Range Wars in Idaho Focus on Land Flanking Streams and Rivers

Peel away the emotions of ranchers, bureaucrats and recreationists and you’ll find the heart of the Idaho range wars--thin green oases flanking the rivers and streams that crisscross a barren area.

Nearly 12 million acres of Idaho is public range land, but the battleground is less than 1% of that--the 13,300 acres of lush wetlands called riparian areas.

They serve as protection for 75% of the area’s wildlife, filters that purify water for people and animals, and home to many species of fish. They’re the destination for most of the hikers, hunters, anglers and campers. They also attract most of the cows.

You can see the result at Hardtrigger Creek in Owyhee County.

Sagebrush and sparse desert grasses grow to the edge of eroded banks where the water table has dropped three feet because of grazing, leaving former wetlands dry even in spring.

“Hardtrigger is probably the worst we’ve got,” said Bill Reimers, a Bureau of Land Management range conservationist.

It’s a stark contrast to nearby Little Squaw Creek, where grazing has been limited to spring only. Lush rushes, cattails, willows and sedges line Little Squaw Creek, catching sediment, building up the banks and narrowing the river into deep cool runs.

The water table is rising again, keeping the area wet even in the heat of summer.

Range conditions overall have improved statewide, but the condition of these stream-side areas has lagged.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is reviewing its Owyhee Resource Management Plan. The fate of Hardtrigger Creek and hundreds of miles of other waterways will be among the hottest issues.

Compromise is hard to find where it takes so much land to raise cattle. Measures proposed to rehabilitate the wetlands have ranchers shaking their heads.

“If we’re forced to do that, we’re out of business,” said Richard Brandau, who has raised cattle in the area for more than three decades.

Dana Danzer, a Bureau of Land Management fish biologist in Boise, acknowledges it’s a tight squeeze.

“In some of these areas, you don’t have a lot of management options,” she said.

The remedy most often proposed is to limit grazing to the spring, when moisture is high, which allows the plants to grow back before the next runoff season.

Other livestock experts suggest heavy short-duration use to beat down banks made steep by erosion and to help seed the ground.

But in some cases the only way to get restoration is to keep the cattle out. That means erecting fences, at $3,000 per mile, or removing cattle from vast areas of land.

In the Owyhee Resource Area, which covers 1.3 million acres of public land along Idaho’s southwest corner, 469 miles of streams with fish and another 238 miles of streams without fish are in unsatisfactory condition, BLM scientists say. Only 43 miles of fishing streams and 36 miles of others are in satisfactory condition. Conditions on 378 miles are undetermined.

More than a century of overgrazing, as far back as the 1840s when thousands of pioneers brought stock through Idaho on the way to Oregon, has left most of the stream-side areas of southern Idaho in poor shape.

Richard and Connie Brandau’s future is directly tied to Hardtrigger Creek and the 25,000 acres of public land surrounding it. They reared two children at their house on Reynolds Creek, part of a 1,280-acre ranch that has been in his family since 1903. They have lived the history of public land grazing policy.

When they began, there wasn’t a fence between their spread and U.S. 95, 20 miles west. They and their neighbors let cattle loose on the public range in April and rounded them up in October.

In the late ‘60s, the BLM began dividing the range into allotments and divided different pastures with fences to help distribute the cattle more evenly and prevent overgrazing.

The Brandaus used to run 210 cattle on their private ground and public lands, but reduced their herd during drought. Their situation is complicated by the presence of 100 head of wild horses, which graze the area year-round.

“It doesn’t do us a lot of good to adjust our livestock numbers to protect the grass when the horses are out there all the time,” Brandau said.

Today the Brandaus are allowed to run 134 cattle on the public land for five months, barely enough to support them. Other ranchers run another 471 head of cattle in the area.

They have tried to work with the BLM to restore the stream. They even hired a rider to chase the cows out of the river bottoms.

But if Hardtrigger Creek’s stream-side wetlands are to heal, Reimers said, grazing will have to be limited to the spring in the stream-side pasture. And the other pastures need more rest too, so the whole watershed can return to a functioning stream system.

Brandau would prefer to develop watering troughs at highland springs, drawing cattle away from the creek.

But Reimers is skeptical.

“We have numerous examples of water development projects in Owyhee County where the riparian areas didn’t improve,” he said.

The water projects can cost thousands of dollars, which BLM doesn’t have. And with the prospects of even less grazing opportunity, Brandau isn’t interested in spending the money either.

U.S. Rep. Michael D. Crapo (R-Idaho) said the current system forces environmentalists and ranchers to battle it out in public meetings, court and congressional hearings. A better approach would be to work out their differences on the ground together.

“That is much more likely to result in proper protection of riparian areas that have increasingly escalated into battlegrounds staged by federal agencies,” Crapo said.