The wilderness debate. Rural road claims by the state and counties. Off-highway vehicle impacts. All were frontline issues when she took the job, and still are. In some ways, the level of acrimony even increased during the course of her tenure. And yet another thorny issue - fast-track oil and gas development - muscled its way into the mix.

Yet, few observers lay the continued stalemates at Wisely's feet. Friends and foes alike praise her professionalism and willingness to give all sides a fair hearing. Most recognize she had only a limited ability to solve long-standing disputes. And Wisely says she is departing Utah for the BLM directorship in Colorado feeling she got some important things done.

"There's still contentiousness," she said, "but we've come a long way."

Wisely was shifted as part of a larger BLM shuffle in which the current Colorado director was transferred to Nevada following the retirement of the agency's chief executive there. Wisely will leave her Utah post in October; current plans call for her replacement to be installed by the end of November.

Wisely, 55, came to Utah from the assistant directorship in Alaska in 1999, the final two years of the Clinton administration. Beginning in 2001, her marching orders from Washington changed markedly, owing to the Bush administration's emphasis on energy exploration and development. Wisely's job became even trickier at the end of that year, when Kathleen Clarke, the former executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, was tabbed by Bush to head the BLM.

"The challenge of working for Kathleen Clarke - who still has a lot of ties and interest in Utah - the administration making decisions behind her back and the political and cultural climate in Utah all combined to put a lot of pressure on Sally," said Martha Hahn, a former Idaho BLM director who now works for the Flagstaff, Ariz.-based Grand Canyon Trust. "When you've got all that going on, it's tough to get things done."

The Beehive State would be tough duty for a state BLM director under any scenario. The BLM manages 23 million acres in Utah, or about 42 percent of the state. Only Nevada has more BLM land. And a significant portion of that ground contains resources ranging from coal, oil and gas to rangeland. That creates an almost built-in tension between the BLM and local governments and residents over how those lands are managed.

Then there is the Wow Factor. Utah's BLM holdings also contain some of the most breathtaking natural scenery on the planet - the San Rafael Swell, Desolation Canyon and Vermillion Cliffs - that recreationists of all stripes want to access and environmentalists want to preserve.

"People feel very strongly about these places," Wisely said. "Everybody wants to weigh in."

And weigh in they have. Virtually every major interest group in Utah with a stake in public lands management has sued the BLM and Interior Department during Wisely's tenure, be it the state and counties over road claims, environmental groups over wilderness protection and OHV groups over motorized access.

While declining to point the finger at anybody specifically, Wisely bemoans what she calls a missing sense of pragmatism in the Utah land-use debates. Too often, she says, philosophies trump collaboration.

"If I have a disappointment - and a hope - it would be to have the public lands embraced as the incredible resource they are, by everybody," she said. "Sometimes it feels like we're fighting about it more than putting our heads together and figuring out the best way to move forward. We're at the point, quite frankly, where ideology is driving a lot of this - on both sides."

By nearly all accounts, Wisely has gone some distance to try to bridge the chasm.

"She's done more to try and open a dialogue with all the interest groups, including elected and state officials, than anybody in recent memory," said Lynn Stevens, the state's public lands policy coordinator.

"We've bumped heads with the BLM as an institution," added Stevens, who once publicly challenged the BLM by helping lead an unauthorized OHV event on federal land as a San Juan County commissioner. "But Sally has never been contentious. She's always been reasonable and sought solutions."

Added Scott Groene, executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance: "We've had state directors in the past that were hostile to the values of wildlife, archaeology and wilderness. In that sense, Sally was a step forward. She understood and appreciated the importance of those values. Unfortunately, the agency has largely not taken the necessary steps to protect them. But the real blame for that lies with the pressure from D.C."

Wisely is hardly without critics. Most recently, her letter threatening legal action against Kane County officials over their OHV sign-postings in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument sparked a fiery response from members of the Legislature and Attorney General's Office, as well as off-road groups.

"Sally's been open to communicating with us. She's been good to work with. But as far as leaving a legacy, I don't think the public land situation in Utah is any better than when she got here," said Mike Swenson, executive director of the Utah Shared Access Alliance, the state's largest OHV advocacy group. "The way she threatened Kane County was shortsighted and terrible."

Wisely also has taken hits over the BLM's collaboration with oil and gas company employees who helped expedite environmental studies to thin out the backlog of drilling requests in the agency's Vernal Field Office. Critics castigated the arrangement as a blatant conflict of interest.

Wisely will say only that, "Our people have done a tremendous job given the resources they have to work with. It's important to view this in the big picture. We understand that our decisions have impacts. But it is our lifestyles that are creating this energy demand."

BLM observers, though, believe Wisely was squeezed by an Interior Department that wanted the pace of energy exploration and development in Utah speeded up.

"I think she was trying to resolve the issue the best she could," ex-BLM director Hahn said. "The [BLM] could have resolved it by recognizing the imbalance of the demand versus the number of employees [in the Vernal office]. They could have given her some help, but they didn't. So it's a quandary. She had to find a creative way to solve the problem. It was no-win situation."

In the larger sense, says Sierra Club representative Lawson LeGate, "It must be a very demoralizing time for federal land management agencies. Before the Bush administration, public lands were managed on behalf of the people. Now, I think people can see that our public land resources have been turned over to the industries that exploit them."

If Wisely feels that way, she won't say. Rather, she calls herself a firm believer in the BLM's "multiple-use" mandate, and goes out the door satisfied she at least made a dent in Utah's perpetual public lands feuds - pointing to the BLM's improving relationship with local communities around the Grand Staircase monument as it becomes a growing tourist destination. She also cites an initiative to update all of the BLM's Utah land-use plans, many of which date back to the 1980s, and the designated OHV route system implemented in the San Rafael Swell.

Finally, Wisely points to the fledgling partnership between state, local and federal agencies to address natural resource issues of common concern - such as the effort to recover Utah's shrinking sagebrush habitat.

"We've got a long way to go, but it's going to end up being something that will have a real positive impact," Wisely said.

She hopes it's a start.

jbaird@sltrib.com

Sally Wisely

* Job: Utah BLM director since 1999

* Age: 55

* Next post: Colorado BLM director