The Last Empty Places (33 page)

His obsessive detective search came to focus on a single “Lost Glacier.” On his Sundays free from work at the small sawmill, he traced the glacier’s scratchings on rock and its piles of moraine rubble from high in the mountains down to the Yosemite Valley. While he was fluent and ecstatically descriptive in letters and journals, the idea of writing for formal publication intimidated him. Instead, he wrote his discoveries in a series of letters to Dr. Merriam. Then the ever-practical Muir simply melded his letters into an article, “The Death of a Glacier,” mailed it off to the
New York Tribune
, and was deeply surprised when the newspaper offered him two hundred dollars for its publication, with a request for more articles.

Muir’s writing career had launched. Although constantly tugged back into the mountains, he did move down to San Francisco, taking up residence in a rented third-floor room at the bustling Swett household, whose patriarch, John Swett, was a progressively minded educator. Here he became friends with another Swett protégé, Henry George, who wrote as passionately against business monopolies claiming the West’s lands as Muir did about his personal experiences with Nature.

Henry George’s railing against the land monopoly profoundly influenced Muir’s thinking, and, as a result, ours. It was an era—the 1870s—when business interests laid claim to large chunks of the West and monopolies began to dominate the economy, the beginning of the age of the robber barons. The railroads had been granted huge landholdings
to build their lines to the Pacific. Especially in resource-rich California, timber barons took great tracts of Sierra forest lands, water companies claimed river flows for irrigation, and agricultural companies swept up large chunks of the rich interior valleys. It’s no coincidence that this was the time, the early 1870s, when Dr. Glenn sent Pete French north with the herd of shorthorns to establish a vast ranch in southeast Oregon.

The threat struck Muir viscerally when, in the summer of 1875, he guided two companions to the Mount Whitney and Kings River area. In the South Fork—new territory for Muir—he found a spectacular valley that in parts rivaled his precious Yosemite. But the threesome also found an ominous sign nailed to a pine tree:

Muir, from his days as a sheep herder, was intimately familiar with the damage that overgrazing by sheep—“hooved locusts,” he called them—and cattle could do to the pristine flowered mountain landscapes that he loved. The sense of loss—this valley, its wildness about to be destroyed forever—galvanized him to action. He published pleas to nature lovers to visit the spectacular valley before it became a hog and sheep pasture, like the Tuolumne Valley, or, as in the case of the Merced Valley, “has all its wild gardens trampled by cows and horses…and all the destructible beauty of this remote Yosemite is doomed to perish like that of its neighbor…”

S
TACY
D
AVIES CAME
to Roaring Springs Ranch in part to repair the kind of damage from cattle that Muir had feared.

The day’s branding done, Davies and I climbed into my Isuzu, where we were sheltered from the wind while we talked, as the bawling pairs and branded calves were shooed from the corral out into the sagebrush and the cowhands returned to their camp.

“The Roaring Springs is what’s left of the Pete French empire,” Davies said as cold gusts of wind rocked the car on its frame. “The
heart of his empire was the Blitzen Valley, because it’s wetter. After Pete French was killed, that northern half of the ranch was sold off and became a part of the wildlife refuge. The ranch headquarters was moved to Roaring Springs, and the government bought the Frenchglen section, because it was a company town.

“The Roaring Springs changed hands a number of times, and the Sanderses bought it in 1992. Since then, they’ve doubled the size of the ranch—from one hundred and forty thousand deeded acres, to two hundred and fifty thousand deeded acres. The ranch also leases over 600,000 acres from the Bureau of Land Management.

“I’ve been here ten years,” Davies continued. “The reason I came leads into the conservation angle.”

The Roaring Springs had been run hard, over those earlier decades, to try to keep it profitable. Cattle had trampled stream banks and grazed them nearly bare of their covering grasses. The streams—once narrow, clear, and cold—had spread out. They filled with mud washing in from the bare banks. As the streams became shallower and slower, the water temperatures warmed up in the heat of the sun, and the native species of trout could no longer survive.

“The main fish in these streams is the redband trout,” Davies explained. “It was endangered.”

A subspecies of the rainbow trout, the Northern Great Basin redband, or
Oncorhynchus mykiss newberrii
, lives only in the mountain-and-desert basins of southeast Oregon and a few nearby parts of California and Nevada. During the Ice Age, when watercourses and glacial lakes connected much more of the West than today, fish species moved freely over wide ranges. The redband has been isolated, on its own, in these desert basins since the retreat of the Ice Age glaciers. Here it has evolved its own special characteristics, including the ability to withstand large swings in water temperature due to the cold winters and hot desert summers.

Never a widespread species to start, the Great Basin redband’s numbers and range were shrinking fast from overgrazing, logging, road-building, irrigation—to the alarm of fisheries biologists, environmentalists, and sport fly fishers, for whom the redband is a prized species.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service knew a petition was coming to have the fish listed as an endangered species,” Davies explained.

A look at a map of the Northern Great Basin redband’s range reveals that the Catlow Valley, where Roaring Springs Ranch is located, sits close to ground zero for the fish. The Fish and Wildlife Service, in so many words, told ranchers and leaseholders such as Roaring Springs, “Either do something, or the fish will be listed as endangered and you’ll
have
to do something.”

Enter Stacy Davies.

“I learned years and years ago,” Davies explained to me, “that if you want to improve a watershed, you start at the top of the mountain and work down. We took the cattle completely off Steens Mountain for five years, to allow the willows to grow back.

“The simplest thing you have to do,” Davies said, “is leave enough grasses and sedges along the stream bank to catch sedimentation and graze the willows lightly enough so they can grow.

“This stabilizes the stream banks and gives shade. If you have shade, the water doesn’t heat up. The fish need narrow, deep channels, deep pools, and shallow riffles. We allowed the streams to narrow and heal.”

Davies and his crews moved ranch roads away from the streams. They reintroduced fire, a natural agent in the landscape, to the Roaring Springs rangelands. They took other measures to improve habitat.

What’s surprising—or maybe
not
so surprising—is that by doing all this habitat work for the redband trout, Roaring Springs Ranch also happened to dramatically improve its forage for
cattle
.

As we sat in the Isuzu, Davies’s eyes shone intensely blue as he talked enthusiastically about these changes he’d helped bring to Roaring Springs Ranch. Warm patches of sun flipped over the grass-and-sage mountains and flew across the broad valley that spread out before us, punctuated by chilly cloud shadows and blasts of cold wind that shook the car.

Davies came to his larger point.

“The environment and economy are codependent,” he said. “If you manage for the health of both, both prosper. If you don’t have a prosperous economy, the environment suffers. And if you don’t have a prosperous environment, the economy suffers.

“Basically, our mission is to be sustainable—environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable,” Davies said. “Our brand is Country Natural Beef. It’s a group of over one hundred producers now. We
were one of the first fifteen. The beef is carried by the Whole Foods stores.”

S
TACY
D
AVIES HAD GIVEN ME
a lot to think about as I bounced the twenty-five miles across the empty sagebrush valleys, over the dry hills, down the rocky canyons, through the dusty flats.

I loved the notion that the cattle here at Roaring Springs Ranch ended up as beef sold at Whole Foods. Was that the “New West”? “The New Economy”? By restoring the habitat for trout, Roaring Springs had, at the same time, improved its productivity for cows. By helping restore the environment, it had helped to make itself profitable.

I’d heard a phrase for that being kicked around in Montana, where large mining waste sites were being reclaimed, and forests that had been trashed by heavy cutting were being restored: “The Restoration Economy.”
⁴⁵

Roaring Springs, which supported six thousand mother cows, looked like a prime example of it.

“The simplest way to say it,” Davies had told me, in describing the Roaring Springs grazing strategy for going light on the land, “is that we want to bite each grass plant once each year.”

He described how the cows and calves make a grand, seasonal circuit around the ranch. “These calves will walk nearly two hundred miles this summer, in a big circle.”

The cows and their calves, Davies emphasized, are raised naturally, without hormones, without antibiotics in the feed, on open range, in a healthy environment, and the animals are “humanely handled.” The ranch’s staff, likewise, is treated well.

“The consumer who buys our product wants to know that our employees are happy and healthy, and the whole operation is sustainable—that’s the bottom line.”

There have always been ranchers who are very careful stewards of the land—and others who have not been. To me, Roaring Springs Ranch looked like the future of the West by making that stewardship—or “sustainability,” or whatever you want to call creating a business enterprise that adheres to a vision of ecological integrity—its overt mission.

Davies clearly loved his work and relished the huge emptiness of
Roaring Springs Ranch. Interestingly, it’s easier for very large ranches to be sustainable because small ranches—say, a three-hundred-cow operation—“have to eat every blade of grass every year.”

“The corporate ranch gets a big black eye,” Davies had told me, “but I maintain that without them, you wouldn’t get the big empty spaces.”

He listed five or six of the big ranches in southeast Oregon—among them Roaring Springs, Rock Creek, Alvord…

“Between us, we control seven million acres of deeded and leased land. We have the important pieces—we have all the water. If we’re gone as grazers, you’ll see a hunting cabin on every one of those pieces. The private land would be sold in small parcels. It would be fenced off. The roads would be blocked.”

Essentially, Davies said, the big empty—all this enormous space around me—would be filled.

A
FTER WATCHING THE BRANDING
and speaking with Davies, I drove the twenty-five miles of dirt and turned right—southeast—on Highway 205. I twisted up and over a low pass in the grass-sagebrush-rock Pueblo Mountains, and descended into the biggest valley yet. Far off on the valley floor lay its single settlement—the tiny,
tiny
village of Fields.

Like Frenchglen, it had that oasis look to it—a distant, yellow-green island of cottonwood trees on a huge brownish valley rimmed by dry mountains. The highway turned and slowed on the approach. I rumbled into town. Fields, for the most part, consisted of a small general store. It offered everything you needed—from canned goods to maps to liquor—with a small café attached, along with a couple of motel rooms, and a gas pump, plus a post office. The outdoor phone booth struck me as emblematic of Fields. It sat by itself near the edge of the great empty plain, without a door, without a phone book, without lettering or numbering whatsoever on the phone console except for the engraved numbered buttons. Its dark blue plastic casing had bleached and faded to a milky blue by years of exposure to winter blizzards and beating summer sun and dust-blowing gales. I’d never seen such a weather-beaten telephone.

It still hummed pleasantly with a dial tone. My cell phone hadn’t
picked up a signal since back in Burns, one hundred miles north. I called home to check in.

They were friendly as could be in the general store—“The Fields Station”—and the staff was drinking an after-work beer when I walked in at closing at 6:00 p.m. They rented me a room—it was an entire bunkhouse, really—and I bought a can of clam chowder to heat up for dinner in its little kitchen. The wind shook the cottonwoods and creaked the bunkhouse. I turned on the gas heater in the sitting room, spread out on its table with my clam chowder, and plunged into my reading.

“I
WANT YOU TO KNOW
my John Muir
⁴⁶
,” wrote Jeanne Carr to Louie Wanda Strentzel, then in her mid-twenties, daughter of a highly educated Polish émigré doctor who had become a prominent California fruit grower. “I wish I could give him to some noble young woman ‘for keeps’ and so take him out of the wilderness and into the society of his peers.”

After several failed attempts to bring the two together—Muir always made himself scarce—the two finally met briefly in 1874 at the Carr house. Trained as a concert pianist and a graduate of what today is Mills College, quiet, intelligent Louie preferred the home life and helped manage her family’s prosperous fruit business. It took three years of wandering in the wilderness and writing articles about it before Muir, at age forty and feeling the need for human love, finally took up the Strentzel family’s invitation to visit their home.