Run the Red 2026

In the early evening of Friday, September 25, 2026, I pulled off the pavement between Farson and Atlantic City, Wyoming, and pointed my truck down a dirt two-track into the sagebrush sea of Wyoming’s northern Red Desert towards the base of Pacific Butte. 

I was headed to meet my fellow Wyoming Wilderness Association (WWA) coworkers and board members to support Run the Red, a “race for a wild Wyoming landscape.” The event began in 2014 as a way to celebrate both the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the 30th anniversary of the Wyoming Wilderness Act, and has taken place on Wyoming Public Lands Day since it was designated in 2019 by Governor Mark Gordon to coincide with National Public Lands Day.

I was excited to see the event in person, even if my first time attending would be made slightly bittersweet in the knowledge that 2026 would be the last year for the event, at least in its current format. I’d heard about the race, both from friends whose knees are much more capable than mine to tackle the significant course mileage, and from peers in the conservation community who lauded it as an advocacy-forward event, focused on connecting participants more deeply to their public lands and on inspiring an ethos of stewardship around those landscapes. 

I was also excited to explore Wyoming’s Northern Red Desert region for the first time. Known as the largest unfenced area in the lower 48, the Red Desert encompasses one of the last great intact tracts of high desert in the United States and is home to nine “Wilderness Study Areas” or WSAs, which are large, wild, roadless tracts determined through a national process to contain some of our nation’s best remote opportunities for solitude and recreation. I was eager to experience such an unlikely landscape’s expansive magic. 

When my truck finally arrived at the GPS pin that had seemed to just be floating in space on my maps app, a full moon was just rising, huge and low, above the badlands to the east as the sun set and cast a dusty rose glow from the west. An aggressive Wyoming wind was blasting unhindered across the treeless landscape, and our crew - hailing from Cody, Lander, the Tetons, and Laramie - retreated to tents and truck beds soon after dinner to escape it.

The next morning came quickly. In the pre-dawn darkness, we caravanned along more two-tracks, marked only in breadcrumb pins along my maps app, until we crawled up and along the ridge of Pacific Butte itself just as the sun crested the horizon. As we arrived at the site where we would assemble our mid-course aid station, the sky flashed a shade of 80s-jazzercise pink for a brief moment before it settled back down into the kind of blue hue that Rebecca Solnit would describe as the color of distance. 

The rest of the day was spent in a blur of course marking, bib number marking, Skratch powder mixing and cowbell ringing, until it was time to creep back down the steep, off-camber two-track into the flats, and make my way to South Pass City, a Wyoming State Historic Site, for the finish line celebration and sponsor booth village. 

At our WWA table, I chatted with runners, volunteers, supporters, friends, family, and even the occasional passer-by about everything from the practical logistics of submitting public comment in support of the Roadless Rule by the October 6 deadline, to the existential question of why Wilderness and wild spaces matter so much to our human psyches. I connected with other event sponsors, many of them also conservation organizations, and was reminded that a love for and deep desire to protect public lands might just be the single-most unifying thing that I and my fellow Wyomingites have in common.

That evening, our small WWA team treated ourselves to a hot meal in Atlantic City before heading to a new home for the evening at a BLM campground just outside of town. The full moon once again rose over the hill sheltering us from that incessant, but also comfortingly familiar, Wyoming wind, and we slept in a bit more peace because of it. The next morning, as I took my hot coffee for a cold walk, a storm that seemed to hint at winter’s arrival out in the distance reflected the rising sun back at me in the shape of a rainbow pointed directly at the yellow September aspens surrounding our camp. I drove away a bit later, after packing things up and saying my goodbyes, feeling scrubbed, small, and so very deeply connected to the world around me.

This is not an easy time to care about and know the necessity of collective care for our natural world, when so many of the powers that be - both in the current administration and in positions of power around the globe - seem only to care about harm for the benefit of a few. We are watching them let go of the things we know cannot get back once they are lost - things like intact habitat, pristine, roadless forests, and, maybe more devastatingly, our belief in our power to push back and persevere. 

But as the folks at the start line for Run the Red can attest, the hardest things we set our minds to are often the things that reward us most in the end. Call me a hopeless romantic, but I think that simply showing up is a practice of love, even if sometimes we take a wrong turn (SO sorry, bib 69!) and sometimes a pain-cave-induced moment of clarity sets us on a new course altogether. 

Showing up shows that we care. Showing up shows that we have not given in or given up. Showing up is potent. 

My biggest takeaway from Run the Red, therefore, is that I cannot stop showing up for the public wildlands that sustain me. And I know from our conversations that the participants felt the same way. So, even though this specific event will not be back in 2027, I am bolstered by the knowledge that race organizers and sponsors alike (it’s us!) are already scheming the next way to show up for landscapes like the Red Desert that deserve our attention most.