Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo is on the verge Of achieving his first victory for the collaborative process he considers a fairer and more efficient process for resolving the deep differences westerners have about public land management.

The Senate is expected to approve his Owyhee Initiative bill this week and the House and President George Bush are expected to follow. It will complete a collaborative effort put together by Owyhee County in 2001 with environmentalists, ranchers and others who share the wide open canyonlands in Idaho southwest corner.

For Crapo, the Harvard-educated Idaho Falls lawyer who used to be the leader of the Idaho Senate, collaboration is a core value. He picked up the idea when he was in the U.S. House after reading Dan Kemmis’ book, “Community and the Power of Place.”

He was less interested in the details of the deal than that the parties could work together to craft a deal that would eventually be able to pass Congress. The original agreement was built over a couple of years. Former adversaries like rancher Ted Hoffman and environmentalist John McCarthy talked their way through the issues for hours and got to know each other along the way.

McCarthy, Fred Grant and others met with every single rancher in the county cutting separate deals to add more wilderness, close a road or remove cattle from a wilderness area for good. The ranchers agreed in exchange for land transfers, places to move their cattle or federal payments, But most of all, the ranchers wanted to be assured they were going to get a square deal from the Bureau of Land Management when it decided on their grazing permits.

Jon Marvel and the Western Watersheds Project had won lawsuit after lawsuit forcing them to cut back their cattle numbers. The spread of juniper across the landscape was also taking away grazing land. They agreed to a scientific review process and an institute to study the problems facing the sagebrush steppe on which their livelihood and wildlife depended.

Marvel and his allies didn’t like many of the deals that were cut. Motorized user groups never seriously considered approving more wilderness.

Sportsmen were unhappy that roads to some of the best hunting grounds in the area were closed. And national environmental groups were concerned about the precedents some of the deals might set. Then-Congressman Butch Otter chided ranchers for not cutting a better deal.

That’s when the collaborative process got its real test. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee staff, working with Grant, Owyhee County rancher Brenda Richards, Craig Gehrke, Idaho representative of the Wilderness Society and others rewrote the bill.

Language carefully crafted to meet the fears of ranchers and others was tossed. The bill was more like a traditional land management bill and less like a local agreement reached around a table after lunch.

The collaborative group held together. Chad Gibson, had spend 31 years as the county ag agent with the University of Idaho’s Cooperative Extension Agency helping shepherd ranchers' through range techniques that kept them in business. He went back to the ranchers when the committee had done it work, explained the changes and assured them they were not going to be left high and dry.

What Crapo did was listen and keep people talking. He and his staff spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours with the collaborative group in a very hands-off manner.

Many participants complained that Crapo didn’t do enough and that he could have gotten a bill sooner had he revealed the realities of what it would take to get a bill through Congress earlier. But when his fellow senator, his political ally, the man he defended to the end, Larry Craig threw roadblocks at the bill’s passage in 2006, it showed that Crapo’s patience was warranted.

Just as Fred Grant, the county advisor who dreamed up the collaborative initiative, recognized all the way back in 2001, it would take their environmental and tribal allies and their Democratic supporters to get a bill through Congress.

Now Crapo can celebrate and justifiably tout his collaborative process and values as valid. He’s already working in north central Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest on his second effort.

And he’s lending a hand to Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson to pass his Boulder-White Clouds bill. I suspect he won’t have to wait another seven years for his next success.

Here is what I wrote about this in 2003:

By Rocky Barker
The Idaho Statesman
Most Idahoans will never see the sculpted canyons and mahogany-covered highlands of Owyhee County.
The Owyhee and Bruneau rivers run through some of the most remote country in the lower 48 states. This hidden treasure also has become one of the West’s most contested places.
Conflicts over land started between Indians and miners. Later, cattlemen battled sheep ranchers. Environmentalists have fought a two-decade battle to protect Idaho’s cross between Utah’s canyonlands and Kenya’s Serengeti, challenging the U.S. Air Force, ranchers and motorized recreationists.
For ranchers the current fight is over a way of life and lately they have been losing. President Bill Clinton nearly declared the area a national monument as he left office in 2001. In response, county leaders sought to find a solution on their terms. The Owyhee County Commission brought together representatives of the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups with Owyhee cattlemen, outfitters, motorized users and others under the auspices of the Owyhee Initiative.
Remarkably they are making progress, building a legislative proposal that would keep ranchers on the land, protect wilderness and keep local people involved in the decisions that shape their lives. All of their futures and competing values are intertwined with this wild, untamed place. Their common goal is to keep it the way it is.

The heart of nowhere
A convoy of two Bureau of Land Management four-wheel drive trucks drove three hours south of Boise and turned West into an unbroken sea of sagebrush. Here is, as National Geographic Adventure described it, “The Heart of Nowhere.”
There are places farther away from roads. None are harder to reach and have fewer year-round residents.
Here the Owyhee and Bruneau rivers carved deep verdant canyons, dark, cold and fertile. This is the place where modern-day mountain man Claude Dallas hid out and killed wardens William Pogue and Conley Elms when they caught him poaching.
In this dry desert only dedicated ranchers survive the harsh seasons of Mother Nature and the legal challenges of opponents who want them gone. These hidden canyons harbor rare plants, desert bighorn sheep and hardy boaters.
Hunters chase deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, sage grouse and chukars. Motorcylists bounce through its dry washes along the Owyhee Front.
In Owyhee County, road is a relative term.
Two tracked paths enter this largely uninhabited expanse of several thousand square miles. But they are not maintained, rarely driven and only survive because of the harshness of the ecosystem.
The convoy had come into the East Fork for a survey trip. Zuckert and her colleague Frank Jenks, are two of the three recreation planners for the BLM in the Owyhees. They were checking out the canyon with a reporter, photographer and Will Whelan, governmental affairs director for the Nature Conservancy of Idaho, in tow.
This road, crossing the Duck Lake Indian Reservation and heading toward the East Fork of the Owyhee River, gets more traffic than most, at least during the run-off season. April and May, among the most unpredictable weather months of the year, is the only time when the desert rivers flows are high enough for navigation.
Even this road might see only a couple of trucks a day during the peak season. Drivers who brave its ruts, rocks and holes risk a long walk out.
The trucks turned down into the canyon and the road became even worse. Steep as steps into a basement, even the highest truck bottomed out as its wheels fell into ruts carved by the brief but heavy torrents of rain that wash the canyons.
The lack of maintenance is at least partially by design. As long as drivers face regular flat tires or even broken axles the Owyhees will remain remote, said Judy Zuckert, the BLM recreation planner who led the survey trip into the canyon.
“The Owyhee canyons are well-defended,” said Zuckert.
Across the Owyhee highlands you can see more than 40 miles of flat unbroken sagebrush desert. Visitors might see a herd of antelope, or an occasionally sage grouse, but otherwise it look like one big empty rolling expanse.
Then you drop into the canyon, an angular landscape of vertical walls and hidden alcoves.
“Its like hallways opening into stadiums,” said Whelan. “Suddenly you see an expanse of cliffs and high spires.”
They paddled large inflatable kayaks through a place seen by only a few hundred people a year.
“I can’t imagine there is ever more than 30 people on the East Fork,” Zuckert said.
Small in stature but strong-willed, Zuckert came to the BLM from the National Park Service. After working at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise she came to Owyhee County and fell in love with the landscape.
Even though it was the peak of the season they saw only a man and a woman in an inflatable boat the entire three-day trip. Here they find world-class solitude surrounded by majestic scenery.
“This is not a monotome,” Whelan said. “it’s a patchwork of many different plant communities and topographies.”

A special place
To boaters the Owyhee and Bruneau Rivers are legendary whitewater. Five-mile Rapids on the Bruneau and the Widowmaker on the Owyhee are two of the toughest rapids in the West.
Edward Abbey, author of the environmental classic “Desert Solitaire” called the Owyhee one of the great rivers of the world. The East Fork flows through the most isolated stretch of river. The upper section can only be negotiated with kayak or canoe because it is so narrow.
In the lower sections outfitters carry boatloads of whitewater rafters during the brief spring season. Floating on both the Bruneau and Owyhees remains unregulated due to the low numbers of floaters. Contrast the East Fork to the Grand Canyon where nearly 800 people spend every night during the floating season.
Zuckert, an avid boater herself, was on a waiting list for 11 years before floating the Grand Canyon last summer. Today the wait is 18 years.
Even with the poor roads interest in the Owyhees is growing. It may be just a matter of time before floaters face the same kind of complex, intensive management found on the West’s popular whitewater destinations.
“One of the things we’ll probably be doing is a permit system that would restrict numbers,” Zuckert said.
Two California bighorn sheep ewes with lambs trotted through towering spires above the East Fork. They are down from their peak, and biologists aren’t sure why. The canyons are home to one of the largest populations of California desert bighorn sheep anywhere, which attract hunters from around the world.
Part of the ecological value of the canyonlands is the contrast between dry and wet. More than 1,200 miles of streams, springs and seeps spread their waters to surrounding riparian areas that sustain 275 different plants including seven rare plants. The deep canyons protect many of these areas, keeping them cool and moist even in the heat of the summer.
No where is this more evident than the Tules, a huge oxbow wetlands that encircles a large rock formation. Here in the middle of the desert grows a grove of dogwoods. Ducks nest in the marsh.
Once the East Fork floated around the spired rock. But one day it broke through, like a dam bursting, leaving the wetlands that today support a rich, diverse community of life.
“I remember being struck, walking up the slope above the Tules, with the incredible diversity of flowering plants that you could only see if you saw them up close,” Whelan said. “If you look at that hillside from a distance it would look like sagebrush and grass.”
The Owyhees’ sagebrush desert represents the largest and perhaps best example of intact shrub-steppe ecosystems in western North America. Globally such areas only exist in the American West and central Asia. There sage grouse and a dozen other species survive in the best numbers in Idaho. Pronghorn antelope, only found in the West, thrive.
No where else in the world has stands of mountain mahogany as large and diverse as the Owyhee uplands. These are the trees that give the landscape an African savannah feel.
Idaho’s oldest forested communities — as old as 1,600 years — cover portions of the uplands. These western juniper woodlands are home to more than 95 wildlife species including trophy elk, rare spotted bats and 27 nesting birds.
Volcanic ash beds’ harsh condition support entire communities of rare and endemic plants. Overall, 31 rare plants occur in the Owyhees.
“You go from the subtle and sublime of the flatlands then drop dramatically into its awesome canyons,” said Marty Marzinelli, a Hewlett-Packard Corp. engineer who has walked hundreds of miles through the Owyhees. “They are both unique places.”

The threats
Marzinelli had been walking through the Owyhees to survey the potential for wilderness designation. A volunteer with the Sierra Club, he has watched as change has crept into the Owyhees. Motorists have pioneered hundreds of miles of new roads and trails into the backcountry in the last decade. More than 150,000 new residents have streamed in the surrounding counties since 1990, placing new pressures on the region.
Ignored by all but a dedicated few — like Marzinelli — until the late 1980s, the canyonlands became famous at the center of a fight over U.S. Air Force low-level training flights. That fight ended a few years ago with federal legislation. Afterwards, the Air Force made a deal with environmentalists over the number and timing of overflights.
Jets were nearly a daily occurrence while floating the river. Sonic booms echoed through the canyons bringing a start to man and animal alike.
The Air Force, environmental groups and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game continue to monitor the effects of Air Force training on the area.
The former combatants now meet annually to adjust management when necessary.
Now that the Owyhees have been discovered, they face new threats. The area has been featured in magazines like Sunset and on network television. The Owyhees are only a few road improvements away from becoming the next best place to be.
With more people come obvious threats like over use and development. But increased invasion by people brings natural invaders as well.
These ecological threats are more complex and insidious. Cheat grass, an alien plant dries out early, burns more frequently than native grasses and can eliminate the sagebrush and shrubs vital to the survival of sage grouse, raptors and dozens of other species.
Already thousands of acres has been transformed from rich sagebrush-bunchgrass land to low-productivity grassland. Even on the East Fork, Whelan found patches of noxious weeds, which have found their way into the otherwise pristine ecosystem.
“There are forces at play here that will mean it will not stay the same unless we become very smart and very effective in dealing with issues such as fire and invasive weeds,” Whelan said.
Whelan, a Yale-educated lawyer, is one of the people engaged in a dialog over how to protect all of the values of the Owyhees. His group, the Nature Conservancy of Idaho owns 45 Ranch, located at the confluence of the South Fork and Little Owyhee rivers.
The ranch consists of only 240 acres of private land, but comes with 65,000 acres of coveted federal and state grazing allotments. Since its purchase in 1996, the Nature Conservancy has used it as based to built protection of rare plants and animals throughout the Owyhees.
One of its biggest concerns is the role of fire in the transformation of sagebrush steppe to grassland.
Fire has placed exactly the opposite effect in the juniper woodlands of the western side of the Owyhees. The suppression of fire and the the removal of fine fuels caused by livestock grazing has allowed junipers to expand by 90 percent in the last century to formerly productive grass and shrub lands. Once junipers grow so big so they develop a closed canopy forest they push out the unique mahogany and sagebrush communities.
Managing fire, keeping it out of some areas and bringing it back to others will be the trick to keeping the Owyhees healthy for both natural and human communities.
Even more controversial is how cattle grazing is managed in the area. Poorly managed grazing and historic overgrazing has left hundreds of miles of desert streams in poor condition, suffering from poor water quality and high temperatures that threaten rare redband trout and other aquatic life.
Ranchers say they are reversing the trends and beginning to improve range and wetland conditions. But in the harsh realities of economics and the desert landscape healing takes time.
Meanwhile Marzinelli is spending his weekends walking from the Nevada border to the Bruneau Sand Dunes surveying possible wilderness areas. “This is the place in my heart,” Marzinelli said. “It’s wild, its natural, it has an extraordinary amount of life.
“That’s why I want it protected.”
The Nature Conservancy and Owyhee Ranchers have formed a group called the Borderlands Trust, which hopes to set up grass banks, where ranchers can graze cattle while resting their range.
“We think everyone has an interest in the health of the landscape,” Whelan said.

The first residents
The Owyhees have been the home of humans for at least 15,000 years. These ancestors of the Shoshone and Pauite Indians left the richest concentration of archaeological sites in Idaho. Bureau of Land Management archaeologists say it may be the greatest contiguous landscape of archeological, historical and cultural sites in the West. More than 500 sites have been identified and more than 3,500 cultural resources, including the historic ghost town of Silver City are spread across the county. Yet large portions of the Owyhees have never been surveyed.
To the Shoshone and Paiute Indians, many of these sites remain culturally and religiously significant.
“We are a living culture,” said Ted Howard, cultural resources director for the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes, headquarter at the Duck Valley Indian Reservation straddling the Nevada border. “To native Americans their is no prehistory only continuous history.”
Archaeologists will tell you the Shoshone and Paiute ancestors came to the Owyhees anywhere from 7,000 to 700 years ago. Howard and most tribal members believe differently.
“Our stories have always said we have been in the Great Basin since the beginning of time,” Howard said.
Historically, the Shoshone and Paiute were hunter-gathers who traveled widely through Idaho, Nevada and Oregon following seasonal food sources. Salmon swam up the , Snake, Boise and Owyhee River, all the way to what is today reservation land.
“We came up here for the salmon,” Howard said, “Until the dams stopped the salmon from reaching our area.”
In 1866, the Shoshone and the Paiutes signed the Bruneau and Boise Valley treaties, ceding much of Southwest Idaho to the federal government while retaining hunting and fishing rights and moving to Duck Valley. But Congress never ratified the treaty, Howard said.
“There has never been an exchange of land title,” Howard said. “the land still belongs to Indian people.”
Tribal members continue religious rituals are sites throughout the Owyhees. These sites are important to the tribe.
However, all of the Owyhees is sacred grounds to the Shoshone and Paiute.
“Everything out there plays a part in the well-being of the whole,” Howard said. “The water, the rocks, the plants, the animals, even the smallest insects.
“Its all a tightly woven quilt and humans are a part of all of this not above it.”
Their voice is important. They played a key role in negotiations with the Air Force, winning concessions on limits to low-level flights over reservation land.
They continue to push to keep people from overrunning their sacred land
When the BLM wanted to make modest improvements to the road into the East Fork canyon, the tribe weighed in. the BLM had the funding this year.
“We’re supposed to talk to the tribes some more,” Zuckert said.

Miners and ranchers
Donald MacKenzie, leader of the British North West Company led a trapping expedition through the Owyhees in 1811. In 1826 Peter Skene Ogden of the Hudson’s Bay Company, another trapping and trading group, gave the area its unique name. He named the area after three native Hawaiian trappers were lost in the area in 1818-1820, using a popular spelling of the time for Hawaii.
A southern alternative to the Oregon Trail passed along the Owyhee Front near Murphy and thousands of wagons passed through the area from 1849 through the 1850s with hundreds of thousands of head of livestock on their way to Oregon.
Silver was discovered in the headwaters of Jordan Creek in 1864 and Silver City in the Owyhee uplands grew into one of Idaho’s early boom towns peaking at 3,000 in the late 1800s. Inevitably miners and Indians clashed. In July, 1864, Michael Jordan and James Carroll, who were part of the original group of miners who discovered gold, were killed at a site along what is now known as Battle Creek. The mines eventually closed and Silver City today is a ghost town.
Silver City Blacksmith Cornelius Shea drove a herd of 1,200 cattle to Owyhee County from Texas in 1869, starting the Owyhee County cattle business. Shea bought the cattle for $11 a head and sold them for $45 a head.
Ranching went up and down throughout the 20th century keeping tight-knit communities like Bruneau and Pleasant Valley, on the Oregon border alive. Stockman raised cattle, horses and sheep and the conflicts over land continued.
Cattle ranchers protested the grazing of rangeland by mostly Basque sheep ranchers and violence broke out several times. One case of trespassing against sheepherder Secundio Omaechevarria in 1914 went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was decided in favor of the cattlemen.
Along the East Fork, weather-worn log and stone cabins are all that remains of these hard-working settlers who took on the Owyhee wilderness and lost.
Today, the sheep herders are all but gone. But new conflicts continue.
Since the 1980s Owyhee ranchers have faced steadily increasing environmental limitations on their operations. The BLM has cut grazing range use by 35 percent to meet its own regulations and the Clean Water Act. Designation of wilderness study areas has limited the options of ranchers to build new fences and water projects that could help them to reduce grazing impacts.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill has ordered the BLM to implement its cutbacks by the end of 2003 after lawsuits by the Western Watersheds Project and the Committee for Idaho’s High Desert . These cutbacks could put several dozen families out of business unless solutions are found.
Meanwhile the economics of cattle has changed, making it even harder for ranchers to eke out a living. Americans are eating less beef and paying less for it.
Up to now cattle grazing and environmental protection have been competing values in Owyhee County. The passions to preserve both values run as wild as Owyhee whitewater and the emotions run as deep as its canyons.

The lines are drawn
Along the North Fork of the Owyhee, a cattle guard is all that is left of a 4.5 mile fence that forms the dividing line between ranchers and environmentalists. Here Owyhee County ranchers have been fighting for their way of life.
Tim Lowry and his neighbors built the fence the middle of the North Fork of the Owyhee Wilderness Study Area in 1990 so they could rotate their cattle around the public range to limit stream damage. Federal officials, sued by environmental groups, tore it out the next year.
Since then, forced by new federal court orders, the BLM ordered Lowry and others to move their cattle off the range early to protect the streams.
The fence is a symbol of the federal government’s dominance over their everyday lives. For environmentalists like Jon Marvel it represents a welfare system that subsidizes ranchers to degrade federal lands. For wilderness advocates like John McCarthy of the Idaho Conservation League, the fence is a way to get Lowry and other ranchers to help him get more wilderness.
The ranchers of the tight-knit Pleasant Valley community on the Oregon border see themselves preserving more than their livelihoods but also their community. In nearby Jordan Valley, Ore. there used to be four gas stations, three cafes and two motels.
Now there is only one cafe and two gas stations. The Pleasant Valley School, where Lowry’s grandchildren attend and his wife Rosemary works, dropped from two teachers to one with an aide now that attendance is dropping.
“That school is like the canary in the coal mine,” It’s like a barometer of the health of the community,” Lowry says.
They don’t want to see their valley grow. They want it to stay the same, an agricultural landscape where ranchers and their families live their lives away from the hustle and bustle of the outside world.
Lowry is a tall, slender, soft spoken cowboy with a long handlebar mustache, who reads 17th Century Dutch theology for entertainment. He grew up near Bend Ore on the ranch where his father, Bill, worked as foreman. Bill Lowry returned to Jordan Valley in 1966 and bought a ranch.
The fence story, told with emotion by ranchers, underscores their disdain for the the BLM who controls grazing on Owyhee County’s public lands. It also explains why ranchers and county officials are attempting to go to Congress to craft a compromise with environmentalists.
Tim Lowry bought his own ranch in 1984 with pastures and federal grazing ground spread out 40 miles from his base ranch southeast of Jordan Valley in Idaho. It that included the public land along the North Fork and the previous owner warned him the BLM was looking at making cutbacks in grazing.
His troubles began in 1988 when the Bureau of Land Management ordered him to remove his cattle from the public land in July in a emergency closure forced by drought. He was baling hay when he got the order.
“They told me I had five days to get every cow off the allotment or they would impound them,” Lowry said.
With the help of neighbors who finished baling and stacking his hay, and some flexibility from the BLM, he rounded up his cattle and made it through the year spending more money for extra feed.
The BLM initiated a round of talks after that between Lowry and the other ranchers and environmentalists seeking a grazing management plan all could live with. By 1990, they made progress but couldn’t strike a deal. The BLM proposed a three-year rotation grazing plan they thought would meet their laws and allow Lowry and the other ranchers to continue albeit with a shortened season and some reduced grazing.
For it to work, the now infamous fence was proposed. The agency released a plan that was appealed by Lowry and environmentalists. A portion of the fence would lie within the wilderness study area and under existing policy, no new structures could be erected in a wilderness study area after Sept. 30 1990.
A BLM official told Lowry they had four days to build the fence to meet that deadline. He and his father were trailing their cattle off the allotment to private land. This also had a deadline.
He met with Mike Stanford, another rancher with cattle on the range, and discussed their options.
“He said “‘we’ve got no choice, we’ve got to give it a chance,’” Lowry remembers.
Leaving his eldery father with the cattle Lowry and Stanford began the seemingly impossible task of building a 4.5 mile fence across a rugged landscape. The first day they made little progress.
“We were pretty discouraged,” he said.
As he told the next part, his eyes misted up and he struggled to compose himself.
“People were coming from everywhere packing post packers and wire stretchers, Lowry said. Men, women, kids bringing up the tail end.
“That’s one of the reasons I believe in providence.”
In three days they finished the fence and installed the cattle guard by the deadline.
“Without neighbors I don’t know where I’d be,” he said.
Unfortunately, the BLM did not have the authority to let them build the fence. Once its grazing plan was released opponents have 30 days to appeal when no action can be taken.
Faced with its illegal act and two appeals, the BLM withdrew the plan. Without a plan, the fence was illegal.
On Aug. 30 1991. Administrative Law Judge David L Hughes ordered the fence removed. BLM firefighters came in and removed all but the cattle guard.
“We had no rationale for the fence to be in there so we had to take the fence out,” said Barry Rose, a BLM spokesman.
Even if Lowry and the agency could reach an agreement now, the area is designated a wilderness study area. Until the final fate of the area is resolved no new roads, fences or water projects can be built.
Lowry wants to rebuilt the fence and maybe add a few water tanks so his cattle don’t camp in Juniper Creek, trampling the banks and sullying the water. If groups like the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club agree to that he’s ready to make the North Fork a permanent wilderness area.
“I can live with the wilderness if we deal with the management question,” Lowry said.
These are the kind deals that will decide whether Owyhee County officials, environmentalist, ranchers and other can craft a bill to protect the area most agree is of national significance.
“The bigger the wilderness the easier it will be for us to convince our constituency to support fences and water projects,” said John McCarthy, Idaho Conservation League conservation director.
Jon Marvel is executive director of the Western Watershed Project, whose lawsuits forced Lowry’s cattle off the range early. The Hailey architect is one of the leaders of the West-wide campaign to end cattle grazing on federal range.
He doesn’t support the ICL-Sierra Club-Wilderness Society effort to negotiate with ranchers like Lowry.
He views cattle as an alien species whose presence on the land is incompatible with protecting environmental values like water quality and endangered species.
He said he will oppose any effort to rebuild the fence or trade water tanks for wilderness.
“Wilderness with new pipelines. fences and cattle is a dead duck in Owyhee County,” Marvel said. “We’ll stop it”
Lowry and the others who graze in western Owyhee County have been unable to meet weak, interim standards for range recovery, Marvel said. He doubts they can protect the streams and riparian areas from their cattle even with fences and water projects. Even if they can, he thinks its wrong for the government to pay for it.
“The question should be: Why are these people treated differently than anybody else?” Marvel said. “How many other lifestyles are subsidized other than agriculture?”
He sees Lowry’s lifestyle and values as one big myth.
“Ranchers contribute less than one and half percent to the annual costs of the five school districts in Owyhee County,” Marvel said. That Pleasant Valley school Mr. Lowry is so fond of could not exist without the taxes paid by residents of Boise, Couer d Alene and Idaho Falls.
Caught in the middle between the two groups, BLM staff were frustrated and even angry the talks between environmentalists and ranchers initially left them out.
“BLM is being made a scapegoat for people’s inability to agree,” said Rose. “Our job is a lot easier when people resolve their differences themselves.”
If Ranchers across Owyhee County like Lowry get the fences and water tanks they want can the BLM work out management plans that meet the law and prevent Marvel from stopping them with lawsuits?
“Water projects alone won’t solve the problem,” said Jenna Whitlock, Owyhee Field Office manager. “It will take active management, a presence on the land, to work.”

Seeking peace

Ranchers and Owyhee County leaders have fought a running retreat since the 1980s that had delayed federal grazing cutbacks until the turn of the century. But Winmills’ decisions had finally boxed ranchers in. With cattle prices depressed it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Then, as if to add insult to injury, environmentalists mounted a glitzy national campaign to convince President Clinton to set aside 2.7 million acres, an area larger than Yellowstone National Park, as a national monument. They pushed hard but in the end, Clinton said he didn’t have enough time.
Still, the message was clear.
“I predict within the next decade the Owyhee canyonlands and uplands will be protected by Congress as a national monument,” said Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
The Owyhee County Commission order its attorney, Fred Grant, of Nampa, to look for some kind of legal protection for the county’s beleaguered ranchers. Grant, a former Mob prosecutor in Maryland who said he later represented some of the same kind of people as a defender, was a savvy attorney.
He had put together the county land use ordinances in the 1990s as way to give local officials more say in federal decisions. He also helped make the case for ranchers claiming private water rights on federal grazing lands.
He was a friend and supporter of Rep. Helen Chenoweth. Most important he is a man widely respected among Owyhee County’s ranching community
He returned to them without a silver bullet. The only way they were going to get ranchers breathing room was to pass federal legislation, Grant told the county. The only way to get federal legislation passed is to cut a deal with environmentalists.
“The Owyhee Monument was within 24 hours of designation last time,” said Grant. “The next time it’s going to be put at the top of the list.”
A year ago the county reached out to the Nature Conservancy, the Wilderness Society and the Idaho Conservation League to join other interests in drafting a bill. The Commission also sent letters to Idaho’s Republican congressional delegation asking for help. Only Sen. Mike Crapo responded.
Together ranchers, environmentalists, motorized users, outfitters, Air Force officers and others have met throughout the county learn together each other’s values, their needs and limits. The process has been slow but the participants are making progress.
“We eat together, we work together,” have have grown to understand each other,” Whelan said.
Ted Hoffman, president-elect of the Idaho Cattle Association, a veterinarian who represents the Borderlands Trust in the initiative, agrees.
“If you would have told me a year ago I could be working with people like John McCarthy I would have said you were crazy,” Hoffman said. “What’s crazy is I kind of like him.”