The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said Wednesday that it was deferring the auction of controversial oil and gas leases in the high desert Adobe Town area in southwest Wyoming.

The bureau's Wyoming office said that it is seeking guidance from the office in Washington, D.C., on "wilderness issues" and won't offer the 15 parcels at an auction in Cheyenne on Dec. 1.

Groups including the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance and Wyoming Outdoor Council had protested the auctioning of the leases. They pointed out that state and local officials oppose drilling in the Adobe Town area.

Mary Wilson, a BLM spokeswoman in Cheyenne, said the bureau deferred the leases not in response to environmentalists' concerns but because BLM headquarters has been "fine-tuning" guidelines for how to manage wilderness-type areas.

"We want to make sure if that guidance is imminent, we don't want to step outside of it before it's issued," she said.

Adobe Town, a remote desert badlands with colorful mazes of narrow canyons, is home to a variety of animals including burrowing owls and ferruginous hawks, the largest hawk species in North America.

The Wyoming Environmental Quality Council has designated nearly 300 square miles encompassing Adobe Town as a "very rare or uncommon" area. The Sweetwater County Commission has adopted a resolution recommending no future leasing in the southern two-thirds of that area, including those proposed for leasing.

"This is a great decision by the administration to pull back from a commitment of some our most fragile and spectacular landscapes to industrial developments," said Erik Molvar, of the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. "Perhaps this is a sign that the new administration is going to be listening to local governments like the Sweetwater County Commission in ways that the previous administration did not." Continued...