Diane interviews tomorrow at the hospital. It would be her first nursing job since graduation. Born in Wisconsin twenty-five years ago, she has been on the road for a year. Alaska, Utah, Colorado -- lots of great country. Climbing, backpacking, seeing the world.

Now she's in Arizona and might stay. Something about Flagstaff, she says, her voice trailing off. I know THAT story. Our town is a crossroad for wandering spirits. Many come and go. Some stick. It's a cultural crossroad too -- Anglo, Native American, Hispanic. That's part of its draw.

I came here thirteen years ago. Though I leave, sometimes for months at a stretch, I am home when I see the broad shoulders of the San Francisco Peaks. My friends here feel the same. Some are newcomers like me. Others have lived here all their lives. Their families have been in northern Arizona for generations. Or centuries.

Diane's been here three weeks. She's been staying next door to me in Government Prairie, west of town. We live in trailers warmed with wood and high country sun. There's no electricity. We haul water and melt snow to drink and wash.

The city is 20 miles away but tugs at our lives. Diane has decided to live in town. For now. Maybe a while. The hospital job, if she gets it, will keep her in Flagstaff at least a year.

She says she hates leaving the quiet and space of the prairie, its uncluttered view of the Peaks, rising a mile above the surrounding ponderosa forests and red rock desert. She'll miss the small economies of life off the grid. But she has friends in town. She needs work. And there's the climbing gym and yoga classes.

"Oh," she says, "and I want to ski the mountain."

I ask what she knows about the San Francisco Peaks. "Not much," she says. "They're the highest in Arizona, They're beautiful. I want to to find out more."

And what does she know about the ski center? Again, not much. " I have a couple friends who work there," she says.

Does she know that the spruce-fir forest high on the mountain is rare in these parts? That in the Southwest, this is hugely valuable turf, ecologically speaking? She's heard a little about that.

Diane has a science brain and background, so I ask what she knows about island biogeography, the study of where plants and animals live, and why. She's heard the term. Patches of habitat can be viewed as islands. These strings of islands constitute avenues of genetic exchange, as David Quammen has written about so clearly and forcefully in Song of the Dodo. They are highways where species can truck hereditary information and influence back and forth across the scattered geographic areas they inhabit, improving their chances for survival, keeping extinction at bay. Stress on any one island weakens the whole archipelago.

The Peaks are such an island. In the Southwest, most of the country is relatively flat, and lies below 8,000 feet of elevation. "Sky islands" like the Peaks are small, few, and far between, making them critical to the continued survival of high-elevation species that live in the spruce-fir forest and the even rarer sub alpine habitat that lies above it. Imagine the plateaus and deserts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah as sea water. See the islands?

She nods.

"So," she says, "islands that get diced up by roads and stuff become even more fragmented. A plant or animal living on the island becomes more likely to disappear ..."

Bingo.

I tell Diane that the latest dicing has been planned for the San Francisco Peaks. The Arizona Snowbowl, with Forest Service backing, wants to dig 14 miles of pipeline for artificial snow making, a ten-million gallon holding pond, cut more than seventy acres of new ski runs, gouge new building foundations into the mountain's skin.

"Which is why the Snowbowl will never get a dollar of my business," I say. "And there's more." I tell her about my Navajo friends, about the Hopi, Hualapai, Supai and White Mountain Apache people I know, how the mountain is sacred to them all. How it has been so for all time.

These friends tell me that skiing on the mountain, making snow up there from treated waste water -- sewage -- insults them and their religious beliefs. I understand this argument, though I doubt I will ever comprehend the enormity of their hurt.

I'm a white man, and I've only lived here a short time. But I know my adopted home's history well enough to say that if I were Hopi or Navajo, I'd be furious. Let's face it, they are in some ways conquered peoples. Wars were fought, and they lost.

Given that, and knowing that the Peaks are to my Native friends what a church, altar or mosque may be to you or me, how could I support snowmaking, or the presence of any commercial recreational operation on the Sacred Peaks?

I can't. No argument that I've heard persuades me otherwise, and I've listened carefully, Economic and social justifications for recreational development on the Peaks simply don't work. The mountain is sacred. My friends deserve respect.

I tell all this to Diane. And, I point out the trailer window, at the west-facing slopes of the Peaks. "I think that's what's holding you here." I see the gears turning. She is weighing the evidence. Will she buy a lift ticket, or fight?

Michael Wolcott lives and writes in Flagstaff, Arizona.