Bennett.” He looked up, and his throat went dry. She was in a faded Carhartt flannel and scuffed work boots, hazel eyes crinkled at the corners, a smattering of freckles across her nose, and a tiny pinecone tattoo inked on the inside of her left wrist. She smelled like pine sap and lavender lip balm, and over the roar of the bluegrass band playing “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” 20 feet away, he could hear the faint lilt of the southern Colorado accent he’d know anywhere. It was Lila Carter, Tom Carter’s daughter. He’d last seen her when she was 16, showing up to their patrol cabin with Tupperwares of her mom’s chocolate chip cookies and begging them to take her on backcountry hikes. She was 37 now, and he’d heard through the grapevine she was a climate lobbyist based in Denver, in town to push for a permanent protection order for the red rock wilderness he’d spent half his career patrolling, the same order he’d been ranting about to his buddies at the diner for three weeks straight, convinced it would shut down every local outdoor recreation spot within a 50-mile radius.