When you enter the Cathedral now (except during certain special events) you will encounter The Council of Pronghorn, an art installation–part of The Value of Water–created in response to environmental devastation in Wyoming by coal and oil interests.

The piece, created by writer/activist Terry Tempest Williams and Wyoming artists Felicia Resor and Ben Roth, consists of 23 pronghorn skulls (for the 23 affected Wyoming counties) mounted on lodgepole pine fence posts and arrayed in a circle. Tempest Williams said, “When we had it completed, and it was outside Ben's studio, we weren't sure if it worked or not, if people would get it. Then we looked outside and saw a bunch of kids dancing in the circle, and shouting, 'If only there was a fire!'”

Pronghorn Antelopes are not true antelopes, but migrating ungulates unique to the American West, the last surviving species of the family Antilocapridae, known for their speed and their amazing eyesight. Pronghorns can spot movement up to three miles away, and due to the placement of their eye sockets can see almost completely behind themselves. They've been roaming the West since the Pleistocene age. Their sleek skulls and sweeping horns are beautiful and haunting. When you stand inside the circle of skulls, itself inside the stone pillars and dome of the Nave, the grandeur and mystery of the Cathedral space are amplified in intensity and in reverence; the awe you feel is the presence and power of Time.

The Council of Pronghorn is a result of a road trip the three artists took, after winning a grant from Invoking the Pause (a small environmental grants program, which has also funded the Cathedral in hosting this installation). Ben was skeptical at first. “I don't pause,” he said. But the trip through a landscape devastated by mining, whole communities living with contaminated water systems, opened his and the others' eyes to a horror they hadn't fully appreciated. “All of our lives changed as a result,” Terry said. “It was like seeing the nerve system of the land exposed. All those wells piercing the earth, injecting venom. It reminded me of a sculpture I'd seen once of a tiger pierced with many arrows.that image has never left me.”

“This is where I grew up, where I live,” said Ben. “I realized I had to do something.” The piece was three years in the making, and has spent the last year at the Jackson Hole Community Center for the Arts.

For The Value of Water exhibition Ben and a friend drove the piece to New York, arriving on the Sunday Hurricane Irene made landfall here. Mid-afternoon they were in lower Manhattan with the 23 “windhorse” skulls in his truck. With a 60 mph wind at his back, he arrived at the Cathedral in four minutes.

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