THE STRUGGLE FOR STEENS MOUNTAIN Ranchers and conservationists settle contentious land issues.

By Patricia Filip
Photography: Dennis Wolverton

Fred Otley, '77, plowed his pickup through the thick chocolate colored mud, down the rough road to check on some elk hunters camped near his family's abandoned homestead in the Cukamonga Valley, in the shadow of Steens Mountain, in the far reaches of Harney County.

For the cattle rancher, Oct. 30, 2000, was a day like any other. But then again, it wasn't.

While Otley was busy checking on elk hunters and chasing a stray bull, thousands of miles away President Clinton was signing a bill that would change dramatically the landscape of the Otley ranch and the ranching family's way of doing business.

The legislation was unanimously supported by Oregon's congressional delegation and governor and hailed as a major victory for landowners and conservationists. It designates nearly a half-million acres near the southeast corner of Oregon as the "Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Area, " providing for 175,000 acres of wilderness, 100,000 acres of which is to be livestock-free. In addition, it establishes three new wild and scenic rivers, creates the first ever Redband Trout Reserve, and legislates 900,000 acres off limits to mineral and geothermal extraction.

Lawmakers proclaimed it a model for how contentious land issues can be settled in the west.

But the issues were not settled easily. After months of negotiations and many seeming impasses, the ranchers and landowners agreed to offer up 18,000 acres of quality private grazing lands high on the mountain for inclusion in the wilderness area. In exchange, they received 100,000 acres of more arid public lands at lower elevations and $5.2 million in cash payments.

To gain the support of the environmentalists, ranchers accepted the no-grazing provision on 100,000 acres of wilderness - the first legislated wilderness that explicitly excludes livestock grazing.

Steens Mountain, a 30-mile-long ridge and the largest fault block mountain in the northern Great Basin, rises a mile above the desert landscape. It's a lonely, little-visited slice of Oregon. The area has, as OSU professor of range management John Buckhouse says, "a back-to-the-last-century feel and way of doing things." The population of the surrounding area is so sparse that parents send their older children 60 miles north to high school in Burns or to boarding school in Crane. Even the Steens' geographical treasures and its four
immense U-shaped gorges - Kiger, Little Blitzen, Big Indian and Wildhorse - are not widely recognized Oregon landmarks.

For more than 20 years, environmentalists have pressured for protections for Steens Mountain. It took, however, the threat of a national monument to finally nudge ranchers to the negotiating table. Bruce Babbitt, then secretary of the interior, visited the area and vowed to recommend Steens Mountain for national monument status if Oregon's congressional representatives couldn't come up with a bill to protect it.

Kiger Gorge, named for Reuben and Minerva Kiger, who moved from Corvallis to Harney County in the 1860s. Bottom: Stacey Davies, manager of Roaring Springs Ranch.

For a year and a half, committees and working groups, including both landowners and conservationists, wrestled with the issue. Finally, Oregon's congressional delegation took the lead, prodding all parties into the search for a solution.

The final make-it-or-break-it negotiating sessions took place for several long days late last summer at Roaring Springs Ranch south of Frenchglen.

Roaring Springs manager Stacey Davies and Fred Otley, representing landowners and grazing permit holders, faced off against Bill Marlett, executive director of the Oregon Natural Desert Association and Andy Kerr, who represented the Wilderness Society.

In Davies' juniper-paneled living room, they pored over color-coded maps, tweaking boundaries, exchanging pieces of property, giving up a little here, holding out for more. As Davies said, "It was a trading game."

Ironically, two of the players, Otley and Kerr, attended OSU at about the same time.

Kerr has been called "one of the toughest environmental professionals in the Pacific Northwest" by the Christian Science Monitor (he claims to have been hung in effigy at least twice). He studied at OSU for three years, leaving in 1976 to join the Oregon Natural Resources Council.

Otley earned degees in range management and in agriculture and resource economics from OSU in 1977 and worked for the OSU Extension Service for five years before returning to his family's ranch.

Otley and Davies were authorized by local ranchers to negotiate a complex package of land trades that would eliminate a checkerboard pattern of private and public land ownership, provide a more contiguous wilderness area and make land management for ranchers easier.

Had the proposed monument been declared, Davies said, half his ranch as well many homes and ranches in the area would have been within the monument.

"We were able to draw the lines where we wanted, to come up around farms and homes and make teeny tiny adjustments. But when the administration comes in and slam dunks you, you don't get that option. They draw it the way they want it."

Steens Mountain robs much of the atmospheric moisture that comes from the west, thereby creating a rain-shadow - the Alvord Desert - on the mountain's east side.

"Every boundary line was negotiated and tied to a property line," said Miles Brown, field manager for the BLM's Andrews Resource Area, who helped facilitate the meeting.

"The landowners thought they would be better protected through legislation than a monument," said Brown. "The environmental community hung in there because the monument would not have designated wilderness or wild and scenic rivers."

He said that one of the real benefits was getting landowners and conservationists together at the table and finding out they had a lot more in common than they had thought. They both wanted to preserve the mountain from development.

"We didn't want it classified as a national monument," said Davies, "because that immediately shows up on your Rand McNally travel map and everybody comes to see the monument. We wanted a name that was unattractive for the average person. We didn't want a visitor's center and a big main highway and road signs saying, 'Come look at Steens National Monument.'"

Despite the tensions that might have arisen during the long days at Roaring Springs, after the deal was finally complete, Otley, Kerr and Marlett were on good enough terms to step outside and share a beer or two stashed in the back of a pickup.

"I'd gladly sit down with them and do it all over," Marlett said. "I was strongly advocating for a monument but I am happier with this outcome, particularly because of the cow-free area and the $25 million that has been allocated for land acquisition.

"It was a great first step, but we recognize that there's a lot of work left to be done. A lot of issues were left unresolved. It's going to take us at least 50 years before we can call it a finished product."

Kerr said the Wilderness Society supported the package but would have liked the inclusion of more wilderness, more wild and scenic rivers and the Alvord Desert.

"The bill wouldn't have passed if we hadn't wanted it or the ranchers hadn't wanted it," said Kerr. "Of course I would like a process better that would have allowed me to stuff what we wanted down the throat of the other side."

Kerr said that this legislation is unique because of the no-grazing provision.

He likes to point out that although the popular song, "Home on the Range," is associated with cowboys, it does not contain a single reference to domestic livestock. He has penned a new last verse,

"Oh it will not be long 'til the livestock are gone
And the bighorn range without fear,
When the native biotic will retake the exotic,
And the streams again will run clear."

As for the ranchers, the legislation is bittersweet. Although it appears they got six times more land than they gave up, they traded away prime summer grazing land for acreage that was arid, rockier and less productive. In addition they lost the right to graze cattle on the upper portions of the mountain.

"We would rather nothing had changed," said Davies. "We walked away from 100,000 acres that will never be grazed again, which was our primary summer feed, and it was really high quality summer feed."

Alvord Desert lies east of Steens Mountain.	Stacey Davies, manager of Roaring Springs Ranch.

Davies said that while the land exchange and the cash payments make it an economically fair trade, his operations will be severely affected. Ranchers traditionally grazed their cattle at the higher elevations during the hot dry months of August and September. Davies estimates that the ranch he manages, which had been running 4,000 mother cows, will have to cut that number to 3,300 and that the calves will gain less weight.

"There are those in the community who say you should never compromise and negotiate with the environmental community and if you give an inch you're letting them get a foot in the door. They are unhappy. The viewpoint of those of us involved in the land exchanges is that the legislation is the lesser of two evils.

"We were handed a basket full of lemons and we tried to make the best lemonade we could. We're not overly thrilled with it, but we're very glad we staved off a monument."

Otley, who is giving up more than 500 acres of prime summer grazing land near the head of Kiger Gorge, is already planning how to compensate.

Fred Otley tags a newborn calf under its mother's watchful eye.

"We're going to have to grow some more forage to replace what we're losing because the cows will come off the mountain earlier," he said. "We're gambling we'll have water. Having enough water for irrigation is always a roll of the dice."

As Otley drives amid sagebrush through the lower portion of his ranch, he proudly points out ecological study areas and talks about research partnerships he has with Oregon State University and the Agricultural Research Service. He said he worried that a monument designation through an executive order would have threatened more than 45 such partnerships on the mountain.

He stops by a patch of bushy juniper, complaining that juniper invasion is threatening the area's ecosystem and damaging the watershed by out-competing other vegetation for scarce water. He is pleased that the legislation establishes a 3,267 acre wildland juniper management area for study and educational purposes. But he is clearly worried about juniper encroachment in the wilderness area.

He is not alone. OSU professor John Buckhouse expresses private concerns about the future of the Steens wilderness area. With a "leave-it-alone kind of management" he predicts alien species will take over the high elevation areas, crowding out groves of quaking aspen and other native vegetation.

Kerr acknowledges the problem of juniper encroachment, but said that historically fire has kept juniper and other invasive species under control. Depending on the management plan for the wilderness, he said, natural fires will be allowed to burn or fire will be introduced.

Actually, Steens is in much better condition today than it was a 100 years ago when Basque and Irish sheepherders grazed 140,000 head of sheep on the mountain and local rancher Peter French operated the largest single cattle ranch at that time in the United States.

"Grazing has been done very judiciously," Buckhouse said. "The BLM has been managing grazing for about 70 years and has been doing it with an eye to ecological conditions of the land. Most of the plant communities have improved in ecological condition since the turn of the century."

Otley said that all the species of native plants and animals on his land are still in place. "We've had positive trends on every stream, for the most part good-to-excellent fish habitat conditions, some of the highest levels of redband trout anywhere," he said. "We're really proud of the condition of the mountain. It's a beautiful area and that's why the public wants it."

	Sage grouse (centrocercus urophasianus)
Alvord Hot Springs, one of several hot springs that arise from faults along the base of Steens Mountain.

Both conservationists and landowners applaud a provision in the legislation that would discourage development by authorizing the secretary of the interior to spend $25 million on land acquisition and to enter into conservation and non-development agreements with private landowners.

Both sides will continue to have a voice in how the mountain and its resources are managed. A 12-member Steens Mountain Advisory Council, representing various local interests, will be established to advise the BLM on management of the area.

"I think we've been fairly dealt with even though we're still a little unsettled about our future," said Otley. "A lot of good things were left out, but some of the good things made it into the final package. The legislation recognizes historic uses and protects the positive management efforts that have been under way. The final package is much better for wildlife, for people, for fisheries than the monument through executive order."

His former OSU classmate agrees that the legislation was a fair compromise. "We couldn't pass the bill we wanted," Kerr said. "They couldn't pass the bill they wanted. So we passed something we could both live with."