On Rivers and Ranching

On October 1^st, we trailed 136 cow/calf pairs down Dry Cottonwood Creek and settled them in a stubble field near the Clark Fork River. This cattle drive marked the end of the 2009 grazing season and the beginning of our shift toward winter management of the ranch and herd. Now, with the days getting shorter and fall’s first snow on the ground, it seems like a good time to revisit some of the summer’s challenges and achievements.

The D.C.C.R. ran two herds this year: The smaller bunch, which grazed on our deeded ground, rotated through a series of six pastures over the course of four and a half months. Moving in accordance with a season-long grazing plan, the herd passed quickly through the ranch’s more fragile areas and spent the bulk of their summer up on the high, grassy benches between Sand Hollow and Dry Cottonwood Creek. Temporary electric fence and consistent herding kept our cattle moving, and close attention from ranch staff ensured that we left ample grass in each pasture for wildlife and general improvement of the range. We were able to defer grazing in two pastures, allowing for reseeding on than 800 acres of native grassland.

On the National Forest, things were a bit more complicated: We share a grazing permit with three other ranchers, and have a combined herd of more than 500 cow/calf pairs. The allotment consists of four enormous pastures, which are better measured in square miles than acres and span the drainages of four perennial creeks. Three of these pastures are grazed each summer, while one enjoys a full season of rest.

The allotment’s vast scale and steep topography make it difficult to manage cattle well. It’s hard to find the cows up there, let alone control where and when they graze. In past years, intensive management on the allotment was viewed as something of a lost cause. The herd went where it pleased, and fragile riparian areas around Orofino, Sand Hollow and Dry Cottonwood Creeks suffered as a result.

This year marked the beginning of a new era on Dry Cottonwood Creek: In May we joined forces with our co-lessees to hire an allotment rider. Our rider, Jim, herds cattle away from creeks and other fragile areas, and does his best to avoid overgrazing. I supplement this work with a comprehensive range and riparian monitoring program to track improvements and identify problems.

All in all we’re making progress. Although a few trouble spots remain, the allotment looks healthier than it did last October. In some places our efforts have produced striking results: There are areas along Dry Cottonwood Creek where I can walk with grass up to my knees, see new shoots on what used to be browsed-out willows, and feel as though we’re getting somewhere—forging a balance that works for wildlife, livestock, and the land.

From north to south, the pastures of the Dry Cottonwood Creek Allotment are as follows: Orofino, North Fork, Basin, Sand Hollow, Upper Hilltop, Lower Hilltop, and Butte Pacific. The last of these—Butte Pacific—is foremost in my mind today.

All the other pastures are named for natural features: Orofino for a creek and a mountain; North Fork for one of two little brooks that join to form Dry Cottonwood Creek; Basin for a massive bowl of grass that stretches nearly to the continental divide; Sand Hollow for a creek that disappears into the ground (although the cartographers missed the mark on this one, since the creek itself doesn’t flow through the pasture); the Hilltops, both Upper and Lower, for a massive ridge that curves like the back of a sleeping dog.

Butte Pacific is different. It’s named for a few caved-in shafts and a shattered concrete foundation that used to be a copper mine of middling worth. The Butte Pacific pasture is oddly shaped and speckled with a shotgun pattern of private in-holdings. Butte Pacific hangs off the south end of the allotment like an afterthought. The other guys who run cattle up here tell me that it’s always the first pasture to dry out, and that the grass never seems to last long. They warn me about some of the people that live back in the mountains, and tell stories about being run off at gunpoint, or being threatened by men with crazy eyes and blunt instruments in their hands. “If the cattle get up that way,” A friend of mine said, “I’d just as soon leave ‘em.”

Butte Pacific sits on a boundary between worlds. Look north and you see an endless line of lumpish mountains—an ecosystem as healthy as most of the others around here. The land has problems, to be sure, but by and large they are the familiar epidemics of western Montana: Cows beat hell out of the creeks; Ill conceived roads spill sediment downhill; People tear around on ATV’s; Pine beetles color the hillsides a hopeless shade of red.

These things are bad. Some of them are even catastrophic. But in spite of them the land endures. Westslope Cutthroat trout swim in the North Fork. Elk bugle through the groves of dying lodgepole pine. North of Butte Pacific it is still possible to hope. The mountains are alive enough to suggest a brighter future.

Not so to the south. That way lays the wasteland. Climb up to the top of the principal ridge in Butte Pacific, look upstream along the Clark Fork River, and this is what you see:

The horizon is all mountains—sheer gray triangles that make up the Anaconda Range. This September they hold just a few last shreds of snow. The principal peak is Mount Haggin, and it juts into the sky like a bony shoulder. The mountains are the highest points in the panorama, but not by much. Let your eyes fall just a bit from the skyline, and you’ll see the Stack.

It is inadequate to say that the Stack is big. It doesn’t do justice to specify that it measures 585 feet from bottom to top, has walls that taper from six to two feet thick, and is a strong contender for the title of ‘tallest freestanding masonry structure in the world.’ The thing is gargantuan, built on a scale to match Montana’s famously big sky.

The Stack is what remains of the Anaconda Smelter, a facility that spent the better part of the last century cooking a massive profit out of low-grade ore from Butte. It looks jet-black from where I’m standing, regardless of the weather or the angle of the sun. It sits like a crow on the hill above Anaconda.

From my point of view the Stack looks ominous. I know it’s toxic as hell—soaked through with Arsenic and heavy metals—and that it rained a dilute, poisonous ash across this valley for more fifty years.

In old photos, the Stack is connected to a labyrinth of furnaces and smelters by a handful of massive flues. The buildings and their exhaust pipes are gone now, removed in the early stages of an environmental cleanup that continues today. Nowadays we’re left with one towering chimney, which has the presence of a war memorial, and vast tracts of polluted land.

The worst of these are the Opportunity Settling Ponds, which stretch downhill from the base of the smelter toward the Clark Fork River. The ponds are dry now, and from up in the Butte Pacific Pasture they look white as old bones. Nothing grows on them. Nothing moves across that benighted, manmade desert except a few haul trucks and the wind. I’ve been down there, and it’s bad dirt as far as the eye can see.

It slid into the Deer Lodge Valley, like twilight come too soon. When the storm first crossed the horizon I was up on the National Forest, rattling the four-wheeler along a rough two-track road that climbed through a series of meadows toward the Continental Divide.

Around here, summer storms are mostly predictable. This particular weather system had been touted for days on the radio. I heard about it in the morning on N.P.R., and then later, at lunch, on the country station. The deejays talked numbers: Eighty percent chance of lightning, twenty percent chance of rain.

I listened to the broadcasts, and I watched the world go still and quiet this morning. People talk about the calm before the storm, but this was more than calm: The Deer Lodge valley, which is normally a case study in aridity, filled up with strange, clammy air. A new haze spread through the sky, higher and whiter than the forest fire smoke that had been smudging the mountains for weeks. The weather was weird, in the archaic, darker sense of that word. I don’t know precisely what prehistoric chord was resonating in my gut, but something about the sky began to wear on me. No matter where I went, the air seemed bad. It felt stale, as though I were in a shopping mall or on an airplane instead of working on a ranch under Montana’s vast sky.
I began to wish for the storm—for rain, thunder and gusting wind. When nothing came I decided to look for respite in the high country. I loaded the four-wheeler with fifty-pound blocks of salt, told my dog, Tick, to jump up on the back, and roared uphill.

Dry Cottonwood Road heads east from the barn. It follows the twists and turns of Dry Cottonwood Creek—roughly at first, and then more precisely as stream and thoroughfare are jammed together in a steep canyon. As the gradient increased, the four-wheeler bounced over a series of deep ruts in the surface of the road.

Dry Cottonwood was the sort of drainage that remembers a hard spring rain. In almost every steep spot, the coarse granitic sand of the road had washed away and sloughed downhill into huge, fan-shaped piles. In more than a few places, these deltas reached the creek and choked it up with silt.

Out of the canyon and into the forest. I turned south at the junction, leaving the creek behind to contour around a hill toward the center of the Sand Hollow Pasture. What we call Sand Hollow is a six square mile chunk of the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest. It’s one of four massive pastures that make up the Dry Cottonwood Creek Grazing Allotment, which we share with three other ranches.

I spend a lot of time up here, certainly more than the other permitees, and probably more than the rider we hire to look after the cattle. I chase cows away from the delicate areas around creeks and set out salt to draw them toward the high, grassy parks on the south faces of these hills.

Today, I drove up to a stock tank at a place that we call Barrel Springs. The cattle were loitering there, standing indolently by the tank with mouthfuls of cud. I let Tick off the four-wheeler and supervised as he rousted out the cows and calves. Working together, we moved them up an old, steep set of wheel ruts toward fresh pasture.
We didn’t have to go far. A half-mile’s climb brought us to untouched grass. I settled the cattle there, dropped a couple blocks of salt, and called my dog. I paused at the top of the meadow, looked west and caught my first glimpse of thunderheads.

In these mountains there are two ways to react to the arrival of a storm: The first option is to hit the gas, pare your chores down to the bare essentials, and make a run for shelter. The second is to resign yourself to the possibility of lightning and a thorough, icy soaking, and watch the spectacle unfold.
I chose the latter course, and sat on a stump while the clouds swept in. As they darkened the irrigated fields and the ribbon-line of the river it seemed to me that the storm was some kind of harbinger, a hint of what was in store for the Deer Lodge Valley.

This is a landscape on the brink of drastic, sweeping changes. Sometimes, as in the case of the Superfund Cleanup along the Clark Fork River, the change will be planned and gradual. Sometimes, as in this forest full of close-set, beetle-killed trees, it will be sudden, violent and uncontrollable as fire.

From where I sat on the mountain, it was clear that this place had arrived at the tipping point: The Deer Lodge Valley was surrounded on all sides by dying lodgepole pines and bisected by a poisoned river. With the storm sliding across the sky, the valley looked like a ship in a huge wave’s shadow. It seemed inevitable that the wave would break, and soon. As I started the four-wheeler and headed downhill I thought: What matters now is how well we manage to ride it out.

Summer is in full swing on the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch —the birds are chirping, the mosquitoes are plentiful, the hay is cut, and the cattle are grazing. Since hiring on in June as the Clark Fork Coalition’s Ranchlands Program Manager, I’ve had a chance to get a feel for the day-to-day operation of the ranch, and explore the role that this property can play in the cleanup and restoration of the upper Clark Fork River.

First, a bit of background: In 2005, with the help of two conservation partners, the C.F.C. purchased the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch. The property is located on the East side of Interstate-90, between the towns of Racetrack and Galen. It’s a 2,300-acre working cattle ranch, and we own around 140 Red Angus cow-calf pairs. Our deeded land includes more than three miles of the Clark Fork River, a large chunk of the floodplain, a tributary stream , and several upland pastures.

Out here it’s impossible to forget about the toxic legacy of mining and the impending Superfund cleanup of the river corridor for more than a few minutes. To the South, the relic smokestack of the Anaconda smelter pokes up toward the mountains like a massive, black exclamation point. From high spots on the property, you can see enormous, dusty flats sprawling outward from the smelter. Walk through the dense willows that grow along our stretch of the Clark Fork, and you’ll encounter barren clearings where the soils are so loaded with Arsenic and heavy metals that nothing grows.  Standing in the middle of one of these slickens , it’s clear that this landscape has been profoundly and thoroughly damaged, and that returning the river to pristine conditions will take a huge amount of work.

Fortunately, that work is about to begin, and, given our position at the upper end of the river, we’ll be one of the first properties in line for cleanup. In July, I got the chance to meet with Joel Chavez and Brian Bartkowiak of the Department of Environmental Quality to discuss the way remediation and restoration will happen on our property. We walked the river together, swatting bugs, crashing through willow thickets and finding an endless succession of slickens, eroded banks, and impacted soils.

The worst spots—the places where exposed mine tailings cover the surface of the ground—will be removed, trucked away and replaced with clean soil. In other, less contaminated zones, the soil will be treated in situ. On the D.C.C.R., this will mean tilling amendments like lime into the toxic dirt. Throughout the riparian corridor, the cleanup effort will include re-vegetation of disturbed and impacted soils, as well as a concerted effort to improve the health and stability of the riverbanks.

Although we’re making progress toward on-the-ground cleanup, and are doing everything in our power to keep the process moving forward throughout the Deer Lodge Valley, it’s clear that we’ve still got a while to wait before heavy equipment starts rolling across the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch. The latest timeline calls for soil sampling to occur on the ranch in the fall of 2009 or the spring of 2010, with the actual cleanup beginning no earlier than summer 2010.

This blog will chronicle the Superfund cleanup process, as well as my attempts to refine our agricultural practices on the ranch. It will focus a lens on what it means to serve as a steward to a badly beaten landscape. I hope you’ll read along.

Bryce Andrews is the Ranchlands Program Manager for the Clark Fork Coalition .  You can also track "On Rivers and Ranching" at High Country News .