On a late summer day, Bureau of Land Management visual resource specialist Sherry Roche lugged a 50-pound plywood panel from a white pickup onto the bare hillside of Hubbard Mesa near Rifle, Colo. Others lashed it to the ground with climbing rope, then stepped back to see if its specially engineered pattern of pixels faded into the rocky shale outcrop.

The camouflage test was one of three series of field trials the agency and its partners completed this August and September in Wyoming and Colorado, in landscapes that ranged from mountain meadow, sub-alpine conifer woodland and sub-alpine aspen, to sagebrush steppe, scrub oak and piñon-juniper. They tested camo under sunny and cloudy skies. They scrutinized it from distances of 100, 200 and 400 meters, at a half-mile and a mile.

The patterns were inspired by military and hunting gear, but this camouflage isn't for uniforms. The BLM -- in cooperation with landscape architects from the Carbondale, Colo., office of Otak,  an engineering and design firm, as well as leading camouflage-design experts from industry and the U.S. Department of Defense -- wants to feather the distracting infrastructure of renewable power plants -- maintenance buildings and outbuildings -- into the background. Scenic impacts often heighten conflicts over development on public land, and the BLM hopes to reduce them. "We don't want to have a scarred landscape out there," says Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp. President Guy Cramer, who created the current design...

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