Owyhee Canyonlands protection effort remains in limbo

The Owyhee Canyonlands area encompasses millions of acres along the Owyhee River on the borders of Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. The land is rugged and remote and beautiful, and efforts to protect it in some way have dragged out for years.

There were pushes for the last two Democratic presidents to designate the area a national monument and most recently, a bill to protect over 1 million acres of the land as wilderness failed in Congress at the end of last year. We traveled to the area and talked to people about the land and the efforts to protect it.

We stopped in Jordan Valley and talked to Mindy Kershner, a lifelong Jordan Valley resident, rancher, and owner of the Ranch Hand Hardware & Mercantile. Then we traveled down to Birch Creek Historic Ranch on the edge of the river to talk to Tim Davis, executive director of Friends of the Owyhee. We spoke to rancher Elias Eiguren on his family’s land in Arock. And then we talked to Reginald Sope, an elder of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes who lives near the head of the canyon in Nevada.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Owyhee Canyonlands encompass millions of acres along the Owyhee River on the borders of Oregon, Idaho and Nevada. The land is rugged, remote and gorgeous. Efforts to protect it in some way have dragged on for years. There were unsuccessful pushes under the last two Democratic presidents to turn the area into a national monument. Last year, a bill to protect over 1 million acres of the land as wilderness failed in Congress.

Earlier this fall, we traveled to the area to talk to people about the land and these efforts to protect it. Our first stop was in the tiny community of Jordan Valley, where we stopped in and I struck up a conversation with the owner of one of the town’s few businesses.

Mindy Kershner: ‘m Mindy Kershner. We own the Ranch Hand Hardware in Jordan Valley, Oregon. We’re a cow calf operation, raised here my whole life.

Miller: And what can people buy? What can’t people buy in this store?

Kershner: What we can’t buy?

Miller: Because I’m looking around and there’s a lot of things here.

Kershner: We do try to carry just a little bit to get you by. There’s hardware, grains, groceries, knickknacks, clothes, your hunting/fishing license, cold beer, pop. We try to carry a little bit of everything, fun stuff for the kids.

Miller: So how has Jordan Valley changed, if it has, in the decades that you’ve lived here?

Kershner: Oh gosh, when the mine was going, we were huge. We had lots of businesses. We were booming. And then when the mine closed, everything just dissipated. We’re one of three businesses still alive in town.

Miller: How much tourism do you see these days?

Kershner: Quite a bit, more so all the time, with more publication of what’s out here. And then everybody’s always wanting to get away, so we do see a lot.

Miller: Are you at all worried that this place is going to be loved too much? That more and more people are gonna come and that the land can’t sustain it, in terms of tourism and recreation, and rafters, or does that not worry you?

Kershner: No, I really don’t. The worst part I see about it is the disrespect people show for the land.

Miller: What do you mean by that? What kind of disrespect do you see?

Kershner: Gates being left open so cattle get out. Problems happen there. When the roads are really bad, they tear ‘em up. They go off road, which tears up the landscape. Leaving their trash. I don’t go into people’s backyards and spin brodie’s or tear up their backyard. And we feel like this is our backyard and we don’t own it by any means, but …

Miller: These are public lands that the public has not necessarily always taken care of?

Kershner: Right. We love it. We love our landscape. We love to enjoy the beauty of it. And I love that people come here. And when they come in the store, I tell ‘em, “You gotta go see this, you gotta go see that.” There’s beautiful landscape here and it’s a great place.

Miller: Every now and then there’s talk about what kind of different designation or protections there should be for the Owyhee Canyonlands in this area. What do you want [people in DC] to know about people here, life here and land here?

Kershner: I’d like them to know that the cattle aren’t bad. I’m all about stewardship. We believe in that extremely. We do all we can for our wildlife. And I feel like the keeping of cattle off the range is a huge detriment. We need the grazing to keep the fire down, to keep the plants healthy. And we can all coexist with our recreationalists. We do this all the time. We just ask for a little bit of respect from the recreationalists. But I love to get out and go just as much as the town people do. I love to enjoy our scenery.

I believe that we all need to protect it, not just the government. We, as individuals, it’s our responsibility. We’re the guys out there on the land. We need to protect it. The four wheelers, the side-by-sides, pick up your trash. Take it back with you. Don’t start fires when you shouldn’t start fires. It’s a team effort. If we would all respect the land then the government wouldn’t have to jump in and say, “we got to designate this.” Because I believe that it really hurts it when we designate it as non-use.

Miller: Thank you very much.

Kershner: eah, you bet.

Miller: That was Mindy Kershner, a lifelong resident of Jordan Valley. She’s a rancher and the owner of Ranch Hand Hardware & Mercantile.

From Jordan Valley, we headed down a long, dusty, windy road to the Birch Creek Historic Ranch. It’s on the edge of the Owyhee River. We found a picnic table and sat down with Tim Davis. He is the executive director of the nonprofit Friends of the Owyhee.

Tim Davis: I grew up on the edge of the Owyhee in a little town called Adrian, so the Owyhee was out my back door my entire life. And the first time I camped in the Owyhee region, I was 2 months old. I have camped out there every year since. As a preteen to teenager camping out there, running up and down the hills exploring, the sense of adventure, the imagination running wild of what this place is.

As I got a little older into my later teen years, I started having an interest in the human history out here. So it’s kind of a little side hobby. I just started wanting to learn more about the human history of this landscape. As my life moved on and I went into careers, I found time to dig into that more. I started getting more interested in the ecology, the geology of this landscape.

Growing up here locally, I didn’t really have a conservation mindset – I’ll just put it simply that way. I remember at one point kind of bad-mouthing conservation movements. And then as I learned more and understood how wild this place is, how important this place is, I did a 180 view of how special this place is in that respect. As time went on and I started getting more involved in the idea of what the future holds for the Owyhee, I started a friends group, Friends of the Owyhee, in 2015. We’ve seen a lot of avenues for us to help out in the land management aspect, just little things that we can get people out to get their hands dirty, give back, focus on the recreation impacts and opportunities, but also talk about the policy of this land as well.

Miller: When you said that when you were younger, you’d bad mouth conservation, what did you think conservation meant and what didn’t you like about what you thought it was when you were younger?

Davis: It was a big misunderstanding, I think, and there’s a lot of that that goes on in the world. But it was really just about them locking us out. We don’t get a say in what goes on out there. But as I’ve gotten more involved, it’s not about locking people out. It’s not about locking up land at all. It’s about keeping it wild and remote for our future generations to see, as we’ve seen. It’s about putting more focus to that land but still allowing the people to be there at the same time. It was kind of a misunderstanding growing up that it’s just getting locked out of land, which is not the case at all.

Miller: It’s interesting as you’re saying that … I mean, the word you use is that they are “locking” us out of land. So was there also some sense that this movement came from outside of Malheur County or outside of the Owyhee region?

Davis: Yeah, there was some of that growing up. In a bigger spectrum of just the Owyhee region. Just that movement, yeah.

Miller: This came from Salem, Portland or DC, but not from here?

Davis: Yeah, exactly. And as I got more involved in understanding what the ideas are for this land, it made sense. There is a local voice in this. There’s always local voices in how things are shaped, and that goes to the BLM policy and planning. That’s public input. It is a huge part in BLM planning. And when anything happens on the land, it does go through a public process. So people are involved. It’s just those [who are] not really paying attention, don’t realize that at times.

Miller: So how would you describe … It’s a challenging question to ask because the size of this region is so immense: 9 million acres …

Davis: It’s 9 million acres in three different states. It’s Oregon and Washington management, it’s Idaho BLM, and then it’s Nevada BLM, and then it’s the district level. Even though it’s such a big landscape and it’s all BLM, it’s different district offices in different states. So there’s other creating political aspects to it as well.

Miller: So if you take a big, zoomed look, how would you describe the health of the landscape, the ecosystem right now?

Davis: There’s a lot of improvement we could do. There’s a lot of science saying that there’s areas that are not healthy out here.

Miller: In what ways are areas not healthy?

Davis: With the invasive species of cheatgrass and medusahead rye are some of the big impacts. There’s a lot of reasoning and it depends on who you talk to as to why. How do we try to get in front of things? Like there’s certain things that we’re never going to be able to fix. It’s changed forever, but how do we manage it as such.

Miller: What do you see as the areas where there’s the most agreement and room for cooperation or rowing in the same direction, even among groups who may have very different overall points of view or perspectives?

Davis: Yeah, It’s pretty simple. We all want to see a healthy ecological landscape out here. We want to see it stay wild, remote and rugged as we’ve seen it, and [as] we want our future generations to see it. We want to see not a lot of change in the way things are done, more or less, out here, but we want to see things get more improved on health and on the impacts of people coming out. How do we address that and how do we create opportunity with that as well, for the communities in Malheur County at the same time? So it’s about really finding balance on the people’s front. But also, we want to see it also become more ecologically healthy at the same time. And that’s where we all agree on.

Miller: Even, even as we’re talking, I think our mics are picking this up right now. My ears certainly are. There’s some OHVs. What does OHV stand for?

Davis: Off-highway vehicle.

Miller: There were more than a dozen jeeps meeting up and maybe they’re driving away. So how common is this?

Davis: This is becoming a more and more common thing out here. This area is becoming more known in the social realms of social media and the tools of satellite imagery. People are looking out here and there’s groups that come out and go on day drives together, like seeing a dozen or a dozen-and-a-half jeeps just together. There’s a couple of side-by-sides that are cruising around down here. And we’re in a pretty remote spot, yet there’s pushing a dozen-and-a-half to two dozen people down here right now and this is pretty far out there.

So, how do we address the amount of growth on the doorstep of the Owyhee around the Boise area with the influx of people coming out here? It’s all of our public land. We all have the right to be here and explore it. But how do we create the infrastructure to handle that at the same time and not cause more ecological damage in the long run?

Miller: How big a population increase has the Boise area seen in recent decades? That’s the closest big population center to where we are right now. Way closer than Portland, Sacramento or something.

Davis: We’ve seen about 120% growth in 30 years – which is huge. And then the planning and management of recreating in this land has not changed in 30 years. The plans have not changed in 30 years. So we need to address this now, before areas get closed or things like that, which nobody wants.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the resources that the Bureau of Land Management is currently deploying, towards the kind of landscape preservation that you really care about?

Davis: The Oregon part of the Owyhee is managed under the Vale District BLM. They manage 5 million acres of public land just in this district. But in that district – and I talked about it a little bit ago – there’s very few paved road miles. It’s three hours from their district office to the southern end. So, you put in time restraints and being able to stay in the field into that perspective, how do you get out and really do a lot of work when you’re already 50%-plus understaffed [and] you’re under budget? Financially, they need more funding to manage these areas, just on the logistics aspect alone. It makes it really hard for our land management agencies to manage these public lands when they don’t have the staff or the funding to do it. It’s hard.

These people are the people who live in these rural communities. I’m talking broad, not just Vale anymore. I’m talking about all of the West here. These staff live in these communities. Some of them are the lifeblood of the community in certain communities. They’re the ones doing community events after they’re off shift. They’re the ones coaching the kids’ teams. Investing in our public lands and the management agencies have a huge connection back to these rural communities and right here is a prime example of that.

Miller: The pattern we saw politically over the last about 10 years, is that in the last year, the last couple of months of a Democratic president’s presidency – 2015, 2016 for Obama, and then for Biden, just this last year – there was a push among some folks to have the outgoing – or maybe outgoing, in the case of Biden – Democratic president declare a national monument here, a kind of unilateral action as opposed to congressional action. That did not happen either time. The most recent time when that didn’t happen, so in the last nine or 10 months, has that changed the way people here are thinking about the issue?

Davis: Honestly, I’m gonna go back a little further on this. So yes, there was a national monument push at the end of 2015 and Obama, and there was a lot of political pushback on that. And it could have almost been ... There were other things that happened nearby, in another county next door, that may have caused it not to happen. We’ll just put it that way.

Miller: Are you thinking about the Occupation?

Davis: Yeah, because that happened right at the same time. But as we went forward, the positive outcome of that is, in 2019, Oregon Senator Wyden announced that he wanted to bring a collaborative group together. So the summer of 2019, myself, a few other conservation group leaders, a few local ranchers, we all sat down at the table together. And we met every week of 2019 in Ontario. We came up with a very collaborative solution that would protect 1.1 million acres as wilderness out here, broken into, give or take, 27 units of wilderness – so roads [bordering] them all. And there were things that both sides had to work on together to find a collaborative solution. It was very, very middle ground. Everybody agreed to it.

That bill is still alive today. It’s been reintroduced four times, with little variations over time ...

Miller: A version of that bill did pass the Senate last year.

Davis: Yes, it did pass the Senate. So at the end of Biden’s administration, in the last year, there was a push for a monument that mirrored the legislation because we knew that legislation still could pass through the Senate and the House – and it did pass the Senate. But we also knew the odds were not high, so we’re like, “well, let’s put out the idea for a national monument mirroring the boundaries of the wilderness proposal and try to mirror as much of the language as we can.”

This conversation of protection in this land has been going on strong since the late ‘80s. And in just my own history research, the first documented language of protecting the Owyhee goes clear back to 1903. There’s a document from then that says this place needs to be a game reserve or a wilderness. In 1935, it was the second largest roadless area in the United States. So the conversation of protecting this landscape goes back 100 years. And when we pushed for a monument to go forward, it was like, if we can get wilderness, great. If we can get a monument, great. We’re just trying to permanently protect this landscape for our future generations, as I talked about earlier, to keep it wild, keep it rugged, keep it as we’ve seen it, for our future generations to experience the same as we have.

Every time a movement has happened on talk of protections in this landscape, the conversation gets a little further along than the last time. Eventually, something is going to happen out here. And getting a form of protection would also make it easier in the management of this land because we have the wilderness study areas, we have the areas of critical environmental concern, we have lands and wilderness characteristics. So you’ve got a lot of different policies. And if we can get it narrowed down to one policy instead of three, it’s gonna be easier to also manage this landscape as well.

Miller: That gets to a little bit of maybe answering this next question. What actually would change? Because you just outlined a lot of existing policies under different federal laws. Whether it’s a monument based on wilderness designation or the designation itself, what would actually change?

Davis: Well, it would get the wilderness study areas out of this, more or less, limbo status. It’s not true wilderness, which then is very black and white by the Wilderness Act about what can and can’t be done out here. Grazing is written right into the Wilderness Act, so there’s no change in that aspect. It would be more focused on health, maybe people recreate out here a little more and more focused on that. And that’s either path: a monument or wilderness.

Very little research has been done out here already. On the archaeology side, I think only 5% to 10% of the area has been surveyed. The ecological aspects, because it’s so far and remote, not a lot of research has been done into that aspect either. The geology is pretty misunderstood out here. So some form of protection could help get more research done out here. It could create new businesses. It could create an economic input to Malheur County. In the bigger picture of protection, it’s keeping it wild like it has been, keeping it as it is for our future generations to see, keeping this wild, remote, rugged landscape as it is forever.

Miller: Tim Davis is the executive director of the nonprofit Friends of the Owyhee. We talked along a stretch of the river near the Birch Creek Historic Ranch.

We’re gonna hear from Reginald Sope now. He is an elder of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes who lives near the head of the canyon in Nevada. I asked him how he would describe the landscape for people who’ve never seen it in person.

Reginald Sope: I would say, prepare yourself, brace yourself, because there’s a beauty within. A lot of people would say it’s kind of like a wasteland or empty land that you can’t really do nothing with. It’s scattered with rocks and terrible terrain, and everything. But on the other hand, through nature, it has its own beauty. And in order to see that, you have to be there to witness it. To me, it shows the true sense of America, the beauty, the freedom in the wide openness.

Miller: Can you describe your tribe’s history with the Owyhee Canyonlands area?

Sope: With my tribe’s history, it’s the Shoshone-Paiute. They’ve roved all the way through from the Yellowstone area onto the Oregon coast. The Canyonlands have been pristine since the beginning of time. They used that for cover in the later part of the 1800s when we had the Bannock War. And then that served as a natural covey to help our people, the women and children. In wartime, they had to go and survive there.

Also, the salmon used to be abundant. This was the one of the main streams that flowed into the Snake and into the Columbia to where we had salmon, right here into the Nevada portion of this area. There’s evidence, through the pictured graphs, the petroglyphs, and also the scatters of the obsidian, different sorts of obsidian.

So therefore, to us, it’s our homeland. And with myself and my family, I’m a traditional man. I do our ceremonies, so I highly encourage our youth. Family wise, I take our children, anywhere from 5 years old on, out there for a couple of nights of camping, telling them the stories of certain areas where our people camped and where this happened or that took place. There’s a lot of stories from our end that we do tell the people who we take out there.

Miller: [Rooster calls in background] I’m curious, as you’re describing it – and as we’re hearing those roosters – talking to young people now, 5-year-olds or up, when were you taken to that land for the first time?

Sope: I was pretty much raised in a traditional way, and therefore, I heard a lot of stories until I was about 5 years old. And from there, we went out camping and harvest, because we do have vegetation out there, from our medicinal herbs to our edible forage, and then to like the junipers or the trees that we use for our traditional ceremonies, the cedars from them, the bark. So therefore, our people would go out there and gather them, and I was very fortunate to be one of the only younger ones to go out with a bunch of elders. So by doing that, they preserved the history part of it through me. Because later on, they said, “We want for you to experience this, to see that, so when you’re older, you can bring the youth out and revive and continue those oral stories.”

Miller: What do you most hope to see happen with this land in the coming years?

Sope: For me, I would like to see it just the same as it is now. Recreationists are OK. Hunters are OK. But just abide by not leaving things out there.

Miller: Reginald Sope is an elder of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes.

We’re going to end today’s show with a rancher. We met up on a beautiful, sunny morning. I’ll let him introduce himself.

Elias Eiguren: My name is Elias Eigurin. We are in Arock, Oregon at the sheep ranch, my family’s cattle ranch.

Miller: How long has your family been on this land?

Eiguren: They purchased this property, my great grandfather and his uncle, in 1914. So just over 110 years, 111 years, I guess. My great grandfather came from the Basque country in Spain when he was 12 years old. And as far as I know, came on his own, and met his uncle whose name was Jose Navarro, who’s already in the Owyhee region. And they tried their hand at a couple different ventures, [like] a livery stable in Jordan Valley. They owned a place out on the Owyhee River for a little bit, and then ultimately bought the sheep ranch in 1914, took possession in 1917 and moved here. They lived in this old stone house, which is the Sheep Ranch Fort, a retired cavalry fort, until 1959.

Miller: Man, I can’t get past the idea that your great grandfather, at the age of 12, came here, came all the way to Eastern Oregon from Spain on his own, took a boat, took a bunch of trains all alone, and ended up here. He had a cousin here he was meeting, but he’s a 12-year-old boy. Did he speak any English?

Eiguren: None, none. And he learned to read and write pretty well in his time also, from what I understand. So he was actually somebody in the region who was part of the creation of the BLM when all of that came about in the ‘30s, after the Taylor Grazing Act, in order to take this open range land out here. And it was adjudicated with the private ground and tied together to establish the grazing permits and the Bureau of Land Management. So he must have been able to speak and read English fairly well in order to be involved in that process.

Miller: Setting aside some obvious technology things, like cell phones and newer tractors or whatever, how different do you think ranching operations are now from what even your grandparents would have experienced? If they were watching you do your work now, would they say, “Oh yeah, we did all that stuff?” Is it basically the same or are things fundamentally different?

Eiguren: So, at the fundamental level, I think they’re very similar. Agriculture and the beef industry has come a long way in terms of the genetics of cattle, so choosing ... It seems like, in my grandparents’ time, whatever happened happened. You brought home a live calf in the fall, fantastic. If a cow didn’t breed, maybe you wouldn’t even know because you wouldn’t have a pregnancy test. And so we’re much more systematic in our management practices these days, compared to 100 years ago. But at the end of the day, we’re trying to manage cattle, manage forage, take what nature is giving us and do it in a way that is sustainable so that we can continue to be here for the next 100 years. That’s the plan.

So if they showed up, they’d see a lot of gadgets that help us do things in a different way, and sadly in ways that they used to have people around to do the work. I mean, there might be 40 men with horses out here putting the hay up, with all the wives preparing food at the house and doing the chores, and the kids everywhere in between. And now, we have a couple of families, and you’ve replaced that all with machinery, technology.

Miller: That might be one of the biggest differences is how many fewer people it takes to do the same work or even more work maybe?

Eiguren: Absolutely, and I think that’s kind of a catch-22, because even today, as immigration is a huge issue in this country, we used to have Mexican-hired men all the time when I was a kid. And they had no intentions of staying here. They were coming here for an opportunity to make money, build a better life back home. And the whole issue is so convoluted that they can’t easily come. If you go through a legal system of having temporary agriculture workers come, it’s a complete secretarial job that you need half a law degree to be able to navigate on your own. Here, we need one or two men to help out for a little while.

For me to hire somebody, in order to get them here and then all the regulations you have to deal with, it’s extremely difficult. And the technology is available so we’ve changed our irrigation systems from flood irrigation, with open ditches or gated pipe, to pivots, because I can manage a pivot from my cell phone and I know that it’s doing its job. I like to have people around. People are important. You lose that sense of community and the way things have gone, to a certain degree.

So I would say if anything is fundamentally changed, that structure probably has changed the most since my grandparents’ time to today. And that’s really why it is so important to get something right in terms of management of public lands in this region, because of the way our economies are based and the way our communities rely on that economy in order to keep the communities that are here intact.

Miller: Let’s turn to these questions about the management of this vast, largely federally-run, private land. We’re on private land right now. This is your land but with millions of acres of BLM-managed land, federal land around us. Am I right that in 2018 or so, you’re one of the people who took part in conversations and negotiations about what wilderness designation might be like? Why did you want to do that?

Eiguren: Yes. We have gone through the threat of a national monument designation being imposed upon us in the past. And really the ambiguity of such a designation is pretty scary to our communities. There’s just no certainty there, in what the purpose of that monument would be, what the priorities would be in terms of managing these lands for that monument. So our group in Malheur County, the Owyhee Basin Stewardship Coalition – a community-based group in the county with families, ranchers, businessmen, recreationists, hunters, all part of our membership and our board of directors – came up with the idea that it was really easy to say no to the monument. Let’s go to somebody who is in a position to do something to help us say yes to something, so that we can create some certainty out here and so we don’t have to go through this fight again. [That] would be our hope.

So our group went to DC and talked to Senator Wyden and his staff about being willing to take this on. He gladly did and has been facilitating that process, and that has been years now in the making. Then coming together with Congressman Bentz and his proposal on the House side, our hope is sometime near in the future, we’ll be able to get something that works for everybody … with the idea that maybe the environmental groups and the ranching groups aren’t so far apart if we have real discussions about what our priorities are out here, on this land, and how we need to care for it.

Miller: What are your priorities?

Eiguren: In my family, raising cattle [is] what we do. There are different segments of the cattle industry. We’re a cow-calf operation. We have the mama cows. We have the bulls. Put them together in the springtime and they have a calf nine months later. We raise that calf for market. Some of those females are retained to go back into our herd. The rest of them are sold so that they’re grown out, and then they’re high-quality protein. We’re basically taking the low-quality forage from this desert region, converting it to high quality protein, and people throughout the world are able to consume that. And my priority is, how can we continue to do that in a way that works for this landscape out here, for our operation, so that our families can continue to thrive?

Miller: So that your grandkids, say, can do the same thing?

Eiguren: Absolutely. So when I’m dead and gone, hopefully somebody has an opportunity. What they choose to do is up to them, but it’s available out there. It has to happen at a certain point.

My concerns, to get down to specifics … I guess let’s move back and start at the beginning. All this was open range before there was any designation as federal land, BLM, Forest Service, any of that. And it was all based off the mining community up in Silver City, needing to consume meat in the wintertime to feed the mining town. But that wasn’t a sustainable process. And it’s so dry out here that things were getting overgrazed. People saw a need to improve management so it’s a more sustainable process – the entire production management scheme.

So in doing that, with the idea of the family being at the center, the families that were on the land were able to apply for grazing permits out on the BLM ground to graze whatever cattle, the number of cattle that they’re able to raise hay for, through the wintertime, whatever you could sustain. So if you had an operation that could sustain 50 head, you’d be permitted for that use. If I had 500 head, I would get 500 head worth of permitting.

And through that, we’ve gone to more fencing, wells and water projects, the Vale Project, and that has taken on more of a kind of a small farm, wetter region type of thought process and the way we do it. So it’s very predictable, our changes that we do, in terms of our grazing rotation. We try to graze fairly lightly so we aren’t over grazing, because that was the whole purpose of the inception of the project.

So, in my opinion, the pendulum has swung the other way and we’ve grazed too lightly in areas. We’ve built up too much fuel load. And now we’ve had these megafires come through. And then the grasses that were there couldn’t live through the fire. Basically, think of a forest that is burnable, versus a forest where everything burns down and then nothing grows back. So if we don’t graze that sufficiently, we’ve had these fires that have burned everything to the ground. And then we’ve had these invasive annuals come back: our cheatgrass and medusaheads. And we have these monocultures in place now, and then they continue to burn, the forage quality isn’t there for livestock or wildlife, either one.

So looking at that, the question is how can we change things? Well, our grazing practices are locked in through the administration and through legislation, and we don’t have the adaptability in order to change how we graze. And in my opinion, the ranching community has been here long enough … and we graze our own private ground differently. We can graze it however we want. Very few of us have issues with cheatgrass and medusahead, and fire, quite frankly – that’s widespread – because we’re able to manage very appropriately for whatever the season gives us.

Miller: You mean, on your own private lands, you don’t have the invasive grasses problem to the same extent or the fire problem to the same extent?

Eiguren: Yes, yes. And we would like to apply those practices to the public ground. So number one, that would benefit the ecosystems from not burning. We’re gonna have fires, we’re gonna have lightning, we’re gonna have dry years, we’re gonna have fuel load. We’re gonna have fires, but we aren’t going to have fires that are going to be hundreds of thousands of acres. Last year, we had a fire start out on the Owyhee River. It burned from the river southeast over here to Arock and burned 100,000 acres of our grazing allotment. We’ve been dealing with that, as far as management, this last year. So on our private ground, it doesn’t happen that way. We would like to apply those concepts to the public ground.

Miller: What’s the connection between what you’re talking about here, which clearly, you’re very passionate about … And it’s where you started in terms of what you’d like to see change here, [which is] a different approach from the BLM in terms of what they will allow in terms of grazing. What’s the connection between that and a wilderness or monument designation? Are they necessarily connected?

Eiguren: No, they’re not … not necessarily directly. So if we have a wilderness that doesn’t improve, in fact, it has a better chance of detracting from our ability to manage the way we want to manage, but the opportunity is there. So there are a lot of folks from the environmental NGO community who want to see preservation, conservation, whatever word they apply to it, out here. A lot of concern about mining and mineral exploration. So we have similar concerns. Water is limited to begin with. I don’t think anybody wants to see the river contaminated, so any activity like that needs to be done appropriately.

But at the same time, those types of ventures, like the Grassy Mountain venture up in the north end of the county, they’re really good for our local economies also. So I think there’s a balance that needs to happen there. But there are a lot of folks who would like to see preservation of some kind out here. So we can understand that, but let’s do that in a way that works with the fabric of the local communities who are already here and makes sense.

Miller: What I’ve heard is that a wilderness designation would allow uses like ranching, like invasive species control, like fire suppression. All those things that can happen now would still happen if, say, a million acres of the 7-million-acre watershed of the Owyhee were put into some kind of wilderness designation. What would change from your perspective?

Eiguren: The devil is always in the details. If it’s a wilderness where you aren’t allowed to use a motorized vehicle, that really changes when we’re talking about a million acres. Until you come out here or you’re in a region that’s this size, people don’t have perspective of how large that area is. So if we’re talking about getting rid of juniper trees but we have to use hand tools in order to do it, or we’re fighting fire and we have to use hand tools to do it, or if we have to mend fence for our ranching operations or else we won’t be allowed to graze cattle, and you have to use a pack team to get there rather than being able to drive a motorized vehicle to it, that’s a game changer for all of those activities out there. So it depends on the details of the wilderness.

Miller: Maybe I misunderstood that. I had thought that you could use mechanized vehicles for all those things, if you were ranching. You’re saying that not necessarily?

Eiguren: There are places where it’s been prohibited. If it is straight 1964 wilderness in those places, that type of activity isn’t allowed. Or you can drive on the road. But if you have a cow that’s a couple hundred yards off the road that you need to get to in order to load her in a trailer to get her home, you can’t drive over there. So how are you going to get that cow out of there? How are you going to make that management move?

Miller: What’s it been like since the monument fears have gone away again? They were there in 2016. They were there in 2024. They’re gone for now. Has that taken a weight off of your shoulders?

Eiguren: Not off mine because it’s always looming. So when we made the transition from President Obama to President Trump, everybody said, “Whew, the fight’s over. We don’t have to worry about this anymore.” Our group, being forward thinking, said, “No, this is gonna come back.” And then you’re right, and for most of the people in our community, thinking there’s no way that President Trump could lose this election, then it was, “Holy cow. What’s gonna happen now?” And then getting through the Biden administration without a monument designation was another miracle in my opinion. So we have another opportunity here. There’s a good chance Trump is not going to designate a monument out here. But we need to get going. We’re past ripe as far as I’m concerned and I think the issue has been talked to death, but we need to agree and get on with it.

The population growth that the Treasure Valley has seen is a big deal. There used to be hardly anybody on Highway 95 when I was a kid growing up. A great place to learn how to drive. My son’s gonna be 16 in November and I’m not sure if I’m going to turn him loose on the highway on his own. A lot of these people are living down in the Treasure Valley and they’re wanting to go somewhere and recreate. Places like Yellowstone are getting more full all the time. This is close. They come out and drive through. It used to be that nobody would come through on this road right here and once or twice a week there might be somebody coming through. There might be a group come through. My neighbor was bringing his cows home the other day and there was a group of seven jeeps. He stopped and talked to them. They were from Colorado, and they’d heard about this place and wanted to come out and see it. So they took a week and drove all through this region.

So as a part of this federal legislation, I would like to see some main roads so that people can go through the area. The roads are in terrible shape. They’re dirt, they have big rocks. They get washed out. When a thunderstorm comes through, they get washed out. But even then, the quality of the road is not good. Search and rescue is a big issue for our county. The sheriff’s department has to come out here and find somebody if they get off on a two-track and get lost. So that’s a huge expense on our county in order to do that.

Let’s create some main thoroughfares so that people can get through, they can see the area. You can’t stop everybody from getting off the road. You can’t police it. But let’s make the main roads make sense. And then people can come through and see it and enjoy it, and they aren’t bothering things that should be left alone in other places, I would hope. In a sense, we need full access where maybe not everybody else needs full access. And that’s a really difficult one to navigate in a place that we’re gonna call public land. I really struggle with that myself. And I know that in the environmental community we have people who say it should be open because we wanna go there. And we have other people that say we’d like to close it all off. So that’s just a continuing perennial question in this conversation.

Miller: Yeah, but you want that to be handled, not by a presidential decree followed by public comment, but in legislation?

Eiguren: Legislation, I think, is much better. I think that includes the voice of the people much better than coming down from the administration, yes.

Miller: We started by talking about family. I just wanna end there. You have three kids?

Eiguren: our kids: three sons and a daughter.

Miller: You’re the fourth generation on this land. Do you have a sense for if your kids might wanna follow in your footsteps and do this work on this land?

Eiguren: They seem to want to. My oldest is 15, my youngest is 6, and that’s a constant conversation that we have. Who would be filling what role? And then, where is there an opportunity in this time in order to create more roles so that there is room, economically, for everybody to be here with the family if they choose to be?

Miller: How do you navigate, as a parent, as a proud rancher and, I think, a proud continuer of this tradition, encouraging your kids ... Maybe I’m just asking this question as a parent myself, who’s not a rancher, but struggles with this question. Do you want your kids to be ranchers? And if so, how do you make room for them to do what they actually want to do, without pushing them into this?

Eiguren: Yes, I want them to be ranchers. If they choose not to be, I just want them to be a good one of whatever they choose to be, whatever that is. I love agriculture, working with the land, working with animals. That all makes sense to me. To be able to take this grass out here, that it’s short, it’s dry, it’s sparse, but a cow will eat it and that body will be quality food for somebody, that’s awesome to me. And if those kids want to continue on with that, we’ll figure out how.

Miller: Thank you very much.

Eiguren: You bet.

Miller: That was fourth-generation rancher Elias Eiguren on his family’s land in Arock.

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