Not long ago, on U.S. Highway 12 in Montana, a giant, empty blue box sat at the Lodge at Lolo Hot Springs. Seven miles from the Idaho border, it had ended up beside the horseshoe pit and the badminton courts. The box had begun its journey in April, 2011, when a Canadian company called Imperial Oil, in which ExxonMobil holds a majority stake, sent it along a route from Idaho to Alberta. The box was meant to approximate the size and weight of so-called mega-loads, which carry oil-extraction and -processing equipment from the Pacific Northwest into northern Alberta; the goal, according to Imperial, was to “demonstrate the safe transportation of oversized shipments with minimal public disruption.” On the second night of its journey, the box knocked out a high-voltage power line, cutting off electricity to roughly thirteen hundred Idaho homes and businesses.

By then, the box was the subject of lawsuits in both Montana and Idaho. The first, brought by Idaho Rivers United, a conservation group, alleged that the box’s itinerary was an industrial intrusion on federally protected land and that the U.S. Forest Service, by allowing the trip, was violating federal environmental law. (Full disclosure: a former colleague of mine works for Idaho Rivers United.) Before the box reached Montana, the state’s Missoula County and a coalition of environmental groups sued the Montana Department of Transportation, in part for allegedly failing to conduct a full environmental study, as required by state law. They demanded that the box be stopped, and, in July, a Montana judge, Ray Dayton, granted their wish. His preliminary injunction held the box at the border for fourteen months (Imperial Oil fought the injunction), and locals nicknamed it Babe the Big Blue Box.

“It created quite a stir with the environmentalists,” said Roger DeJonge, whose security company was contracted by Imperial Oil to guard the box. “They picketed the thing and made quite a stink. People would go by screaming, but we had two guards on it, 24/7.” DeJonge, who has since been hired to manage the Lodge at Lolo Hot Springs full time, said that Imperial paid the property owners six thousand dollars a month for the parking spot. An Imperial spokesman, Pius Rolheiser, would not confirm the amount but acknowledged that money changed hands. “I guess you could call it a lease arrangement,” he told me.

Problematically, the Pacific Northwest and northern Alberta are separated by the Rocky Mountains, as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark discovered in 1805. Lewis wrote, “The pleasure I now felt in having tryumphed over the rockey Mountains and decending once more to a level and fertile country where there was every rational hope of finding a comfortable subsistence for myself and party can be more readily conceived than expressed.” More recently, energy companies have been seeking the same triumph along Highway 12, which traces part of Lewis and Clark’s route. The Idaho section of the highway, a scenic two-lane road, runs parallel to the pristine Clearwater and Lochsa Rivers, winds through the Nez Perce tribal reservation, crests the continental divide in western Montana, and eventually meets the open prairies that run north to Fort McMurray, Alberta, western Canada’s newest oil boomtown. With recent advances in mining and processing technology, the Canadian oil sands are shifting the balance of global energy production, giving Canada the world’s third-largest known reserves of recoverable oil, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Paired with the oil and natural-gas boom in the northern plains of the United States, the oil sands could provide North America with energy independence and free the U.S. from Middle Eastern entanglements.

The mounting political pressure to extract the sands’ contents has been most evident in the debate over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring Canadian oil to refineries in Houston. But, as Ryan Lizza wrote in the magazine, the process of separating Alberta’s black gold from its sandy substrate is notoriously difficult, requiring more energy and heavier industry than conventional oil production. Imperial Oil’s solution was to use the Columbia River and Snake River to ship huge pieces of Korean-built equipment by barge, from Vancouver, Washington, to a small agricultural shipping port in Lewiston, Idaho. From there, the pipes, racks, and other assorted materials would be bundled onto the mega-loads—taller, wider, longer, and much heavier than the “wide loads” that are common on U.S. interstates—and travel east along Highway 12. Maneuvering massive machinery through the highway’s narrow river canyons would make for a slow trip, but it would be faster and cheaper than the alternatives: shipping equipment through the Panama Canal to ports in the Gulf of Mexico or the Great Lakes, a boat ride to Canada’s Port of Churchill, in the Arctic, or building new manufacturing facilities in the United States or Canada. Idaho Rivers United alleges that, by allowing the road’s transformation into an intercontinental conduit for heavy industry, the Forest Service violated the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which states that certain free-flowing American rivers “and their immediate environments shall be protected for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations.”

Before Imperial carried out its plan, another oil company, ConocoPhillips, attempted to ship two enormous, Japanese-built coke drums to one of its refineries, in Billings, Montana. The endeavor was unrelated to the oil sands, but critics worried that, if ConocoPhillips succeeded, other companies would feel emboldened to take the same path and continue on to Alberta, creating an endless caravan of industrial shipments to Canada along Highway 12. The drums, which were twenty-six feet high and weighed three hundred and fifty tons each, were cut into four pieces and moved in two convoys. A Harvard-educated historian named Linwood Laughy and his wife, Borg Hendrickson, who live along the highway, were outraged by the disturbance—the transport, which moved at a snail’s pace, completely blocked the road. In August, 2010, with legal help from Advocates for the West, a nonprofit environmental-law firm in Boise, Laughy, Hendrickson, and another neighbor on Highway 12 filed a suit against the Idaho Transportation Department, arguing that, by permitting the mega-loads, the agency had violated its own regulations regarding oversized vehicles.

Laughy and Hendrickson soon became the leaders of an anti-industrial grassroots movement. Hendrickson set up a Web site, fightinggoliath.org, which provided updates on the court battle, and sent newsletters to thousands of subscribers. But, that December, a hearing officer made a recommendation in favor of ConocoPhillips, and the state permitted the trucks to legally crawl along Highway 12. Within six months, Imperial Oil was spending roughly thirty million dollars on road improvements along the highway—burying some power lines, raising others, widening shoulders, and reinforcing bridges—to support more than two hundred Korean-built mega-loads bound for Alberta.

Yet Laughy and Hendrickson’s case, combined with the others against Imperial the following spring, made it difficult for the oil companies to proceed. Judge Dayton’s ruling in favor of Missoula County and its affiliated environmental groups demanded that Montana conduct an environmental-impact statement before granting further mega-load permits. In June, 2012, Imperial abandoned Highway 12 entirely and settled on a contingency plan, “at considerable cost and complexity,” Rolheiser told me: the company would disassemble the Alberta-bound mega-loads (some already parked in Lewiston, others still in Korea and Washington State) and ship them via interstates to Fort McMurray.

The big blue box—Imperial’s test run—was recycled for scrap, and, by February, 2013, the company was sixty-one per cent over budget for the first phase of its oil-sands development. From now on, Imperial is ordering its heavy processing equipment from Canadian manufacturers; the Highway 12 quagmire, Rolheiser said, “was a significant factor in our decision not to procure modules from outside Alberta.”