Indigenous trail crews empower the next generation of environmental stewards

By Cecilia Curiel

For the last several years, Shonto Greyeyes of the Diné (Navajo) Nation has made his living in some of the Southwest’s most sought-after landscapes—from the Red Rock District in Sedona, Arizona, to Utah’s Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Greyeyes got his start doing river restoration for Coconino Rural Environmental Corps, based out of Flagstaff, Arizona. Following his time at Coconino, he moved north to work in Montana before returning to the Southwest to lead high school conservation crews in Williams, Arizona, intern at the Red Rock Ranger District, and lead adult crews in Grand Staircase for the Arizona Conservation Corps. He now serves as a program coordinator for the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps.

I spoke to Greyeyes while he tabled at the Nizhoni Days Pow Wow in Albuquerque, New Mexico. With the sound of voices, drums, and laughter in the background, he described the impact that Ancestral Lands and programs like it can have for Indigenous peoples. The Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps aims to engage Indigenous youth and young adults in conservation and land management through hands-on service projects. Like other conservation corps programs, Ancestral Lands crews work with government agencies and private organizations on trail building and maintenance, ecological restoration, historical preservation, fire prevention, and more. However, they do this work with the added goal of restoring Indigenous peoples’ historical connection to the land. Or as Greyeyes put it, such programs can “lead our nations back to ecological and cultural wellbeing.”

Ancestral Lands is now the model for a much larger initiative. In the summer of 2022, the US Department of the Interior launched the Indian Youth Service Corps (IYSC), meant to provide employment and training for young Indigenous peoples, as well as to “increase Tribal engagement in environmental stewardship activities.” Through her role leading the department, Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo Nation has ensured that Indigenous stewardship is part of efforts to address topics such as climate change and environmental justice. The Interior Department’s role, Haaland said in her acceptance speech to the position, is “not simply about conservation—[it’s] woven in with justice, good jobs, and closing the racial wealth gap.”

Both Greyeyes and Secretary Haaland see corps programs as not only a means of employment and community service, but also an opportunity to reengage Indigenous people in stewarding the landscapes they inhabited for thousands of years before systematic removal by the US government. The IYSC can contribute to community resilience by promoting ecological and social restoration, shared knowledge, and skill development. Achieving these goals—if history has taught us anything—will largely depend on how well programs integrate Indigenous knowledge and values.

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Programs like the IYSC and Ancestral Lands have a long historical precedent going back to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The CCC was intended to provide employment and economic relief for young men in response to the Great Depression. Many viewed the distress experienced by displaced workers who could no longer provide for themselves or their families not only as a financial burden, but a social and psychological one. The CCC was Roosevelt’s answer to mending these problems. In fact, historian John Paige notes that the program was steeped in ideas for social and cultural development, with influence from 19th-century philosopher William James who wrote that such programs would make men, “tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.” While this sentiment clearly leaves out the active role of women, it shows that conservation corps programs were more than tools for employment, but active in social construction and community building.

While the Civilian Conservation Corps was widely developed for white men in a still-segregated 1930s America, it did recognize the hardships that the Great Depression placed on Indigenous and Black Americans, creating divisions for both. The CCC Indian Division did not suddenly dispel the difficulties that Indigenous people have and continue to endure, but the program was largely lauded as a success within Native communities, especially when compared with other policies of the time.

For example, the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, implemented just one year after the CCC, intended to restore Indigenous cultural knowledge, strengthen tribal governments, and promote native traditions as a counter to earlier government policies of Native American assimilation. However, it relied on US government authority to enact many of its stated goals, and the program failed to promote tribal autonomy and cultural resilience.

The CCC Indian Division, on the other hand, had the simple goal of providing employment and training to Indigenous peoples while making improvements to both tribal land and government land that other divisions of the CCC worked. The training prepared Native American participants to eventually hold over 750 of the approximately 1,200 managerial positions in the CCC Indian Division. This was a key difference from the Indian Reorganization Act, which was largely run by white governmental officials. The acknowledgement that Indigenous peoples were best suited to make decisions in Indigenous affairs was a critical element of the CCC Indian Division’s success.

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That self-determination is something that Ancestral Lands and the IYSC strive to replicate. “If we have people from our communities that look like us performing these tasks and showing up authentically through failure and success, the whole process,” Greyeyes says, “when we see our people doing it, you know, it becomes a possibility.” But truly empowering marginalized communities, Greyeyes emphasizes, also requires creating the opportunities and mechanisms for them to succeed. “If I could train myself out of a job,” Greyeyes continues, “that would be ideal.”

Training crew members to move up in the organization isn’t the only goal of programs like Ancestral Lands and the IYSC. They want crew members to take their training into the community. Shamira Caddo of the White Mountain Apache Nation describes starting her work in conservation. “At the time, there were no jobs on the reservation,” she says. So when she got a call from the Arizona Conservation Corps White Mountain Apache office she jumped at the chance, even though she wasn’t quite sure what she had signed up for. All she knew was that she needed to be at “Pinetop, with camping gear and clothes for, like, eight days.” Her first days at Arizona Conservation Corps were “a crash course” operating chainsaws to clean up after wildfire and clear trails. This was her first job off the reservation, and she eventually became a crew leader. Caddo says one of the most influential parts of her experience was, “being exposed to different departments within the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] or Park Service, or, state, local and federal agencies. It was like, wow, you know, they actually have these jobs. And I can actually do them.” She now works at a farm in Minnesota that brings Indigenous practices into the community through garden projects, and she credits her chainsaw training in part. “That’s one of the reasons why this organization hired me, “she told me. “They needed sawyers on the farm.”

The corps offer more than just skill-building. Many of the corps members I spoke with explained that conservation programs meant their first chance to leave the reservation and engage with their ancestral lands. Maasai Leon, of the Chiricahua Apache Nation, has been working in conservation for several years, including recruiting Indigenous members for the Arizona Conservation Corps. He explained that many of the crew members he worked with had never left their reservation. “And those that had,” he says, “have never really seen a lot of the national parks and monuments and areas that we work in.” Programs like IYSC and Ancestral Lands reconnect Indigenous peoples to land they were violently displaced from by the creation of our national forests and parks. These programs offer a renewed opportunity to help Indigenous youth understand “the connections that we have to place and how it’s been disrupted through the creation of parks and forests,” Greyeyes tells me. “In a larger wellness community aspect, [it’s about] creating opportunities for young Indigenous people to develop their own story and develop their own narratives as a part of their identities when working in parks.”

Working these lands, Leon explains, is important for Indigenous youth to engage their past. For example, one crew worked on a historical preservation project on Fort Bowie, where many Indigenous peoples were held prisoner during the Indian Wars. “It would be wise to put Native people on that trail to know the history,” Leon says, explaining that understanding the complexities of historical sites, the legacy of settlement, and the nuance of tribal relations is important for Indigenous peoples.

This gets at another mission of programs like Ancestral Lands and IYSC: to foster community resilience by creating and sustaining cultural lines of heritage through interaction and passing knowledge from one generation to the next. This is why, Leon says, when the crews are together, he tells stories, especially those involving other tribes represented on the crew. “I always encourage people to learn more about their culture,” he says. “And if there was any way that we could provide more information for them, or put them in touch with an elder, we would.” Opportunities like these are important in keeping alive the knowledge and traditions that Indigenous peoples share through story.

Leon offered another example of a crew member working with Anasazi artifacts, explaining that for his people, the Diné, coming into contact with such ancient cultural pieces meant he needed to perform a cleansing ceremony known as smudging. Leon continued, “When it comes to ceremonies, we’re very understanding, you know…if someone needs to go to a ceremony, we will work with the individual to try to get them to wherever they need to go.” Caddo shared a similar experience of a young Navajo crew member who refrained from sleep during a lunar eclipse as part of a tradition passed down from his grandmother. Caddo says she had to think on her feet, but because time off for ceremonies is structured into the Ancestral Lands program, it was easier to make adjustments for the crew member. Making space for ceremony within conservation programs represents a different way of being with the land, of recognizing Indigenous peoples’ stories and ceremony in conservation.

Caddo, Greyeyes, and Leon’s experiences help us understand how Indigenous conservation crews can empower young Indigenous peoples to carry knowledge into the wider community. In calling for a national Indian Youth Service Corps, Secretary Haaland said, “Increasing [Indigenous youth’s] access to nature early and often will help lift up the next generation of stewards for this Earth.” Connecting Indigenous youth with the land is a significant step in combatting some of the environmental and social injustices that Native peoples have experienced, and one step toward the broader goals of passing Indigenous knowledge to future generations and embedding it into our policies and land management strategies.

 

Cecilia Curiel is a graduate student at the University of Wyoming studying English and Environment and Natural Resources. She hails from Eugene, Oregon, the traditional homelands of the Kalapuya people and the people of the Grand Ronde Reservation and Siletz Reservation. She loves to be in the outdoors, a passion she first developed working in conservation corps in the North and Southwest.

Header image: Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps crews empower young Indigenous peoples to carry knowledge into the wider community. (photo courtesy Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps)

Dude ranching offers a compelling model for sustainable tourism in the West

By Graham Marema

Just before sunrise, Nine Quarter Circle Ranch wakes up. The valley is still blue with fog, and wranglers don cowboy hats and vests, shimmying their feet into worn boots. Guests wake and yawn over a communal meal of eggs, sliced fruit, and mugs of steaming coffee. Soon, the Appaloosa horses will come thundering down from their night pastures into the corral, followed by the hooting wranglers, for a day of riding beneath the Taylor Peaks.

I could be describing a scene from 75 years ago, as this dude ranch began another day of horseback riding, fly fishing, and guiding guests over the scrubby hillsides of the Taylor Fork Valley. Or I could be describing a scene from this morning.

That’s sort of the point.

“Our motto is ‘time stands still,’” says Kameron Kelsey from beneath the rim of an old black cowboy hat. Kameron runs the Nine Quarter Circle Ranch in southern Montana, right outside Yellowstone National Park, along with his wife Sally. They host some 600 guests at their ranch each year. “I mean, we have a guest here this week who came in the early ’60s as a young child, and it hasn’t changed. That’s part of the appeal and charm of the place.”

That longevity is something other tourism sectors have, at times, struggled to replicate. For western outdoor tourism, the question of sustainability—which requires balancing the positive and negative impacts on local ecosystems, economies, and cultures—grows more crucial every year. As visitors arrive so do economic opportunities but often at a cost to local communities. With tourism booms come complications, from increased housing prices, to human waste in fragile backcountry ecosystems, and more.

While tourism draws like rock climbing and winter sports have struggled to mediate their impact on local systems, dude ranching, a quietly understated western tourism industry, has remained popular, unobtrusive, and relatively unchanged for nearly 150 years. The timeless charm of dude ranching might provide a compelling example of a long-term recreational sector rooted in sustaining a cultural and natural way of life.

A dude ranch, also called a guest ranch, is distinct from a working ranch, whose sole purpose and income comes from cattle ranching. The dude ranch, by contrast, receives at least part of its income from hosting guests for cowboy-themed vacations. When the practice began in the late nineteenth century, ranches hosted these guests for free. The very first “dudes,” as visitors were called, were mostly folks from East Coast cities enamored with the western lifestyle. They felt drawn to the romantic image of the cowboy, a figure somehow unchanged by the quickening urban sprawl of eastern cities.

It wasn’t long before ranches found that guests were eager enough to pay for the chance to play cowboy. From there, an industry was born. Dude ranches popped up from Montana to Arizona, California to Washington. The railroad brought more dudes out West than ever, slick-haired and shiny-shoed, yearning for a vacation far from the city bustle. In the 1920s and ’30s, as people were leaving the countryside for urban jobs in offices and factories, the wide plains of the West offered a reprieve—a grounded, traditional experience that urbanites craved. Dude ranches became more popular with each passing year.

The same allure that tempted guests out West in the twentieth century continues to enamor tourists of the twenty-first. Check out Gwyneth Paltrow’s Instagram, or Carey Underwood’s, and you might catch them sunburnt and beaming in front of a picturesque mountain backdrop at a favored luxury ranch getaway. These dude ranches promise a reconnection with nature and authentic western lifestyle, where values and landscape haven’t changed in over a hundred years. Tourists who have never touched a horse before can clamber into a saddle and even wrangle some cattle. Think Billy Crystal in City Slickers.

“It’s a different type of vacation,” says Bryce Albright, director of the Dude Ranchers’ Association, which provides membership to more than 90 dude ranches across the West. “They’re more of an authentic western experience, which you can’t get anywhere else. When people come out West, yes, you’ll see the cowboys, and you’ll see the rodeos, but until you get immersed in that kind of culture, you won’t really have respect for it.”

So what has made this model of tourism sustainable for local environments, economies, and cultures? While some forms of outdoor recreation balance negative and positive impacts on local systems by introducing something new—new management plans, new renewable energy technologies, new ideas—dude ranches contend with all three pillars of sustainability by embracing something old, traditional, and relatively unchanged.

In a way, environmental sustainability is inherent to dude ranching. Knowing that their customers expect beautiful, pristine landscapes year after year and decade after decade, ranchers have incentive to be responsible stewards of that land. As Sally Kelsey puts it, “If Kameron’s family had chosen not to maintain a dude ranch… this landscape would have looked very different.”

That isn’t to say dude ranches never embrace new technologies. Take the solar panels soaking up rays outside Goosewing Ranch in Jackson, Wyoming, or the hydroelectric generator at Diamond D Ranch in Stanley, Idaho. In fact, the Dude Ranchers’ Association requires some form of environmental footprint reduction as a prerequisite for becoming a member.

But Sally points out another, less measurable way that dude ranching fosters environmental sustainability. “Something that is undervalued when it comes to our impact on conservation,” she says, “is our guests get to take rides in the country and learn to value a place that’s very different from where they come from. That would benefit the community should we ever have a threat to the area and need people to speak up about why this kind of place is special.” This is the same tactic the National Park Service has been using for years to instill a sense of urgency for conservation in park visitors: to care about something enough to fight for its protection, you have to see it for yourself.

When it comes to the second pillar of sustainability—economics—the industry is often “overlooked,” according to Bryce. “It doesn’t get the recognition,” she says of dude ranching’s economic impact. “Tourism organizations frequently overlook dude ranches because they don’t think it’s very big, but if you look over the past couple of years, they were probably some of the most visited vacation destinations in the US.”

It’s true that compared to tourism that brings people to stay and spend money in mountain towns, dude ranching’s contribution to a shared local economy may be smaller. Guests at the Kelseys’ ranch might eat a meal or two in Bozeman or spend a weekend in Yellowstone, and locals may find seasonal work on the ranch as wranglers, cooks, or housekeepers. But the economic contribution outside of the ranch itself is relatively humble.

Still, dude ranching has had an important economic impact on the ranching industry. For some ranches, opening their doors to guests has provided an economically viable alternative or supplement to raising cattle. “Agritourism,” which invites guests to vacation on farms and ranches, has grown in popularity among both tourists and their hosts with revenue tripling in the US between 2002 and 2017.

To examine dude ranching’s impact on the third pillar—culture—take a look at the Dude Ranchers’ Association’s six Hs: Hospitality, Heritage, Honesty, Heart, Hats, and of course Horses.

“We’re holding onto our forefather’s ruggedness and way of life and hoping to share that with as many people as we can,” says Kameron, who himself, as the third Kelsey to run Nine Quarter Circle, is evidence of this. Preserving an “authentic” and old-fashioned culture is baked into the dude ranch aesthetic, and that means immediate impact on culture in towns like Bozeman seems somewhat negligible. Dude ranches play on a romantic, mythologized image of the West that has drawn visitors for more than a century, and while skeptics may raise their eyebrows at the perpetuation of that myth, the “authenticity” of dude ranches being run by real ranchers plays a large role in local communities embracing them.

Arizona acknowledged the importance of this cultural preservation when it designated dude ranches as key heritage sites in 2022, creating the Arizona Dude Ranch Heritage Trail. The trail acknowledges dude ranches’ historical and cultural significance and puts frameworks in place to preserve these sites for future generations.

What’s more, relative to forms of outdoor recreation that entail high-speed sports or loud motors on public lands, dude ranch guests spend most of their time on private land, partaking in low-impact activities like horseback riding or branding their initials into leather belts. They aren’t as likely to leave trash on public trails or overburden the infrastructure of small mountain towns to the extent of other industries that rely on those towns to house, feed, and sustain their guests.

Dude ranches like the Nine Quarter Circle Ranch bring tourists into this region—to gain an appreciation for the land, spend their money, and celebrate local cultural heritage—without a significant cost to local communities. That seems like a pretty balanced version of the sustainability math equation. In the evening, the eggshell sky over the Taylor Fork Valley softens, and the ranch winds down for the night. The Appaloosas return to their grazing pastures. Cowboy hats sleep on hooks by the front doors of the cabins. Guests settle into bed, listening to the shush of the dark river, sore and sunburnt and smiling. Imagine how this scene will look in the next 75 years. My guess and hope—pretty much exactly the same.

 

Graham Marema is pursuing her MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming, with a concurrent degree in environment and natural resources. She is a writer from East Tennessee who often writes about landscape, ghosts, and SPAM.

A vision for bringing passenger rail back to the rural West

Words by Nick Robinson, artwork by Graham Marema

Steel wheels glide along a track as the conductor announces, “Next stop, Thermopolis!” Outside the window, pronghorn antelope gallop across the sagebrush. The train slows to match their speed and then enters a tunnel. On the other side, striking granite walls of the Wind River Canyon come into view.

This vision of passenger rail travel across Wyoming is purely imaginary, but might it one day become reality? Today, no travelers ride the rails in Wyoming or South Dakota, making them the only two states in the continental United States without passenger offerings. Instead, trains here transport almost anything except humans, while citizens rely on cars to get from one community to the next, and many who can’t drive have no options at all. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if conductor whistles rang out once again, and accessible passenger rail service connected towns in the rural west?

If Dan Bilka and Charlie Hamilton get their way, that just might happen. The two lead All Aboard Northwest (AANW), a regional passenger rail advocacy group whose vision is to create a transportation network that offers environmental, equity, and economic benefits throughout the northwestern US. The way they see it, folding passenger rail back into the greater transportation fabric could benefit underserved populations and act as a development engine for rural communities across the West.

Passenger rail has a robust history in the region. Trains carried travelers across the western United States starting in the late 1860s. I met Mark Amfahr, a transportation consultant from Minneapolis, while he was in Laramie digitizing a Union Pacific Historical Society collection at the American Heritage Center. “A first-class passenger car would look and feel like this room,” Amfahr said, motioning to the decadent curtains, detailed woodwork, and grandiose western paintings adorning the walls.

Locomotives required stops to refuel and change crews along routes, Amfahr explained. Key stops grew to depots and became “the reason why people located where they did, and why those communities developed…a base for jobs or employment.” Settlements grew. The Overland and Pioneer Routes, operated by Union Pacific and Amtrak respectively, snaked alongside present-day Interstate 80, serving people in Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, Green River, and Evanston and providing the common traveler access to an ever-growing West.

Societal shifts following World War II began to alter the transportation landscape. Veteran pilots returned home, and commercial air travel entered the scene. Flying became popular for long-distance journeys, and the automobile was king for short to medium length trips. Funding supporting rural passenger rail linkages dried up in the late 1990s. Ridership dwindled as routes began to disappear. The last Amtrak passenger train to serve Wyoming departed from Green River on May 10, 1997, and all stations closed the next day.

Now, All Aboard Northwest is working to reverse those closures and bring passenger rail to even more small towns across the West.

“We have found the statistic is around 30 percent of the US population doesn’t drive,” says AANW Secretary Charlie Hamilton, who himself is unable to drive. “Either they are too old, too young, they’re too poor, they are disabled, or they are concerned about the future. And that number is only getting bigger.” Offering alternate modes of transportation can attract new visitors for communities hoping to grow in a sustainable manner, Hamilton believes.

“There are the 3 Es. We call them the environmental benefits, the equity benefits, and economic benefits,” Hamilton says. The AANW website lists examples such as reducing automobile pollution, expanding access to services for underserved communities, and bringing in tourists to overnight in small towns. “No matter where you are on the political spectrum, most people will say yes, I can get behind at least two of them. There is a lot of interest in making this happen not only in big cities, but in small places too.”

Toward this vision, AANW organizes an annual “Train Trek” outreach series, where members travel by car meeting with groups interested in establishing passenger rail service. In 2021, the trek centered on Wyoming. Stops included not only historically serviced cities, but towns that were never connected to major cross continental routes. “The smaller communities really got it best,” Hamilton said about towns such as Greybull and Thermopolis, where residents were drawn to the value of being able to travel to larger cities for services not offered in the immediate area. One meeting resulted in a series of letters from Wyoming residents to policymakers at the United States Department of Transportation, each echoing the sentiment, “People live here too.”

According to AANW President Dan Bilka, this was the first time in recent memory that the Department of Transportation heard from Wyoming residents about their desire for passenger rail. Reinstating service is popular on both sides of the aisle, and the Federal Railroad Administration’s Corridor Identification and Development Program aims to identify communities that could be viable candidates for intercity passenger rail. All Aboard Northwest acts as a mediator for communities wishing to submit applications for consideration.

Imagining a future where citizens of the rural West can ride trains from town to town is not that much of a stretch. Many historic depots still anchor small towns. “[The depot] is that critical access point for the community, but they are also regional hubs, and as they were in history,” Bilka explains. “The depot is the gateway and entryway into the community.” Local leaders are realizing this and are already envisioning the transition back to former use.

I can imagine myself standing on the platform as a train rumbles idle at Depot Park in Laramie, Wyoming. Doors of the sleek cars slide open and passengers file out. A seated woman wheels herself down a ramp and is greeted by a friend. Kids run to playground equipment at the park while parents sit at a newly built eatery. I hear letters click on the split-flap display board. Listed under departures is Malta, Montana, the endpoint on a north-south route that transects Wyoming. I step aboard and find my seat. The train departs the station, gaining speed as it glides northward. Full steam ahead.

 

Nick Robinson is an adventurer interested in sustainable modes of transportation. He can be seen cycling around Laramie, Wyoming, on a green vintage Schwinn bike.

Graham Marema is pursuing her MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming, with a concurrent degree in environment and natural resources.

Booming elk numbers create a rare opportunity for hunting and tourism

By Janey Fugate

While scouting for mule deer on a chilly October evening in southeast Wyoming, the last thing I expected to see was several hundred elk. But there they were, at last light, filtering over the crest of a bare ridge and winding down the valley floor towards a river. Awestruck, I watched from a crouch. Cold eventually forced me to my feet and I started moving back along the hillside towards my car. As I walked, blaze orange vests alerted me to the presence of three other hunters lying behind a rock, rifles at the ready. I knew that they were waiting for the elk to step across an invisible line onto public land.

This image of three hunters watching a band of wary elk moving across a darkening landscape has stayed with me. Elk numbers are up across Wyoming, creating more hunt opportunities and possibly more funding for state wildlife agencies. At the same time, this ties to a host of management challenges related to changing property ownership, balancing in-state versus out of state tag allocations and finding enough access to private and public land for more hunters on the landscape. While these challenges aren’t unique to Wyoming, they are particularly acute here as the state moves to adapt to a growing outdoor recreation industry.

Against this backdrop, the state is leveraging its need to control elk numbers with a desire to boost the outdoor recreation economy through increasing nonresident tag allocations, with implications for game managers, landowners, and hunters.

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In the age of environmental crises, it’s unusual to hear of a wild animal that’s thriving. But in Wyoming, elk are at historic highs. In the 1980s, the state had an estimated 65,000 elk. Since then, elk populations have nearly doubled to reach over 120,000. Barring a few herds in the northwest, elk today exceed the desired numbers determined by game managers.

“It’s the heyday of elk. It really is,” says Lee Knox, a wildlife biologist for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Knox attributes elk population growth to a range of factors, including elk’s adaptability to different habitats and food sources relative to other hoofed mammals, their long-lived nature, and ability to learn to avoid hunters by hanging out on private lands.

Another major, though indirect, contributor to elk abundance could be a lessening of hunting pressure driven by changing landownership and changing landowner values. What were once large working ranches that supported hunting are now often divided into smaller ranchettes and developments, where elk are viewed less as a nuisance or a hunting resource and more as an attractive feature of the property. On the flip side, some landowners have consolidated large ranches that are less open to hunters than in the past, effectively locking up herds of elk from hunting pressure. This is particularly relevant in eastern Wyoming, where the amount of private property drastically limits hunter access compared to the western part of the state, causing hunters to crowd into patchy public lands.

While having too many elk is certainly a better problem to solve than its opposite, overpopulated elk can take a toll on the landscape. Elk can damage fences and get into haystacks or crops, compete with mule deer for habitat, and can be tough on willow and aspen stands, which are already declining as the climate gets drier.

Yet, elk are one of the most coveted kinds of quarry by both nonresident and resident hunters. As such, elk offer a particularly salient window into how big game hunting, a $250 million industry in Wyoming, fits into the tension around how to grow the state’s recreation economy while best managing habitat, access, and hunter satisfaction.

The Wyoming Wildlife Taskforce—a group of stakeholders from around the state that formed to tackle issues related to wildlife management and the sporting industry—may have found a way to bring elk to more sustainable levels. Their proposal could reap the economic benefits of attracting more out-of-state elk hunters, who pay significantly more than Wyoming residents to hunt. They proposed several legislative changes to elk hunt management in the state.

The first change was to remove a longstanding 7,250 cap on nonresident elk tags. The state legislature approved this change, which will go into effect in 2024. The demand for these tags has steadily exceeded their availability. According to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, in 2022 there were 30,000 applications from out-of-state hunters for the 7,250 allotted elk tags.

In addition to removing the cap, the taskforce recommended splitting the nonresident tags into two categories: special (40 percent) and regular licenses (60 percent). The price of nonresident special licenses, which are designated for coveted hunt areas that offer higher rates of success on larger, mature animals, will increase to just under $2,000. For the regular tags, the nonresident price will remain at its current level of $692.

Boosting the number of licenses allotted for nonresident hunters like the taskforce proposed can be controversial when it’s perceived as taking away opportunities for in-state folks. This can be especially sensitive in Wyoming because the state already has higher nonresident tag allocations than neighboring states. Compared to Montana, which limits nonresidents to 10 percent of the available tags, Wyoming allocates 16-20 percent of elk, deer, and pronghorn tags to nonresidents. Jess Johnson, policy coordinator for the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, a sportsmen’s advocacy organization, says that maintaining a culture that prioritizes in-state hunters is a critical concern for residents.

“A fundamental part of being from these states is the ability to draw these tags,” she says. “Hunting, fishing, and trapping is a constitutional right in the state of Wyoming. Folks are very protective over it, understandably.”

According to the taskforce, these changes will not affect resident elk prices or the quantity of tags available to resident hunters, but they will affect Game and Fish’s budget—for the better.

Currently, 80 percent of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s budget is funded from hunting license fees. And 80 percent of that 80 percent comes from out-of-state tags. For example, an elk tag that currently costs nonresidents $692 is only $57 for residents. Doubling the price of a portion of these nonresident tags for elk, as well as deer and pronghorn, like the taskforce proposed has the potential to boost Game and Fish’s $90 million budget by 6 percent, adding an estimated $5.7 million in revenue each year.

“To me, that’s a win-win when you can approach the market value of a product and help your state agency,” says Sy Gilliland, president of the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association and a member of the taskforce.

According to an economic survey conducted by the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association, the number of nonresident hunters applying increased by 10 percent from 2015 to 2020, reflecting a broader trend in big game hunting. With shows like Meateater popularizing hunting and a growing desire to eat ethically harvested meat, the demand for western hunting isn’t showing signs of slowing down. And Wyoming is well positioned to capitalize on it.

“We have a world-class wildlife resource, and the world knows it,” says Gilliland. “Elk hunting right now is the best it’s ever been in modern history. [People] want to come here and experience it, so raising the cost of licenses can slow down or recoup the real value of that license.”

Gilliland has been guiding hunters all over Wyoming since 1977. Owning the state’s largest outfitting business, he’s led black bear hunts, moose hunts, and everything in between. As an outfitter, Gilliland also occupies a unique space in the cross section of hunters’ values. Outfitters need nonresident hunters to support their businesses, while still desiring the solitude, abundant wildlife, and public lands access that residents cherish.

He hopes that the change in the nonresident tag quota will indirectly benefit his industry, and Wyoming. His logic is that nonresidents willing to pay for the higher price of an elk tag may be more willing to hire a guide.

“The best bang for your buck is to put that license in the hand of a nonresident using outfitters,” says Gilliland. “He leaves the most dollars on the landscape.”

And repeat customers are the easiest the retain. Jim Moore, a Virginia native, has been coming with his son to hunt elk in the Wyoming backcountry for the last 10 years. Moore says that for him, harvesting a bull elk is just a part of the deeper experience of being immersed in nature. While telling me about his hunts, he described sharing a kill with a red fox that helped itself to Moore’s elk carcass, finding wolf tracks in the snow, and nervously keeping watch on a nearby grizzly bear while his guide field dressed their elk. With his outfitters, he’s hunted both private and public land.

“It’s a real opportunity for people that they can use commonly owned land,” says Moore. “It’s millions and millions of acres of opportunity for people.”

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And while it’s true that the opportunities to hunt public land are vast and worth celebrating, Wyoming’s overabundant elk are just as often found on private lands. This is where access comes in, a hunting buzzword. Increasing access to both private and public land is a big piece of the puzzle. Both Knox and Gilliland believe that nonresidents may be more willing to hunt private lands—and pay the steep fees landowners often charge for access—than residents are. For instance, in eastern Wyoming, Knox says local hunters are more likely to travel elsewhere in the state for hunt opportunities rather than try to get access to private lands.

“Most [residents] will go west if you allow it because there is more public land,” says Knox.

Gaining permission to hunt on private land presents a barrier for hunters that don’t have existing relationships with the landowner. When I watched the three hunters hiding on the ridge, they had no alternative other than to wait at a distance and pray the elk would cross onto public land. Similarly, in Area 7, a hunt unit near Laramie Peak, there were roughly 1,000 elk tags sold to hunters, but the hunter success rate was only 30 percent. In this area, there’s not a shortage of public land, but a lack of access to the private land where the elk hang out.

Private lands can even inadvertently prevent public lands from being accessible, an issue recently brought to the forefront of national news with the now infamous “corner crossing” case. In 2021, a landowner sued four out-of-state hunters for crossing a corner of his ranch to access public land on Elk Mountain they drew elk tags for. This more than $7 million lawsuit, still ongoing, pits the rights of public users against the rights of private landowners, adding to the friction felt around the West.

“The relationship between landowners and hunters is breaking down,” Johnson says. “There’ve been bad actors on both sides, frankly.”

This dynamic is painfully real to Ross Cook, a hunting mentor of mine whose family has owned a ranch outside Lander for the last 35 years. A few years ago, he caught two hunters going to retrieve a mule deer buck they shot illegally on his property. This is a more extreme case of the kinds of harmful behavior that deter landowners from opening their properties to hunters, but it illustrates a rising lack of trust.

“I have zero interest in letting people come and hunt that I haven’t shot with and worked with,” says Cook. “Vetting someone is really hard and most ranchers don’t have time for that.”

There are many reasons why landowners may not want hunters on their property, despite how much money people will pay for access. These range from not wanting the hassle of managing strangers and concerns over ensuring safety to not agreeing with shooting animals on principle. But for Cook, it comes down to finding hunters that share his ethics.

“I would love for people I know who have elk tags to come up to my land and go to town… but finding individuals you can trust is really hard.”

Landowners may have another reason not to allow elk hunters on their land. Cook says that landowners often claim money in elk-related property damages from Game and Fish instead of allowing hunters on their land, which incentivizes a cycle of limited access and over-abundant elk. Programs like Game and Fish’s “Access Yes,” where landowners can make their property open to hunting, address this dilemma but haven’t seen much success.

So bridging a desire to capitalize on nonresident hunters’ dollars with the potential to knock back elk populations is complicated on a lot of levels. The next step may be to match a rise in nonresident hunters with properties willing to let them hunt elk.

“How do we get more hunting pressure on reservoirs of private property?” asks Gilliland. “The best bet for that is to put more licenses in the hands of nonresidents who have the ability to hunt that land and have the ability to pay landowners.”

~

Hand in hand with removing the 7,250 cap on nonresident elk tags is a taskforce proposal to create new nonresident elk hunting units to change how managers can distribute hunters across the landscape. These changes signal how Wyoming is grappling with a growing demand for western hunting and a desire to both protect its wildlife and maintain its identity in a changing West.

And though distrust between landowners and hunters is a thorny issue, some of these challenges may hopefully open the door to creative solutions that give hunters access to private property where elk congregate. For example, in other parts of the state and the region, online startups are connecting recreationists to private landowners with hunt opportunities, similar to Airbnb for hunting.

The economic benefits of attracting and capitalizing on nonresident hunters and the revenue they might bring to the state are significant, as is the potential to bring elk to more sustainable levels.

But for Gilliland, there is another, less tangible benefit to welcoming more nonresident hunters to Wyoming.

“We change lives, I have seen it so many times. [Hunters] are so grateful to the state of Wyoming for this opportunity,” he says. “I’ve guided congressman, they are hunting their public lands… when they come out here and they see their wilderness for the first time, they are advocates and they go home and help form policy.”

 

Janey Fugate is a storyteller and a master’s student with the Zoology and Physiology Department at the University of Wyoming under Matthew Kauffman. Her research focuses on how Yellowstone bison, after being reintroduced to the park, established the migration patterns they exhibit today.

 

Header image: Elk stand silhouetted against a sunset in Wyoming. (Shutterstock)

Rock climbers in a remote Wyoming canyon may help shape national public lands climbing management

By Nita Tallent

On an early summer day in 2018, a group of sport rock climbers—packs laden with ropes, quickdraws, harnesses, shoes, and chalk—clambered up a makeshift trail in Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming. They were eager to ascend the steep, awe-inspiring limestone walls strewn with pockets, cracks, ledges, jugs, and crimps that promised to deliver challenge and exhilaration.

“We noticed some excessive use of glue in routes at a really well-established area up in Mondo-Beyondo,” recalls Mike Ranta, cofounder of the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society. “We had no judgement on that at the time.” However, their opinion began to shift when they saw how many new routes included holds manufactured through chipping, drilling, and gluing the rock. Such manufacturing is anathema to standards for climbing route developers to “leave the rock in as close to its natural state as possible.”

A booming popularity in the area alongside ambiguity over what constitutes ethical route development has made Tensleep Canyon the stage for an outdoor recreation conflict. Now, as the Bighorn National Forest resumes work on a climbing management plan for Tensleep Canyon to both address issues associated with overcrowding and define what amount of rock alteration is allowed when developing climbing routes, climbers and public land managers around the country are watching closely. The Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan has the potential to set precedent for rock climbing management on public lands nationally.

~

Tensleep Creek cuts through an evergreen shrouded canyon down the southwest face of the Bighorn Mountains in northcentral Wyoming. Climbers have scaled the towering limestone and dolomite cliffs of Tensleep Canyon since the early 1980s when the “godfather” of Tensleep, Stan Price, hand drilled and installed ten bolts to set “Home Alone,” one of the first sport routes in the canyon. Hours from any major airport and lacking the glamor of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, residents and recreators believed the canyon was immune from being overrun. However, in the 30-plus years since rock climbers with ropes saddled over their shoulders first burrowed into these forests, word of the canyon as a treasure chest of routes waiting to be established spread.

Since the 1980s, climbers have developed more than 1,200 climbing routes in the Tensleep Canyon area. After local climber Aaron Huey and others compiled The Mondo Beyondo: Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming, the first published guidebook to the canyon in 2008, climbers and route developers flocked to the area. Today, climbers from around the world have discovered the canyon, making it the central jewel in the crown of any self-respecting sport rock climber. Still many local climbers would have preferred the jewels stay a secret.

The surge in popularity has brought problems. Heavy traffic and illegal parking along the Cloud Peak Skyway (Hwy 16) and Forest Road 18 create safety concerns. A weaving network of unapproved trails to crags is eroding soil. Dispersed camping sites close to waterways and the road are on the rise. Uncontrolled dogs run amuck. Masses of climbers inadvertently spread invasive plant species such as houndstongue and Canada thistle in addition to leaving behind human and pet waste and litter. At the base of climbing walls, staging areas have compacted soil and damaged shrubs and grasses. Boisterous crowds interfere with nesting raptors.

Recognizing that recreation was on the increase, in 2005 the Bighorn National Forest published a Forest Land and Natural Resource Management Plan announcing that within 10 years a climbing management plan would, “inventory existing rock-climbing routes including approach, associated trail locations, and human impact,” in Tensleep Canyon.

In 2011, the Access Fund, a national climbing advocacy organization, created a Tensleep Canyon stewardship group, now known as the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition, to work with the Bighorn National Forest on the climbing management plan. The Access Fund’s goal was to collaboratively develop a plan “that both preserves the current climbing experience at Ten Sleep [sic], while conserving the resource for future generations.”

However, 2015 came and went and the promised plan had yet to be created. By the time Ranta and his buddies witnessed manufactured holds and chipped rock in Tensleep Canyon in 2018, it was not unusual to find climbers from around the world crowding at the base of the crags, anxiously waiting their turn. In that same year the Access Fund included Tensleep Canyon as one of “10 Climbing Areas in Crisis,” noting that “world-class climbing” invited crowds too great for the area to sustain.

~

As the popularity of rock climbing grew in Tensleep Canyon, so did the number of route developers looking to leave their mark on the limestone walls. This was not without controversy. For those not in the climbers’ sphere, establishing a new route is the magnum opus for many climbers, the pinnacle of their progression and status in the climber community. Setting or developing a sport rock climbing route involves drilling holes into the rock and inserting bolts along an ideal line that is safe and appropriately challenging. Ideally, route setters do this with minimal impact to natural geology, flora, and fauna of the rock face. They may “clean” the route, which generally involves brushing aside loose rock, vegetation, debris, lichens, and moss. They may also “comfortize” hand holds by smoothing and sanding sharp edges typical of the Bighorn Mountains to minimize torn and bloody “climbers’ hands.”

Generally, cleaning and comfortizing in dolomite and limestone are considered acceptable modifications by modern climbers, but the “manufacturing” Ranta and his buddies encountered in 2018 is not. The Access Fund defines manufacturing (a practice which they oppose) as “any conscious attempt to expand a hold, create a new hold (drilling pockets, expanding a pocket with a tool, creating a hold with glue), reinforcing loose holds with glue, or adding/placing an artificial hold on the wall in an attempt to curate a climbing movement or experience, or to create a route other than what is naturally available.” The conundrum is in the fine line between “cleaning and comfortizing,” which many climbers accept, and “manufacturing,” which many climbers oppose.

In an attempt to self-regulate in Tensleep Canyon, Ranta and other climbers approached world-renowned route developer and owner of a nearby climber campground Louie Anderson, who they suspected of manufacturing. The actual words exchanged during the June 30, 2018, meeting are forever lost with only contradictory recollections remaining. The gist was to agree upon what was and was not acceptable for comfortizing routes in Tensleep Canyon and put a stop to manufacturing. However, route manufacturing continued.

The Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition and the Access Fund denounced the manufacturing. In addition, three original Tensleep Canyon route developers—Charlie Kardaleff, Aaron Huey, and JB Haab—posted an open letter condemning the practice on the Tensleep Canyon Facebook page. Taking the debate to a national audience, Rock and Ice magazine published the letter in 2019. In addition, citizens reported the damage caused by the manufacturing to the Forest Service believing that it was the Forest Service’s role to stop the practice.

In July 2019, a few climbers, frustrated by the Forest Service’s failure to police the manufacturing, closed manufactured routes by removing bolts, clipping bolts flush with the rock surface, filling holds with glue, and affixing bright red padlocks to the lowest bolts. If the intent was to generate a reaction, that intent was met. The Forest Service, the Access Fund, and Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition quickly condemned the bolt cutting and padlocks, which escalated tensions and further divided forest users.

On July 19, 2019, much to the dismay of many in the local and national climbing community, Powder River District Ranger Traci Weaver issued an official regulation prohibiting any new route development until release of the Forest Service’s long-promised climbing management plan (which was slated to be completed by 2015, yet still in 2019 nowhere to be seen). Soon after Weaver’s announcement the Access Fund released a statement which denounced both route manufacturing and “vigilante bolt chopping” forecasting concern that due to these actions the “climbing community could lose the privilege of climbing in Ten Sleep [sic] altogether…”

Eighteen months later the Powder River District held a virtual meeting to request input from the public about climbing in Tensleep Canyon. The goal was to identify desired condition of the forest and clarify practices that would ensure respect for the natural and cultural resources owned by all Americans yet entrusted to the care of the US Forest Service. During this February 2021 meeting, District Ranger Weaver announced that the Bighorn National Forest had contracted Maura Longden, climbing management consultant with High Peaks, LLC, to lead development of the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan.

Members of the public submitted over 500 comments both during the public meeting and in response to a scoping notice, summarized on the Bighorn National Forest National Environmental Policy Act planning web page. The public expressed a gambit of concerns ranging from the fear that the Forest Service would prohibit all forms of rock climbing; to concerns about negative impacts to natural and cultural resources; to questions about the absence of non-climber, outdoor, recreator, Indigenous, and diverse perspectives in the discussions; to other issues. The overarching concern was whether and how the Forest Service would curtail route manufacturing while allowing route development to resume.

~

Despite the Forest Service’s best intentions, effort on the climbing management plan paused again following Weaver leaving her position in June 2021. In 2022, a new leadership team joined the Powder River District. District Ranger Thad Berrett, Lead Climbing Ranger Ryan Sorenson, and Recreation Program Manager Kelsey Bean began reaching out, learning about the needs of the many forest users, and signaling that efforts on the stalled plan would resume.

In 2023, the Powder River District staff continued to familiarize themselves with issues and the stakeholders, rights-holders, and national interest groups as they resumed work on the Tensleep Canyon climbing management plan. According to the Forest Service’s web page, the plan will respond to “increased development and impacts from rock climbing,” and will entail protections for soil, vegetation, geology, water, cultural resources, wildlife, and social resources. The Forest Service confirms it will codify the route development practices and ethics outlined in Best Practices for Development and Rebolting in the Bighorn Mountains and Bighorn Basin, a document the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition and Access Fund created with the Forest Service, while prohibiting manufactured holds and routes. It will also guide management for access trails and staging areas, human and pet waste, dog and human interactions with wildlife and livestock, commercial use, gear caches, dispersed camping, and visitor capacity. Climbing management plans are subject to the National Environmental Policy Act, which will allow for public participation. Ranger Berrett acknowledges that momentum on the plan has been slow and says not to expect implementation until 2024.

Meanwhile, US Forest Service leadership and climbing advocacy organizations such as the Access Fund are following the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan because it has the potential to set precedent for rock climbing management on public lands nationally. Despite the fact that 30 percent of climbing in the United States occurs in national forests, there is no national policy defining acceptable, standard practices meaning each of the more than 150 national forests must establish their own policies. The Access Fund is advocating for nation-wide guidance to bring “consistency and stability” among national forests. Eyes are on how the Bighorn National Forest codifies climbing in Tensleep Canyon because this climbing management plan may pave the way for other forest plans as well as national policy.

In addition, two bi-partisan bills put forward in Congress have the potential to shape management of fixed climbing anchors across designated Wilderness areas on public lands, according to the Access Fund. The Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act (H.R. 1380) from Representatives Curtis (R-Utah), Neguse (D-Colorado), and Stansbury (D-New Mexico) and the America’s Outdoor Recreation Act (S. 873), introduced by Senators Barrasso (R-Wyoming) and Manchin (D-West Virginia) intend, in part, to “bring consistency to federal climbing management policy and protect some of America’s most iconic Wilderness climbing areas,” as summarized by the Access Fund. Both bills direct public land managers “to outline any requirements or conditions associated with the placement and maintenance of fixed anchors on federal land.” They also would require agencies to solicit public comment when drafting the requirements, giving climbers a voice in shaping climbing practices on public land.

~

As they await the final climbing management plan, an unofficial local climber group is promoting ethical climbing and route development. The Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society, led by Mike Ranta and Adam (Ace) Ashurst, creates updated editions of Aaron Huey’s original climbing guide. In 2023, this informal collective completed the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Guidebook 11^th edition: The Invasion, which explicitly opposes the “intentional alteration of the rock by chipping, drilling pockets, or gluing for the purpose of enhancing holds (manufacturing).” The society’s strategy is to call out manufactured routes so local and visiting climbers can avoid or boycott them out of respect for the landscape, sending the message that manufactured routes are not to be revered or tolerated.

The Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition is also doing its part to engage climbers in stewardship of Tensleep Canyon. The coalition’s Christa Melde invites everyday climbers of all colors, genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities to join the conversation around the climbing management plan. She believes the solution to sustainable climbing in Tensleep Canyon “just boils down to education.” To that end, Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition members reach climbers through one-on-one conversations about stewardship and Leave No Trace practices at crags and trailheads. They also advance engagement and education at the annual Tensleep Climbers’ Festival each July.

Everyone who Western Confluence spoke to for this article—the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition, the Access Fund, a permitted rock-climbing guide, the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society, and independent, unaffiliated climbers—expressed a spirit of renewed enthusiasm and cooperation, unanimously pledging their support to the Forest Service staff in completing the climbing management plan. Now, land managers and climbers around the country are watching to see how the Bighorn National Forest not only tackles the challenges of parking, camping, trail use, and waste disposal in a remote yet world-famous climbing destination, but also how they draw the line between ethical route development and forbidden manufacturing.

 

Nita Tallent, PhD, is a plant ecologist, retired federal natural resource professional, and a master’s student in the Haub School of the Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. Her current research focuses on the motivations of private landowners to allow outdoor recreationists on their lands. Nita is also an avid outdoor recreator who dabbles in sport rock climbing.

 

Disclosure: Adam (Ace) Ashurst of the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society is the author’s step-son.

Header image: A rock climber ascends a sport route in Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming. (Photo by Nita Tallent.)

Can outdoor recreators minimize impact in the backcountry while connecting deeply with place?

By Sam Sharp

It’d been raining all day when we heard them: bullfrogs, croaking from the woods. We stopped, dropped our packs, and marched through the leaf litter to find them.

One student pointed out a big, green frog covered in mud.

“Can I hold him?” he asked.

Sure, I wanted to say. Just be gentle. But I hesitated. The frog had stopped croaking by now, frozen under the stare of ten 8th graders. In fact, all the frogs had stopped. We’d walked as carefully as we could, but our footsteps had still reduced their miniature pond to a silent puddle of mud.

“Let’s just look for now,” I finally said. “We don’t want to bother him.”

The student sighed. “Okay,” he said.

That night, after we set up our camp, I overheard him talking with a friend. This was the first frog he’d seen “in real life.”

That moment stuck with me. As an outdoor educator, I’d led these students into the backcountry—ten days in the Appalachian Mountains—to foster relationships with themselves, each other, and nature. At the same time, we tried to minimize our impact on this place. Most outdoor professionals would agree that holding wild animals, especially walking off trail to do so, violates that effort. It goes against Leave No Trace, or LNT—the ethical guidelines most outdoor recreators follow to reduce our impact on the backcountry.

And yet, something about LNT just didn’t feel right. There were times that, as with the frog, trying to minimize our impact resulted in minimizing engagement. But it wasn’t just missed opportunities. Sometimes it felt like we practiced Leave No Trace merely to create an illusion that we hadn’t been there. For some kids, this illusion of absence is a reality. Many of our students came from backgrounds that have been and still are excluded from outdoor spaces. It disturbed me to tell them to make our camps look like they were never there—to scatter rocks we used to tie down tarps, for example—when, just a week before, they had never been.

I left that job with a lot of questions. I could see how following Leave No Trace helped us clean up after ourselves and protect the wild quality of these mountains. But I worried that framing their whole relationship with nature around LNT might compromise students’ connection to them. At a time when access to wildlands is out-of-reach for many young people, could we adapt LNT to not just minimize our impact on nature, but also maximize meaningful experiences with it?

In the 1970s, Americans began flocking to national parks and forests in unprecedented numbers. Remote places suddenly faced a new source of pressure: aggressive, reckless recreation. Hillsides eroded as hikers walked off trail. People fed bears, then got attacked by them. Campgrounds became clogged with hot-dog wrappers, charcoal, and human poop. And unattended campfires often leapt into the forest.

People’s behavior began to shift, slowly, in the 1980s, when the National Park Service, Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management cooperatively established a program called “Leave No Trace” to inform responsible backcountry travel.

Leave No Trace has since become a non-profit organization, offering day programs, workshops, and multi-day “LNT Master Educator” certification courses. It has become the ethical underpinning of the most outdoor education groups and is the most widespread outdoor ethic in the United States. You can find its seven principles displayed at most trailheads, outdoor retailers, and National Park visitor centers. The principles are:

1. Respect wildlife
2. Travel and camp on durable surfaces
3. Dispose of waste properly
4. Plan ahead and prepare
5. Leave what you find
6. Minimize campfire impacts
7. Be considerate of other visitors

Leave No Trace is simple and actionable. Pack out your trash, it tells us. Stay on trail to reduce erosion. Let animals be. And cook on a propane stove, not a campfire, to limit burn scars and wildfires.

“All the principles are science driven,” says Derrik Taff, an associate professor of Outdoor Recreation at Penn State. He was on sabbatical at LNT’s headquarters in Boulder when we talked over the phone.

“I’ve seen them work firsthand, as a park ranger and outdoor facilitator,” he continued, “but they’ve been empirically shown as well.”

He described a study showing that LNT training led a group of kids to act with more consideration for nature.

I asked him how following LNT as an ethic, however helpful it might be in reducing our impact, might lead to a detached relationship with the outdoors. He saw that as a misteaching of the principles.

“It’s really just about being a good human… Like, let’s try to protect nature and be respectful of each other. Who could argue with that?”

I couldn’t argue with Taff on the point of whether or not LNT works. But I still felt like there was something off about it—something wrong with using it to drive our relationship with the environment. David Moskowitz, author and professional wildlife tracker, put this feeling into words.

“It [LNT] forwards the idea of wilderness,” he told me over the phone one day. “It erases the reality that North America wasn’t a wilderness, it was inhabited by people that we stole the land from.”

His criticism is not isolated. In a paper titled, “Beyond Leave No Trace,” researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara argue that “as a practical environmental ethic, Leave No Trace disguises much about human relationships with non-human nature.” It promotes an optimal relationship to nature based on human absence, another researcher argues, further alienating people from wild places.

“I had students who were so afraid to mess things up outside that it just became a stressful experience,” Moskowitz continued. “As if, you know, as if we were in a museum.”

He cleared his throat. “When it comes down to it, LNT is really about making it more aesthetically pleasing for affluent people to recreate.”

Moskowitz’ criticism of LNT resonated with me. It felt arbitrary to tell students not to flip rocks upside down when looking for crawdads, for example, when a flood might easily do the same thing. But again, Taff’s support for it made sense too. I’d chased off many racoons who’d come to scrounge on dinner scraps we hadn’t properly disposed of.

I wondered if there was a middle way—if I could find someone who has adapted LNT to inform a more holistic, complex outdoor ethic.

I immediately thought of KROKA Expeditions, which I’d heard about when I was working for Outward Bound. Based on an organic farm in New Hampshire, KROKA embraces a unique blend of organic agriculture and backcountry travel in its curriculum.  I reached out to Emily Sherwood, a co-director at KROKA, to learn more.

Sherwood made it clear that KROKA rigorously follows LNT. But it doesn’t seem to minimize intimate experiences with nature. On some courses, students build canoes from dead trees they fell, using hatchets they maintain. Sherwood also noted that they have a unique way of travelling in winter.

“Our winter travel is very intensive,” she started. “We use a large tent that can fit all of our group, and a wood stove that can heat the tent…And we’re really conscious about how we harvest those [tree limbs]… and how many we take from a single tree.”

KROKA students also cook almost exclusively with wood because it’s so abundant in the northeast. Campfires also foster more intimate experiences with a place and other people than gas, from carefully harvesting wood in the area as a group, to seeing the flames crackle while it cooks your dinner. Still, it’s still a surprising decision, given that propane stoves are widely considered to create less visual impact.

“It feels like Leave No Trace on a much more global scale,” she said. “We’re not using a petroleum product. And that feels like the right thing.”

We agreed that LNT looks different in different places. Here on the high plains of Wyoming, I rarely, if ever, make a fire (though I have in winter, when enough snow falls in the mountains to make a fire pit). But I’ve only been living in Wyoming for little more than a year. I wondered how I could continue framing LNT in my own budding relationship with this place.

Perhaps Moskowitz, a former KROKA instructor himself, said it best. “Let’s accept that negative impacts exist and that we need to clean up after ourselves. But we can reimagine Leave No Trace as something that is helpful in terms of keeping a clean campsite, but also realistic about our relationship with the natural world.”

This can still sound cerebral to me. But responsible recreation might not be as complicated as it seems.

On Day 5 of another expedition, we came upon Crater Lake in Pennsylvania’s Delaware Water Gap. It was 90 degrees out, clear and sunny. The students wanted to swim. I wanted to tell them no: this is a fragile, and highly trafficked, glacial lake. But I talked it over with my co-instructor, and we made a plan.

We scouted out a spot without much vegetation on the edge of the lake, and the next thing I knew all ten students were in the water, shoes off, howling like coyotes.

Later that afternoon, we air-dried, put on our hiking boots, and prepared to continue on our way. Our impact on the water seemed negligible—perhaps a bit of sunscreen in an already well traveled lake. But the water’s impact on us was momentous.

“I needed that,” one student said, closing his eyes. “And I didn’t even know that I did.”

 

Sam Sharp is a writer from Ohio. A former Outward Bound instructor, he is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing with a concurrent degree in Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming.

 

Header image: Students form a huddle and chant in Crater Lake. (Photo courtesy Philadelphia Outward Bound School.)

Cultivating pollinator support at state parks

By Amy Marie Storey

In 2019, a plain mowed field in Oklahoma’s Sequoyah State Park transformed into an acre of wildflowers. The verdant space served both visitors and pollinators. It became home to deer and raccoons, butterflies and bees. Park adventurers wandered the mown paths, enjoying the extra experience before heading home. The author of this metamorphosis was Angelina Stancampiano, a state park ranger who received a grant to revitalize the space as a pollinator garden. Following a recent move to Wyoming, Stancampiano hopes to recreate this success in five new state parks, combining community engagement and conservation to write a little hope into the big picture story of pollinators.

As it happens, the story is currently in a plot twist and it’s not a fun one; pollinators are in decline globally and although researchers have catalogued as much as possible about these declines, the causes are not yet defined. Conservation efforts of all sizes—from community courses on pollinator-friendly gardening to participation in community science initiatives—hold extra weight during this critical period. Recreation sites may seem an unlikely player in pollinator conservation, but this summer, Wyoming State Parks are taking up the challenge. With the agency’s focus on visitors and outdoor recreation, the trick was fitting pollinator conservation in with the parks’ people-oriented goals.

No comprehensive answers exist to guide long-term conservation of pollinators, including those in the western US. The once common western bumble bee (Bombus occidentalis), for example, once ranged down most of the US’s west coast, but today has disappeared from almost all its former range. A recent study showed Wyoming as one of the last strongholds for this species. Three other native Wyoming bumble bees are currently petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act alongside the western bumble bee. But a listing is just one, lengthy step of the conservation efforts. Data must be thoughtfully gathered and research conducted to uncover the causes of decline. Only then can conservation measures be designed to combat losses.

Meanwhile, patches of floral habitat like community and home gardens may be a lifeline to species in peril. According to Scott Schell, entomology specialist for the University of Wyoming Extension, supporting pollinators requires neither great skill nor great investment. “If you plant it, they will find it,” he says. He points out that people enjoy plants, too, and a garden can be a boon to human health. “I don’t see any downside in trying to help pollinating insects.”

Stancampiano is one of two Wyoming State Parks interpretive rangers, whose missive is to ensure that park resources and experiences reach the visitors coming from within and beyond the state. This means helping people build connections with the land through tours and activities. The opportunity to combine her role with pollinator conservation arose when Wyoming State Parks District Manager Kyle Bernis tasked Stancampiano and her counterpart, Linley Mayer, with applying for a Hearts of STIHL grant. Run by outdoor power equipment manufacturer STIHL, this grant funds sustainability- and conservation-related projects in parks.

“The three prongs were education, conservation, and restoration. And it just asked you to pick one,” Stancampiano says of the grant’s prompt. “But I decided to try and target all three.” She proposed Wings Over Wyoming, a long-term program that aimed to provide positive experiences to park visitors and support pollinators at the same time. Stancampiano outlined an ambitious plan to plant pollinator gardens and hold educational workshops that promised to impact parks, visitors, and wildlife statewide.

Last fall, STIHL awarded Wyoming State Parks $20,000 for the proposed project. Over the winter, the Wings Over Wyoming team crystallized plans, ordered seeds, and hosted the first workshop, which taught participants to build small bee habitats. State Park staff planted seeds during the first two weeks of June and the gardens peaked in July and August.

Wings Over Wyoming is engaging visitors through five themed sites. Bear River State Park highlights bats and rebuilds bat boxes around the park. Edness Kimball Wilkins State Park nods to the active Audubon Chapter in nearby Evansville by focusing on birds. Keyhole State Park restored a plowed area to a pollinator patch optimized for beetles. Medicine Lodge Archaeological Site, a designated monarch butterfly stopover site, is focusing on butterflies. Finally, Curt Gowdy State Park’s focal creatures are bees. Each site hosts pollinator gardens and workshops to make “seed-bombs” (packets of biodegradable medium that crumble to release native seeds) and build “bee bungalows,” alongside other pollinator-focused activities. The program reached thousands of visitors throughout the summer.

Stancampiano drew from the success of the Sequoyah State Park garden to strategically place pollinator gardens near campsites and other places where visitors linger. For example, “Once [visitors] get off the water for the day and have showered off and they’re making dinner, maybe the kids are going and reading all the pollinator signs and walking through that pollinator patch.”

Visitors to Wings Over Wyoming sites enjoy pollinator-friendly garden designs that also fit the landscape and its history. Bear River State Park’s garden beds are made with galvanized steel to pay homage to the automobiles of the historic Lincoln Highway nearby. Medicine Lodge State Park features raised beds in the shape of an elk, one of the park’s most iconic rock art images. Stancampiano sees Wings Over Wyoming as a way for visitors to connect to the land and its creatures. “We have public lands for us, but also for these plants and animals.”

Stancampiano is surrounded by collaborators who have provided practical support to help the program accomplish its lofty goals. The Wings Over Wyoming committee includes volunteers from across the state, colleagues from the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Office, park superintendents, and Stancampiano’s fellow interpretive ranger. This team-level planning may be the perfect counterbalance to Stancampiano’s high aspirations. “[I say], let’s do the extreme, and then the superintendents [say], ‘Woah, woah, woah. How much watering time is that going to need and how much time will it take staff to construct this building?’ . . . So by working together as a team, I think we have been able to hopefully hash out any issues before they arise,” she says.

Public education programs like Wings Over Wyoming can create long term results by inspiring communities to support pollinators and by cultivating the interest that already exists for insects and pollinators. When it comes to gauging interest, entomologist Schell may have the best seat in the house. “Almost everybody has some sort of striking memory of an insect event,” he says. As the go-to diagnostician for arthropods, Schell teaches public workshops, supports field trips for young learners, and answers as many questions as he can. “I don’t expect everybody to become an insect lover per say,” says Schell, “but just recognize their value.”

Even small actions like including a flowering plant in landscaping or contributing data to a pollinator study can have far-reaching effects. Will Janousek, a research scientist for the United States Geologic Survey and coauthor of a recent paper modeling occupancy of the western bumble bee, used information from a community science survey to show changes in the range of this bee and to predict continued range reduction in worst- and best-case action scenarios. “A portion of [the 14,500 surveys used in the study] comes from a variety of community science programs,” Janousek says. “People have the opportunity to submit data from their backyards.” Community-powered studies like this end up supporting petitions for federal protection, informing the decisions of land managers, and providing foundational research for future studies.

While it may be hard to measure exactly how Wings Over Wyoming gardens impact nearby pollinator populations, Stancampiano points out, “Anything that we’re doing is above and beyond what we have been doing [previously], so I see any of it, all of it, as a positive effect.” If Wings Over Wyoming succeeds, it will set an example for public education, equip Wyoming State Parks visitors to conserve pollinators, and add one more piece in the effort to restore these critical creatures. “For me,” Stancampiano says, “the best possible outcome we could have would be folks who came and visited one of our sites and went home and decided to change part of their manicured lawn into a pollinator patch.”

 

Amy Marie Storey is a master’s student with the Zoology and Physiology Department at the University of Wyoming. Her interest in ecology and entomology spills into her master’s work studying the parasites of wild bees in the West.

 

Header image: Blanket flowers bloom in a pollinator garden designed for butterflies at Medicine Lodge State Park in Wyoming. Photo by Emilene Ostlind.

Managing off-leash dogs on public trails

By Sabrina White

“Boulder, as a town, has always been super supportive of dogs and people recreating together off-leash,” says Lisa Gonҫalo, recreation management coordinator for the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks. “We have a long history. We have pictures from the 1970s of people hiking in Chautauqua Meadow with their pups off-leash.” Today, dogs enrolled in the Boulder County Voice and Sight Program are still legally allowed off leash on certain trails within the county. As public trails get more crowded with off-leash dogs and people, programs such as this are appearing around the country, exploring innovative solutions that let dogs happily run free while also protecting the surrounding environment and other trail users.

According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, 45 percent of all households in the US own a dog, totaling between 83.7 and 88.8 million domesticated dogs in America alone. That’s 10 times the entire population of New York City, and a 30 percent increase over the past 20 years. As these numbers continue to grow, there will undoubtably be more dogs enjoying outdoor spaces with their owners, since dogs require activity every day to stay healthy. Dogs that don’t get a chance to run around can gain weight, suffer from joint problems, or develop behavioral issues like excessive barking or unwanted chewing. While requirements vary, most dogs need between 30 minutes to 2 hours of exercise every day. Many dog owners, like Merav Ben-David, routine skijorer with her two huskies Chilkoot and Elwha, are especially fond of areas that allow dogs to explore off-leash. “There is no replacement for off-leash. Because the dog has to make decisions for themselves,” she says. “They are free to explore smells. I mean, they’re wolves, even these little ones. And their whole communication system is based on scent. And if you’re walking the dog on a leash, they don’t have the freedom to explore all the scents around them.”

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However, off-leash dogs can cause problems if they disturb trail users, attack other dogs, disturb wildlife, or leave poop behind. Melanie Torres, a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, was dog-sitting a huskie named Summit. She had him on a leash in Medicine Bow National Forest, when three little dogs ran up. The owner yelled the classic “My dogs are friendly,” but Summit was not. This story has a happy ending—the owner ran over and grabbed the dogs before anything bad happened—but it’s not uncommon for similar narratives to have much worse endings. After experiences like this, Torres believes off-leash dogs must have good recall and owners should leash their dogs when they see another dog on leash. “If your dog is not listening or paying attention,” she says, “it ruins the experience for everybody.”

Another problem is when off-leash dogs disturb wildlife, but managers and researchers are still trying to understand the full extent to which they impact wild areas. A 2008 study in the Natural Areas Journal looking at dog presence on Colorado trails, found that prey animals like mule deer and prairie dogs stayed further away from trails with dogs, and bobcat density also decreased in those areas. However, a 2011 study in Conservation Biology found that predators avoided trails in northern California based more on the number of humans present than dogs.

A more stinky concern with increased dogs on trails is poop. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that a typical dog excretes an average of 274 pounds of waste every year. That’s 12 million tons of dog waste excreted in the US annually. On average, 40 percent of dog owners do not pick up that waste, leaving it on the trail with major impacts on ecological systems. Dog poop can spread bacteria and parasites like roundworm or hookworm to animals or people, and it introduces excess nutrients into soil and waterways leading to harmful algae blooms. While one dog pile probably won’t affect anything, the quantity of dogs using outdoor spaces and trails means it adds up. Dog waste collected in plastic bags also adds loads of plastic and poop to landfills.

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To address these issues, trail managers seek innovative solutions to create a culture of responsibility with dog owners, reward good behavior, and foster a sense of community. The Boulder County Voice and Sight Program is attempting to do just that. Dog owners must watch an hour-long video detailing the natural history of the open spaces and their responsibilities to control their dogs and conserve the area, and their dogs must have a rabies vaccination and dog license. The program requires participants to keep off-leash dogs within sight and under voice control at all times, to clean up after them, and to make sure they don’t chase wildlife. Failure to follow any of the rules results in fines or citations. The City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks surveys currently show 84 percent compliance, so while not everyone obeys, negative events are relatively infrequent.

To prepare dogs for such programs, many dog training companies around the country now offer classes for off-leash specific skills such as ignoring wildlife, recalling when there are lots of distractions, and off-leash heel. Mandy Kauffman, co-owner of Rockin’ E Dog Training and Consulting in Laramie, Wyoming, says, “Before a dog is ready to go out on trails outside, I think they need to have some, at least basic obedience training so that they and their handler can communicate with each other.” She emphasizes the importance of being prepared, ensuring your dog has good recall, and anticipating the types of users or wildlife you might see on the trail. “If a dog is going to be going off-leash on trails, I think that that ramps up a notch,” she says.

Effective off-leash dog programs also strive to prevent wildlife disturbances. During surveys to evaluate the effectiveness of the Boulder County Voice and Sight Program, Gonҫalo found few negative encounters. “The incidence that they observed a dog chasing wildlife was barely reportable. So, of the hundreds of observations, it was maybe a handful, like three to five, so … very small.” Other areas close trails at specific times of the year, such as during breeding or fawning seasons, when wildlife is particularly sensitive. Such regulations must vary for each trail to address sensitive local wildlife species while still allowing responsible recreation.

Addressing the poop problem especially requires creating a culture of responsibility. The City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks holds events to explain concerns with excess poop and increase visibility of the problem. Recently, they organized a cleanup of their four most frequented trails. Staff and volunteers placed flags everywhere they found a pile of uncollected poop. One of their most popular trails, Dry Creek, had 250 flags within the first quarter mile, providing a striking visual for the amount of waste. “[We were] trying to raise awareness around [dog waste],” Gonҫalo said. “The dog owners that came on Saturday were also horrified about what they saw.”

While removing dog waste prevents contamination, what happens to it after is also an important environmental consideration. Fifteen years ago Rose Seemann, co-founder of the non-profit Enviro Pet Waste Network, noticed this smelly issue and wanted to do something about it. Inspired by a USDA study that composted waste from Alaskan sled dogs, she created EnviroWagg and began composting waste from dog parks. After years of successfully creating safe and high-quality compost from dog waste, EnviroWagg now collects from more than 20 Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks trailheads. “I want to try to get across to composters that this is not nuclear waste, your compost pile is not going to blow up, you’re not going to poison people. If you compost it with everything else, it will be fine,” Seemann explains. “You just have to have all these things in place. You have to teach people not to use plastic.” Proceeds from EnviroWagg support the Enviro Pet Waste Network, which teaches people alternative ways to deal with pet waste and keep plastic and poop out of landfills.

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Off-leash dogs using public trails don’t have to harm other users’ experiences or the ecosystem. Programs like Boulder County Voice and Sight are spearheading sustainable practices and creating a culture of responsibility that allows dogs to explore to their hearts content while minimizing their impact on the environment and people. “In Boulder, I think we kind of consider pets our children and that’s how we advocate for them,” Gonҫalo says. “And so, letting them experience the outdoors and sniffing and doing all the things that dogs love to do is a wonderful opportunity for that.”

 

Sabrina White is a graduate student at the University of Wyoming studying bumble bee thermal tolerance in Michael Dillon’s insect ecophysiology lab. She is also a dog parent to Slack and Bear.

 

Header image: A man walks with an off-leash dog on a public trail. Courtesy City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks.

Land trusts take on community access to outdoor recreation

By Meghan Kent

In 2009, Colin Betzler moved to Sheridan, Wyoming, as the first paid executive director for the local land trust. Like for many people, the Bighorn Mountains drew him to the area. On a clear day, the fortress-like summits of Cloud Peak, Blacktooth, Innominate, and Mt. Woolsey reign over the Sheridan valley. The Bighorns’ steep cliffs and high alpine parks play backdrop to everyday life in the small town. Among neon signs and busy storefronts, business names like “Foot of the Bighorns” and “Blacktooth Brewing” bring the mountains into the downtown.

For all of Sheridan’s Bighorn Mountain pride, Betzler struggled to find close trail access. A swath of private properties separates the city from mountain trailheads. After fruitless searches down state highways and county roads, Betzler found his choices for trail access limited to driving an hour on the highway or climbing Red Grade Road, a steep, gravel path closed four months of the year. Betzler determined to create a local trail system through his role at the Sheridan Community Land Trust.

Traditionally, land trusts protect land. They hold conservation easements, in which a landowner willingly gives up development rights to a land trust to protect open space, agriculture, or wildlife values of their property. Many land trusts also purchase land outright to protect sensitive habitat, commonly referred to as “preserves.” While these agreements and holdings remain important in private land conservation, the scope of work for land trusts has broadened. As they’ve shifted to engage their communities, local land trusts have found a role in creating access to open space.

“Land trusts increasingly are seeing themselves as part of the solution to who has access to the outdoors,” says Brad Paymar, who directs programs in the western US for the Land Trust Alliance, a national organization that develops guidelines, provides resources, and advocates for conservation policy to support land trusts. In recent years, the alliance’s focus has shifted to equity and social impacts including access to the outdoors. This isn’t necessarily a new idea—for example, the Trust for Public Land was founded in 1972 with a mission to create parks and protect land for people—but growing awareness of disparity in access to greenspaces and resultant health consequences has highlighted the need for local land trusts to create access to open space. The Land Trust Alliance’s 2020 Census reports 80 percent of land trusts provide public access, up 11 percent from 2015.

Settling into his new role, Betzler heard abundant interest in the community to expand outdoor access. After consulting with other land trusts, Betzler and the Sheridan Community Land Trust board organized a small group of recreationists to identify locations for a trail system. They narrowed down a long wish list of private and public lands to a few places where trails would be accessible for the community, minimize environmental impact, and have landowner support.

The land trust had been deliberate in building community trust and was careful not to encroach on any property rights. “We weren’t standing on the edge of their property with a bulldozer,” Betzler says. Working with landowners already supportive of the organization, Betzler started “Ride the Ranch”—a series of evening group bicycle rides along two-track roads on private land. These rides were a proxy for community interest and gave landowners a taste of public access.

One landowner on the west edge of Sheridan made the access permanent. In 2013, the land trust opened Soldier Ridge Trail as a four-mile out-and-back on a ranch road. The land trust has since added a trailhead on nearby city-owned property to create 10 miles of unpaved trail, with 1.5 more miles and another trailhead planned for summer 2023. The Soldier Ridge Trails connect to the city pathway system, making access possible even without a vehicle. As they move across this working ranch, trail users experience the native range habitat protected in many of the land trust’s conservation easements.

Paymar refers to places like Soldier Ridge as “ambassador landscapes,” where people can experience the open space, wildlife, and natural values that land trusts protect. They’re often in or near urban areas, making access easy for recreators as well as school groups. This connection to place brings the community into the land trust’s mission.
As Soldier Ridge developed, Betzler and his team pursued another trail project along Red Grade Road. Thirty minutes from Sheridan, Red Grade switchbacks across a mosaic of state, BLM, and Forest Service lands. Unlike Soldier Ridge, which opened access on private properties, Red Grade had always been publicly accessible. Locals had been skiing, snowmobiling, and wandering its dense woods for decades. A trail system would expand its appeal and usability, pulling recreation traffic off the road and into the thickets. The steep foothills and rugged terrain would make destination-worthy downhill trails, but the land trust decided on a different direction.

“We don’t need it to be world class—we want it to be great for our community,” says Betzler. Instead of bike-specific trails to draw visitors, the land trust designed Red Grade for a range of non-motorized recreation. They hired a trail designer who incorporated local knowledge to create trails for uses from birding to biking and everything in between. The design also accounted for nearby landowner concerns including privacy and fear of trespass.

After years of planning, fundraising, and permitting, the land trust broke ground on Red Grade Trails in 2014. When the BLM and Forest Service requested public comment for expanding the trail system in 2015, they received more than 500 comments, over 80 percent of which specifically supported the trails. What started as four miles meandering from sagebrush foothills into the conifer forest has since grown to 17 miles, three additional trailheads, and plans to construct 16 more miles.

By the time Betzler left his position in 2017, the Sheridan Community Land Trust had built eight miles of trail across two systems; created put-in and take-out sites along Tongue River, Big Goose Creek, and Little Goose Creek for rafters; and placed a conservation easement to double the size of a city-owned natural area. Current executive director Brad Bauer continues Betzler’s vision of creating an amenity for the local community.

Community members, he says, are “the ones who have bought into building and enjoying these trails.” Seventy percent of the land trust’s funding, including for trails, comes from community supporters and local foundations. Their support is necessary to keep the trails maintained, as well. With 29 miles of trail across three systems and over 75,000 users in 2022 alone, the land trust relies on volunteer help to supplement trail maintenance. Bauer continues to look for opportunities to engage more of the community with the trails, including creating accessible trails and providing free community education such as guided hikes, history talks, and workshops.

The Sheridan Community Land Trust trail systems have become a point of pride. In the words of local trail user Jim Sorenson, “Your family is here for Thanksgiving—what do you do? You take them to Red Grade and show them around. … It’s something everyone can do.”

 

Meghan Kent was the summer 2020 Science Journalism Intern for Western Confluence. After earning her master’s at the University of Wyoming, she moved to Sheridan to become the Sheridan Community Land Trust’s first conservation program manager.

 

Masthead photo: The Neeson family, along with their four-footed friends Harold and Luu, enjoy the green foothills and valley views during a spring hike at Red Grade Trails. Photo Courtesy Sheridan Community Land Trust.

Inmates are saving an iconic American landscape—and themselves

By Frani Halperin

On a very windy fall day, Gina Clingerman, project manager for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Abandoned Mines Lands program in Wyoming, walks through rolling hills where a wildland fire torched more than 14,000 acres of sagebrush steppe in 2020. Gina estimates that the sagebrush lost in this blaze near the small town of Hanna were probably 100 to 150 years old. But now, she says, they’re, “Dead. Gone. Forever.” That’s an irreplaceable loss for the pronghorn, mule deer, elk, and some 350 other species of wildlife that depend on this ecosystem. The sagebrush landscape, she says, is in peril.

Current estimates are that nearly half of sagebrush ecosystems, the largest interconnected habitat type in America, is gone because of human activities—including roads and urbanization, extractive industries like oil and gas and mining, and devastating fires, which are increasing with droughts and warming temperatures due to climate change. The BLM wants to restore these habitats, and Gina says just scattering seeds on the ground doesn’t work. Among blackened nubs of dead sagebrush, she points out little yellow cages about 12 inches tall, each sheltering a hand-planted seedling. Loose seeds have less than a three percent survival rate compared to the 40 to 70 percent viability of seedlings, but cultivating sagebrush from seed to stem is arduous and time-consuming. Here, Gina and her colleagues got help from a surprising source—inmates from the Wyoming correctional system.

When Levi George was incarcerated at the Wyoming Honor Farm—a minimum-security prison in Riverton, Wyoming—every day starting in April 2021, he and three other inmates made nurturing seedlings the focus of their day. “We mixed the dirt and the soil and made sure the pH levels are where they need to be. And then, we do the seedlings, and then throughout the year, we water and fertilize them,” Levi explains.

Over 6 months, the inmates’ plants grew to about three inches tall. Growing from seeds in the wild, they would have taken five years to get to the same height. In the fall, inmates at the Wyoming Honor Farm shipped out 25,000 sagebrush seedlings to sites around the state where they and partnering organizations planted them by hand.

The Institute for Applied Ecology, a nonprofit organization focused on conservation of native species and habitats, recognized a need for native plants to restore lands following wildfires. Inspired by Evergreen State College’s Sustainability in Prisons Project in Washington, the institute launched the Sagebrush in Prisons program in 2014.

Stacy Moore, ecological educator with the Institute for Applied Ecology, says prison officials were skeptical at first about dedicating resources toward growing a plant that most dismissed as “a weed that grows everywhere.” But after giving the program a try, the staff at the first prison, the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario, Oregon, told Stacy that they wanted to double production the next year. “So, that’s what we did, and the next year we went from one prison to five prisons. Then, other prisons saw the benefits and they put up their hand to be involved as well.” The nonprofit now works with 11 prisons in Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, and California.

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If the only goal was to grow sagebrush, the nonprofit could just do it on their own. But the ability to benefit adults in custody far outweighed the constraints that working with prison populations presented.

“These inmates are soon going to be out in the community, they’re going to be your neighbors, they’re going to be the ones you’re standing in line next to at the grocery store,” Stacy says. “So, we want to give them as many skills as we can before they are released.”

The institute brings in experts at each prison to teach inmates—and staff who also seem eager to learn—about sagebrush ecosystems. At the end of the season, each participant receives a certificate listing the skills they’ve acquired.

Levi says he’d never grown a plant from seed and found the experience therapeutic. “It’s nice to see something grow from nothing.” He adds that working with plants also offered him a place of refuge. “In prison, just like anywhere, everybody is not going to get along. So being able to be away from everyone else and be with the plants and nurture them and watch them grow, to me, it was very soothing.”

The program is so popular that there are not enough spots for everyone who wants to join. The inmates tell Stacy they like the smell of the sagebrush. Some say nurturing the seedlings lowered their blood pressure. Stacy hears that the program has helped reduce violence at facilities. Officers shared about one inmate in Idaho who was so depressed he wouldn’t go outside. His involvement in the program raised his spirts, and he became the lead team member. Prison staff said the program, “brought him out of his shell and saved his life.” Studies show programs like these also reduce recidivism because inmates reenter society with tangible skills, feeling valued.

The experience convinced Levi, who was due to be released within days from the Wyoming Honor Farm when this story was reported and is now at a halfway house, to apply to work for the BLM. “I plan on still continuing to work with them after my release here and try to help other people that’s been in my situation when they get out to have somewhere to start from because it’s hard for felons to get employment sometimes.”

And meanwhile, the tens of thousands of seedlings shipped out from prisons across the West each autumn are putting down their roots to bring back damaged areas of the sagebrush sea.

“It’s just knowing that you had a part of something that you’re giving life to that’s going to hopefully sustain other life form(s),” Levi says, trying to put into words what the program meant to him. “It’s a big deal.”

 

Fran Halperin is executive producer at H2O Radio. Western Confluence editor Emilene Ostlind adapted this piece from Halperin’s original piece, “How Inmates Are Saving an Iconic American Landscape—and Themselves,” published November 18, 2021, on H2O Radio.

 

Tens of thousands of invasive species—from cheatgrass, blights, and tamarisk to hogs, fire ants, and boa constrictors—damage natural ecosystems, agricultural systems, human-built infrastructure, and even public health throughout the United States, costing billions of dollars each year. The National Invasive Species Council calls invasives “one of the most significant threats to ecosystems, human and animal health, infrastructure, the economy, and cultural resources,” and Hawaii Governor David Ige, leading a Western Governors’ Association initiative on invasive species, emphasized that they “pose a significant threat to the western experience.” In the American West, invasive species present some of the biggest and most complex environment and natural resources challenges we face today. Addressing them requires not only huge investments of money and human capacity but also creative thinking and innovative approaches.

We hope this issue of Western Confluence will contribute to that endeavor. While we can’t explore every invasive species and proposed solution, we have curated a mix of stories that paints a picture of the problem’s scale, touches on both plants and animals as well as terrestrial and aquatic species, and most importantly shares examples of cutting edge research and approaches.

In many cases, control efforts focus specifically on getting rid of the invaders, whether that means spraying every last patch of a new invasive annual grass, treating a hot spring to kill all the exotic fish, or transporting every last mountain goat out of a mountain range. But as Tessa Wittman writes in her piece about resilience in native plants, we “will never get rid of the last cheatgrass seed.” One of the take-aways from these articles is that many invasive species have become permanent additions to the systems they now occupy.

Where eradication is out of reach, managers are shifting from the objective of getting rid of invasives toward figuring out ways to live with them. In these articles, researchers and managers share new strategies for keeping potential invasive species out of new places, identifying first arrivals of new species early, targeting those before they take off, optimizing where to apply control measures, making native systems more resistant to invasion, and even extreme potential future solutions, like genetically engineering diseases to wipe out invasive species. Scaffolding all these solutions are strategies around human coordination, communication, education, and data sharing.

Will these efforts work? There are some encouraging successes, but on a whole, invasive species, seem to be expanding faster than we can keep up with. Meanwhile, managers struggle to find adequate or sustainable funding for a seemingly endless battle that has few wins and little to celebrate. And yet, given the damages they cause and threats they pose, doing nothing about invasive species is not an option. Invasive species require that we keep working on, innovating around, and paying for these and future solutions. We will have to be incredibly informed, coordinated, and responsive. We will have to get creative about directing our limited resources to where they will best improve the situation. We will also have to adjust our expectations of what our ecological and cultivated systems should look like and consider new measures of what counts as a functioning ecosystem. We will have to adapt to a new normal.

By Emilene Ostlind

Plants as stories of human meddling

The Wyoming census for the plant kingdom is out! Over 2,900 different kinds of vascular plants grow in the wild in Wyoming according to experts at UW’s Rocky Mountain Herbarium. They include more than 2,500 native species along with 372 nonnative ones as of 2018. Every single wild plant falls into one of those two categories: native or nonnative. Native plants belong, not just by living their whole lives here but by having Wyoming-ness inscribed in their genes over the ages. They are each uniquely adapted to their environment and to each other.

What about the nonnatives? They don’t have the fine-tuned adaptations or provide the ecological support of the natives. Some, but not all, nonnative plants are invasive, like biological bombs that multiply exponentially across the landscape, wreaking havoc on native plants and animals. People often think of natives as “good” and nonnatives as “bad.” But our views and actions haven’t always been consistent with these labels. In fact, the Wyoming plant census, with all its nonnatives, is full of stories about how changing human perceptions of good and bad have shaped the flora of our state.

Bring it to the classroom: Access a version of this article modified to an eighth-grade reading level.

Waves of nonnative plants started showing up on Wyoming landscapes well over 100 years ago and have continued right up to the present. A census never stays the same. One of the earliest weeds to arrive in Wyoming was Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense), appearing in Cheyenne in 1901. One of the more recent noxious weeds to arrive was garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), first appearing in Wyoming in 2014 along a trail in Devils Tower National Monument. Garlic mustard is highly invasive in most of the country, and the National Park Service is trying to eradicate it from the monument. Those 100-plus years of nonnative species arrivals include tales of human intentions and accidents, international storylines, and a few contradictions.

Some nonnative plants once considered desirable are now considered invasive. For example, spotted knapweed (Centaurea maculosa; syn. C. biebersteinii, C. stoebe) came from central Europe, first arriving in North America by way of British Columbia. Bee keepers planted it in western Montana for the flavorful honey its nectar produced. But in the absence of any natural control, spotted knapweed spreads widely and is recognized as a noxious weed in 15 other states as well as Wyoming.

Similarly, settlers brought Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia), a hardy tree found in southern Europe and central and western Asia, to the New World for windbreaks in the arid West. It is very fragrant—Thermopolis takes on aromatic exquisiteness in calm midsummer evenings when Russian olive is in flower along the Bighorn River. Some birds and small mammals like the seeds and carry them far and wide. Now Russian olive has taken over scarce river woodlands at low elevations, making them less hospitable for wildlife and livestock. Wyoming added Russian olive to the state noxious weed list in 2007, making it illegal to sell commercially. A relative called silverberry (Elaeagnus commutata) is a native shrub that bears much the same sublime fragrance and is starting to appear in nursery trade featuring native plants.

Other plants were accidental introductions. Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) was likely one of the first weeds early settlers brought to North America, coming as a contaminant of grain crops from the eastern Mediterranean region of Europe. The name Canada thistle comes from early residents of New England who blamed its appearance on the French traders from Canada. It’s time to pardon Canada! Historians now believe it arrived in both countries at about the same time. Today, it grows in moisture-collecting places in every county of Wyoming, a denizen of ditches and dams as well as valleys and wetlands. It spreads by underground root-like stems, often forming large, dense colonies.

Sometimes our attacks on invasive plants bring natives down with them. To keep the invasive musk thistle (Carduus nutans) in check, weed managers imported one of its natural pests, the Eurasian flowerhead weevil (Rhinocyllus conicus), from the Old World. The weevil’s larvae feed on developing seeds in the thistle flowerhead. This biocontrol strategy succeeded in turning around severe musk thistle invasions. However, recent studies suggest the weevil has also taken a liking to the rare native Ownbey’s thistle (Cirsium ownbeyi). Like invasive plants, the Eurasian flowerhead weevil didn’t behave in a predictable way when taken away from its overseas home.

Fortunately, not all nonnative plants are invasive. Crested wheatgrass (Agropyron cristatum) is a bunchgrass from Russia widely planted in the western United States to control erosion on reclaimed mines and roadside cutbanks. It is locally abundant in every county of Wyoming, and though persistent where planted, it does not readily spread into surroundings. Likewise, common lilac (Syringa vulgaris), a sweet shrub favored in gardens, persists around houses including abandoned homesteads, but is not a wild plant or a species that spreads and invades.

Native plants are never truly invasive in the wilds of Wyoming, but they can be darned pesky for some human tastes and land uses. In the realm of pesky native species, there is exactly one native plant on the Wyoming noxious weed list, skeletonleaf bursage (Ambrosia tomentosa). It garnered this dubious distinction by producing spiny bur-like seeds and proliferating in some cropland settings. It spreads by seed and creeping roots and can grow over waist high on fertile ground. It is widespread on the High Plains, growing in both cultivated cropland and rangeland. As a designated noxious weed, skeletonleaf bursage is the target of state-funded herbicide spraying in cropland, but it maintains a firm roothold in the state.

The word “weed” has been used indiscriminately to refer to both native and nonnative plants. For example, every kind of milkweed growing wild in Wyoming is actually native. These plants may have gotten the weed moniker by thriving where manmade habitat fostered their spread, for example in planted hay meadows, or because they are poisonous to eat. Showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) grows in moist, eastern Wyoming valleys and wetlands as well as planted meadows and roadsides. Only recently have we come to appreciate milkweeds as food for resident and migrating monarch butterflies.

These many stories of humans moving plants around and later changing their minds about what’s good and bad show that the native and nonnative categories are not as simple as they first seem. When it comes to addressing the problem of invasive species in our state, the starting point is understanding that humans account for their presence in the first place.

By Bonnie Heidel

Bonnie Heidel is botanist at Wyoming Natural Diversity Database. She also brings news and tales of nonnative plants to the Wyoming Native Plant Society newsletter, Castilleja.

The race to save an ecosystem

Locals speculate that Nevada’s largest fire may have started with a Fourth of July firework launched in a canyon. But no one really knows. The 2018 Martin Fire seemed small and innocuous, until a weather cell moved into northern Nevada. With winds suddenly pushing the blaze, it burned through sagebrush rangelands at 11 miles per hour. Firefighters couldn’t get ahead of it.

The Martin Fire doubled in size every day for four days, growing to be 57 miles long and 30 miles wide and burning 435,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, and private ranch land. Among the biggest losses in the fire were some of Nevada’s best sage grouse habitat and at least 35 sage grouse leks, where the birds stage their breeding dances. Ranchers, Elko County, and local hunters all chipped in for a reward to catch whoever started the fire, to no avail.

While fire is a natural part of the Great Basin, massive ones like the Martin Fire were unheard of a generation ago. An ecosystem that evolved with relatively rare fires, occurring every 30 to 100 years or more, can now see fires as often as every 5 years.

Bring it to the classroom: access a version of this article modified to an eighth grade reading level.

Not only are rangeland fires more frequent in the Great Basin today, they are also larger. Historically, rangeland fires grew to the order of hundreds to thousands of acres. Today, they regularly escalate into megafires, the term firefighting experts at the Interagency Fire Center in Boise coined for blazes exceeding 100,000 acres. Megafire captures the disproportionate destruction and expense of those very large fires.

According to data from the Bureau of Land Management, a new trend is emerging where range fires now tend to burn more acres each year than forest fires. That was the case in 13 years out of the last 19. Yet public attention and resources devoted to even mega-sized range fires remain relatively scant compared to forest fires.

Several major changes are stoking Great Basin megafires. For one, a long history of fire suppression has led to more continuous shrubby cover of sagebrush and juniper, and less of the native perennial grasses that slowed fires in the past. Two, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum), an invasive annual that most of us take for granted in pastures, along roadsides, or poking at our ankles through our socks, is covering more and more of the West. Plus, the Great Basin has been getting warmer over the last 100 years, a trend that favors cheatgrass.

Not only is cheatgrass prolific, it also makes rangeland more likely to burn. As cheatgrass grows between native shrubs and grasses it coats the landscape in a fine, tissue paper-like fuel. When a lightening strike or errant campfire sparks a fire, slow-growing sagebrush perishes, while cheatgrass seeds persist, ready to germinate quickly and outcompete native grasses. After multiple fire cycles, sometimes fewer, cheatgrass reduces formerly diverse and complex shrublands into fire-prone grassland savannas. This pattern has locked the Great Basin in a vicious cycle of burning, which leads to more cheatgrass, and then more fire.

The sweeping scale of recent rangeland fires and the speed with which they are changing the Great Basin drives home the ecological, economic, and social consequences of invasive species run amok. Ranchers, rangeland scientists, and managers are waking up to the rapid pace at which cheatgrass and fire are altering the Great Basin’s sagebrush ecosystem, and now they are racing to save what remains.

“It’s in its own class among invasive species,” says Jeremy Maestas, an ecologist who works on sagebrush ecosystem conservation for the US Department of Agriculture’s Sage Grouse Initiative. “I think what people have to realize is just the sheer disruptive nature of that plant on western range. If you care about the American West and the rural way of life, this is going to upend everything.”

After thousands of years making a successful living alongside people in Europe and Asia, cheatgrass is perfectly suited to exploit the human footprint in North America. Since arriving from Europe nestled in packing material in the late 1800s, it has spread to all 50 states and thrives especially well in the western US.

Range managers in the early to mid 1900s fretted over cheatgrass in the scientific literature, say Maestas. While sagebrush and native bunch grasses are long-term investors, taking years to put down deep roots after a fire or other disturbance, cheatgrass moves fast and gets rich quick. As a winter annual that can germinate in the fall or spring, it has a head start on native plants that are dormant during those times. Then it dries out by June, producing as many as 5,000 seeds per plant.

By the 1930s westerners rationalized that they could learn how to live with cheatgrass. It does have some spring forage value for cattle and it was too hard to control anyway. Aldo Leopold saw this complacency and sounded an alarm about allowing cheatgrass to subtly spread unabated throughout rangelands in Utah and Oregon.

“It is impossible to fully protect cheat country from fire,” he wrote in Sand County Almanac. “As a consequence, the remnants of good browse plants, such as sagebrush and bitterbrush, are being burned back to higher altitudes, where they are less useful as winter forage.”

As Leopold predicted, overgrazing and drought made the Great Basin vulnerable to initial cheatgrass invasion, and his fears about failing to control the weed came to pass. Today, cheatgrass makes up more than 15 percent of vegetation cover over 52 million acres of the Intermountain West. That means about a third of the region is covered in fine fuel that dries out just as fire season begins. Conversion to cheatgrass monoculture is most severe in lower elevation regions of the Great Basin and on the Snake River Plain of Idaho. It’s also starting to spread in the Northern Rockies, showing up in places people never expected to see it.

Cheatgrass cover in the west has increased since 2000, according to Maestas. Along with that, fire frequencies in the Great Basin are now up to four times historic levels. The fire season is also longer. And perhaps most striking, fires are much larger.

“When people’s houses aren’t burning down, it’s really hard to motivate people at a large enough scale to do something about it,” says Maestas. That’s changed, though, as the cheatgrass and fire cycle has ramped up. About 15 million acres of sagebrush burned from 2000 to 2018, mostly in the Great Basin. Nine million of those acres burned between 2014 and 2018 as fires over 100,000 acres are becoming more common. “People’s ranches and allotments are burned out regularly, and they have nowhere to go with their livestock. Now we’re seeing consequences of not taking action.”

As the economic, ecological, and social fallout of inaction against cheatgrass have come into much clearer resolution, so has the sense of urgency about combating it. Jon Griggs, the manager of the Maggie Creek Ranch near Elko, is among the Nevadans who have experienced the many dimensions of those consequences. One is the emotional toll of seeing livestock get burned over and watching in fear as flames have rushed him on the ranch.

Then there are the tangible consequences for ranching communities that rely on a healthy, functioning sagebrush ecosystem. When ranchers need to stay off their federal grazing leases after fire, they can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on feed or they may have to sell their cattle. “Fire and the aftermath of fire might be the biggest challenge that we have,” says Griggs. “It does put people out of business. It changes our livelihood, sometimes forever.”

In addition to the direct threat of being burned over, ranchers and wildlife managers worry about the threats cheatgrass and fire pose to long-term conservation goals in the Great Basin. For instance, when mule deer arrive to their winter range after a fire, they can’t find the sagebrush and bitterbrush they rely on, leading to poor reproductive success and outright starvation. Fires in northern Nevada have taken a toll on the herds. For instance, in the early 1990s one of northern Nevada’s prime mule deer areas hosted an estimated 20,000 individuals. By 2018 there were fewer than 10,000 mule deer there. “Most in our agency attribute that major decline in population to wildfires that have burned the majority of the winter range for this herd,” says Cody Schroeder, the Nevada Department of Wildlife’s mule deer staff biologist.

While the fates of 350 wild animal species are tied to healthy sagebrush, sage grouse have driven much of the policy and wildlife politics in the ecosystem. So ranchers like Griggs have viewed the potential endangered species listing of sage grouse as an opportunity to do conservation work that benefits both cattle grazing and wildlife. But fire can sweep through to undermine that work in a matter of hours.

After a burn, sage grouse will first return to the lek, even if it’s black and barren, and try to perform their mating rituals, says Alan Jenne, the Nevada Department of Wildlife’s habitat division chief. Sage grouse exposed to open sky are likely to be eaten by predators, so they will abandon that lek rather than mate. If they do mate, nesting success in cheatgrass is low because chicks are exposed to predators like ravens. Even when chicks survive, the birds need to find annual flowering plants to eat. But if cheatgrass has taken over, those forbs won’t be growing, and the birds will need to move to a new area. At that point, “they’re kind of on this death march to get to something more productive,” says Jenne.

When the Martin Fire took out at least 35 sage grouse leks, it was like watching years of collaborative efforts to keep sage grouse populations healthy and off the endangered species list go up in smoke. Griggs calls fire the concern when it comes to potential sage grouse listing. “Three quarters of a million acres in two fires last year in the north end of this state burned up the best habitat we got,” he says. “Thinking about listing, just those two fires really concern me.”

Those concerns are well supported, and shared by the sagebrush conservation community. If current wildfire trends in the Great Basin continue, model projections from a 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences point to a 43 percent reduction in sage grouse populations over the next three decades.

After the Martin fire, sagebrush skeletons poke out of black soil and wind whips up sooty dust clouds on the denuded horizon. Returning this landscape to a place where sage grouse chicks can once again thrive means overcoming all the advantages cheatgrass has in an arid and disturbed landscape.

Sagebrush habitat restoration is an evolving art and science. While we see the aboveground results, a key component of the battle against cheatgrass happens belowground. Research is showing that maintaining or reestablishing the extensive root systems of native plants keeps shallow-rooted cheatgrass from getting a toehold.

People restoring sagebrush ecosystems rely on the mantra of “right seed, right place, right time” to guide their work. The saying is shorthand for the complexities of reestablishing native plants in a harsh, cold desert climate where it rains fewer than 10 inches a year. Restoration in vast, remote areas is resource-intensive, logistically difficult, and subject to the vagaries of desert weather. For instance, it took nine semi trucks carrying up to 30,000 pounds of seed to replant after the Martin Fire, but burned over, snowy, wet dirt roads needed to be repaired first. In the end, it’s impossible to touch every acre of a 435,000-acre burn scar.

Most invasive weed management programs address less than 10 percent of infested acres, yet invasive plants can spread at a rate of 15 to 35 percent per year, according to the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ 2017 report on wildfire and invasive plants in the sagebrush biome. Failing to shift those numbers in favor of sagebrush, bunchgrasses, and native forbs has dire consequences for a sagebrush ecosystem that’s already 41 percent gone. “It’s hard for me personally, the notion that we could almost lose this ecosystem in its entirety within my lifespan,” says Liz Munn, rangeland ecologist for the Nature Conservancy’s Nevada chapter.

To help prevent that dire outcome, Munn is collaborating with a number of researchers who hope to improve restoration success by developing technologies to help native plants compete. One technique is trying to give native grasses a head start over cheatgrass. To do this, researchers coat bluebunch wheatgrass and squirreltail seeds in pods of activated charcoal. Those pellets protect them from the herbicides that beat back cheatgrass, giving them a competitive advantage once they germinate. Other seed coatings help bet hedge against variable weather by letting native grasses germinate earlier or later than they would on their own.

“Ultimately we’re sort of mimicking what cheatgrass does,” says Munn. “Cheatgrass needs a little credit here, really. It’s well adapted to this environment. It germinates quickly. It germinates often. So we’re trying to basically give native seeds the same advantages that cheatgrass already has.” Strategies like this are part of a larger suite of techniques the Nature Conservancy and USDA Agricultural Research Service are borrowing from precision agriculture. These precision restoration technologies, as they are called, are designed to boost the odds of successful restoration. They include different kinds of seed coatings, and also mapping tools that help managers make better decisions about which restoration practices to use and where and when to use them.

Seed coating techniques have been successful in the lab, so the Nature Conservancy is now working with collaborators throughout the West to test them in the real world. One of those places will be on mule deer winter range that the Nevada Department of Wildlife is restoring after the 2017 Snowstorm fire.

While the current seed-coating test isn’t large enough to positively affect mule deer habitat yet, it could contribute to the success of ongoing restoration efforts in the future. Mule deer herds near Elko have seen dramatic population declines, largely from loss of winter range to cheatgrass and fire. “We have populations that are solely reliant upon our past efforts at fire rehab at different times of the year,” says Caleb McAdoo, a habitat biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife.

That’s one reason why it’s important to protect intact habitats and hard-earned restored areas from fire. Currently the best option available for that is fuel breaks to keep fires from growing so large in the first place. Managers often construct those wide bands of roadside vegetation by seeding with nonnative plants that grow successfully in semiarid climates, like forage kochia, a shrubby perennial with thin leaves and succulent, slender stems. Ideally, that green barrier is moist enough and wide enough to calm a range fire.

Fuel breaks remain a controversial technique because they require intentionally disturbing an area and planting nonnative vegetation. As a 2018 US Geological Survey report points out, substantial scientific evidence supporting their effectiveness, or documenting their impacts, is lacking. But anecdotally, strategic fuel break placement has protected key habitats or restored areas. That was the case in southern Idaho when projections showed the 2017 Centennial Fire could reach 142,000 acres. After a fuel break slowed the blaze, firefighters gained control of it before it reached 20,000 acres.

Fuel breaks, and the scale with which managers need to deploy them, underscore the heavy-handed actions required once an invasive species reshapes how a large landscape functions. The Bureau of Land Management is now proposing to build 11,000 miles of them in Nevada.

“We’re trying to figure out what the sweet spot is of basically fragmenting this landscape enough to stop these megafires and to try and get a foothold on some of these restoration opportunities, versus too much fragmentation that is ecologically impactful,” say Jolie Pollet, the BLM’s division chief for fire planning and fuels management, based in Boise.

Beyond containing Great Basin megafires and restoring habitat where cheatgrass is already widespread, managers are trying to get ahead of the weed before it takes over in new regions.

We go into areas that are broken and try to fix it,” says Maestas. “We need to get out of that model. Invasive species management 101 tells you you’ve always got to prevent first.” That means doing what Leopold implored westerners to do nearly 100 years ago: go into areas where cheatgrass invasion is just starting, like the Rocky Mountains, and find strategic ways to eradicate or control it.

For instance, until relatively recently, ecologists considered Wyoming too northerly, and too high elevation, for cheatgrass to really take off there. Now that they are finding large infestations above 9,000 feet, it’s clear that even northern states are vulnerable. With 37 percent of the West’s sage grouse population, the most leks, and the most sagebrush of any state, the stakes are high for controlling cheatgrass in Wyoming.

In places like the Great Basin, where prevention work didn’t happen soon enough, the challenge is learning how to live with cheatgrass. “But that doesn’t have to be the future for a lot of West,” says Maestas.

“We still have a lot of land that is in really good shape, but it’s threatened by invasion. I think it’s a cultural mindset, that people have to be ready to respond quickly before there’s an obvious problem.”

Text and photos by Sarah Jane Keller

Sarah Jane Keller is a freelance science and environmental journalist based in Bozeman, Montana. Find more of her work at sjanekeller.com.

Further Reading

B.A. Bradley et al., “Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) distribution in the Intermountain Western United States and its relationship to fire frequency, seasonality, and ignitions,” Biological Invasions 20 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-017-1641-8.

P.S. Coates, et al., “Wildfire, climate, and invasive grass interactions negatively impact an indicator species by reshaping sagebrush ecosystems,” Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences 113 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1606898113.

D.S. Pilliod, J.L. Welty, and R.S. Arkle, “Refining the cheatgrass–fire cycle in the Great Basin: Precipitation timing and fine fuel composition predict wildfire trends,” Ecology and Evolution 7 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.3414.

K.A. Snyder, et al., “Effects of changing climate on the hydrological cycle in cold desert ecosystems of the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau,” Rangeland Ecology and Management 72 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rama.2018.07.007.

Wildfire and Invasive Plants in the Sagebrush Biome: Challenges That Hinder Current and Future Management and Protection. WAFWA Wildfire/Invasive Species Working Group. 2018.

One researcher examines how native plants can compete with invasives

In the spring of 2019 Elizabeth Leger drove out from her botany lab at the University of Nevada, Reno to her field site on the western edge of the 435,000 acres burned in the Martin Fire. She was looking for cheatgrass. The 2018 wildfire was the largest in Nevada’s history, and cheatgrass is frequently the first thing to grow after a fire on this landscape. But as she approached the burned area, Leger didn’t see the invasive grass. Rather she found fields of blooming native wildflowers. How did these native plants survive and thrive after fire? What suppressed the cheatgrass?

Leger studies what makes some individual plants and plant communities resistant to invasive species, like cheatgrass, and resilient after disturbance, like fire. “Resistance,” she says, “is the ability to keep the weeds out, and resilience is the ability of the community to come back to some sort of native trajectory after disturbance.” In her research, she works to identify the characteristics that enable some native plants to outcompete or recover. Her work could help managers better tailor their efforts to combat invasive species by promoting resistance and resilience in native plants.

Bring it to the classroom: access a version of this article modified to an eighth grade reading level.

A nonnative species is titled “invasive” when it degrades ecosystem productivity, reduces biodiversity, disrupts desirable ecosystem services, or drives sensitive species toward extinction. That happens when it outcompetes natives. Disturbance, such as fire, can expedite invasion. The worst invasive grasses in the West are annuals, which germinate from seed every year, while native perennials, once rooted, come back year after year. Intact sagebrush systems contain a diverse community of shrubs and perennial forbs and grasses that grow and blossom throughout the growing season. Each native species is one component of a continuous cycle of ecosystem productivity. When each of the components are present, the plant community prevents invasive weeds from taking over.

“The problem,” Leger explains, “is when you pull some of those components out, that’s when you make these windows for cheatgrass or other weeds to come in.” For example, when decades of intensive grazing and topsoil erosion removed some native species on western landscapes, cheatgrass invaded.

The standard approach to fighting invasive annuals has been to focus on killing them across the landscape. Land managers invest huge amounts of time, money, and herbicides on invaded landscapes, but they will never eliminate the last cheatgrass seed. At the same time, treating invasives like a cancer can have much the same result on the ecosystem as chemotherapy has on the human body, killing healthy components alongside the target. Relying on conventional solutions like herbicides to manage invasive plants also kills the native plants that have evolved to resist the invaders.

Leger is researching unconventional solutions. Her curiosity was sparked after observing a half-burned hill. On the side untouched by wildfire, native grasses and shrubs grew, while the burned side was covered in cheatgrass. Amidst the cheatgrass, a few endemic grasses persisted. Leger collected plants from both sides of the hill and began experimenting.

To identify characteristics of plants capable of competing with cheatgrass, she first plants cheatgrass in experimental plots containing different compositions of native plant communities and then weighs the biomass of the cheatgrass produced in a season. Thus, her metric to assess resistance is to gauge the effect of the native plants on the productivity of the invader. Natives are more resistant when cheatgrass produces smaller plants and fewer seeds.

To understand the characteristics of individual native plants surviving in invaded areas, Leger can be found at her field sites and greenhouses measuring plants and excavating root systems. She has found, for established perennials, the best strategy is to green up really early—the minute it starts raining—and put a lot of energy into roots. “Below ground,” she says, “that’s where all the fighting is in the Great Basin.” Her most interesting finding in native seed establishment is, “The plants that survive best are the ones that are small overall.” The theory is, plants that require less water and fewer resources have a better chance of surviving in a high competition situation.

Leger’s research is informing new management strategies. Whereas seed producers generally select for bigger plants, Leger’s work shows that plants that are small, green up early, and produce a lot of below ground biomass are more resistant to invasion. By selecting seeds with these characteristics, managers may get a leg up on cheatgrass. Furthermore, based on the increased understanding about the importance of a diverse, intact native plant community, some managers in sagebrush are seeding native perennials in advance of fire in an effort to restore the ecosystem from historic disturbance such as overgrazing. Leger is also assessing the potential for high-density, short term cattle grazing to mow down the annual grasses, thus opening space for native perennials to establish.

There is no silver bullet solution, Leger emphasizes. No one strategy will work in every place or every year but seeding diverse species with a variety of characteristics and growth strategies may support a stronger and more resilient ecosystem. Restoration seeding efforts are ongoing at select sites among the 435,000 acres burned in the Martin Fire. The spring of 2019 was particularly wet, which helped endemic perennials thrive on the western edge of the burn, and only time will tell how the landscape is rebounding. Leger will return each season to monitor the plant communities, searching for clues to inform wiser management approaches to fighting invasives.

By Tessa Wittman

Tessa Wittman is a senior in environment and natural resources and wildlife and fisheries biology and management at the University of Wyoming and a 2019 Udall Scholar.

Tiny soil organisms may hold the key to managing invasive plants

The four members of Gordon Custer’s research group gather around as he walks through the steps of data collection. It’s a sunny June morning at a test area in the High Plains Grassland Research Station outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Custer and the lab members have donned sunglasses and ballcaps to block the sun’s rays.

Custer, a University of Wyoming PhD student in ecology, demonstrates how to toss a placemat-sized white plastic square made of tubing, use a tablet to take pictures of it, catalog the plant species within it, and then extract three soil core samples. He places the soil samples into a small plastic bag called a “Whirl-Pak,” because, to seal it, he must whirl the pack over itself several times, similar to wringing out a towel.

“It’s a super creative name,” Custer jokes.

A team member sanitizes the soil core sampler with a blowtorch and ethanol before tossing the white square to another place in the plot, one of 84 individual subplots within the research area. Once he’s certain the research team has got the hang of it, Custer retreats from the test plots to set up his workstation.

Bring it to the classroom: access a version of this article modified to an eighth grade reading level.

“If anyone has any questions, don’t hesitate to ask,” he tells the lab members, and he tells me, “If you need anything give me a shoutout, but otherwise I’m going to be in field work mode.”

The group needs to gather 211 individual Whirl-Paks from the research plot, and the weather forecast calls for rain in the afternoon. Any samples that get wet would differ from the other samples, throwing off the data set. It’s an ambitious goal for one day, and they’re racing against the weather.

“I need a third hand,” Custer laments, as he meticulously repeats the steps to process each of the Whirl-Paks.

The group is looking for microbes—microscopic organisms including bacteria and fungi. While they are invisible, microbes play a crucial role in a healthy ecosystem. They cycle nutrients, breaking down compounds into forms that other organisms, such as plants, can use. Custer says many plant species flourish in the presence of compatible microbe communities, and vice versa.

Disruptions—such as wildfires, development, and invasive species—can easily upset microbial communities, throwing the ecosystem out of balance. Learning how disruptions impact microbes can help researchers get a handle on how to return ecosystems to their pre-disruption state. Custer plans to do just that, by homing in on how invasive plant species impact microbial communities. Custer says, in the future, his work could create new strategies for managing invasive species.

The research Custer and his lab are conducting is part of a larger microbial research effort at UW funded by a National Science Foundation grant totaling $20 million over five years. The goal is to gain comprehensive understanding of microbes in Wyoming. Currently, very little is known about the distribution of microbes across the state, or what happens when that is disturbed.

How do you survey microscopic organisms? Linda van Diepen, UW assistant professor in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management and Custer’s PhD advisor, says that while researchers won’t ever see the microbes in their soil samples, they can look for markers of microbial communities. Microbes excrete enzymes to break down food—like dead grass—into components small enough for them to consume. As they do this, they also change the nutrient concentration in the soil. Researchers can analyze the enzymes, nutrient concentrations, and the microbe’s own DNA to identify which ones are present and how they are functioning.

While they are vital to a healthy ecosystem, little research has been done to discover how microbes, as an integral part of an ecosystem, interact with invasive plant species.

“These invasive plants invade a system and they alter nutrient cycling, alter below-ground interactions,” Custer says. “These impacts [could] last long after the plants have been removed.”

Custer is working on three projects focused on the interactions between microbes and invasive species. At the site near Cheyenne, Custer and his group are working in a plot treated with an herbicide a year and a half earlier.

“Invasive plants kind of diverge the microbial community away from the native state,” Custer says. “When you spray herbicide on it, you may be furthering it away from its native state and imposing additional hurdles to restoration.”

Custer’s lab, two teams of two, bring him the Whirl-Paks as they finish with each subplot. He breaks up the soil cores, which look like brown apple cores, in the Whirl-Pak and shakes up the soil. He then uses metal instruments to take small amounts of soil and place them into two different tubes, one with a potassium sulfate solution, and a “bead tube” filled with small purple beads. The soil analysis will hopefully yield information about the microbes present in the herbicide treated areas to discover whether herbicides disrupt the microbial community and how.

Herbicide application is just one of the many ways invasion can affect the microbial community. For his second research project, Custer examined the long-lasting impacts of invasion on the microbial community, even after an invasive plant is removed.

To study this, Custer grew native plants in pots for 12 weeks. He then harvested the native plants and re-planted the pots with Russian knapweed, an invasive species, which grew for 12 weeks. Finally, he harvested the invasive plants and re-planted the pots with the native species. Custer examined the microbial community at every step of the process.

The third project is a general survey across the entire state of Wyoming to compare microbe communities in native, uninvaded prairie with places where cheatgrass has invaded. Van Diepen says the initial survey of Wyoming will help determine which microbe species are present in uninvaded prairie versus invaded prairie. Custer worked with Wyoming Weed and Pest as well as UW Extension to survey 10 to 15 sites across Wyoming.

Custer says his research could lay the groundwork for new approaches to combat invasive plant species. A potential application is in the development of bioherbicides—herbicides that use microbes instead of chemicals to target invasive plant species. Bioherbicides made from microbes could be tailored to attack a specific invasive plant without harming native species. Custer’s foundational research efforts could inform future development of such herbicides, helping to put more tools in the hands of land managers.

“A lot of work is still needed on that front, and it is not a silver bullet,” he says. “But it is a potential avenue for development.”

Custer’s projects, as well as the others under the NSF grant, will lay the foundations for future microbial ecology research in Wyoming and beyond. Custer says being able to take part in a project this size with so many people involved feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“The breadth, the knowledge that is working on this is crazy,” Custer says. “You have biogeochemists, microbial ecologists, computational biologists, statisticians, GIS people…it’s pretty cool, the interdisciplinary research and collaboration.”

In the research plot, Custer’s group stands around his workstation as he processes the few remaining Whirl-Paks. The clouds have turned a dark, gloomy purple and the wind has picked up. The rain is coming. In the semi-arid climate of Wyoming, Custer says there is a “pulse” of microbial activity after a wetting event like a rainstorm.

Custer twists the lid on the last tube, as the groups loads their materials into the UW van. One student slams the trunk shut, and the volunteers pose for a picture—a souvenir of a successful field day. The phone camera flashes, and the rain starts to come down.

Text and photos by Sara Teter

Sara Teter was the summer 2019 Science Journalism Intern for the Ruckelshaus Institute and a graduate student in the Communications and Journalism Department at the University of Wyoming.

What do we really know about their effects?

As Cara Nelson, a researcher and professor of ecosystem science and restoration at the University of Montana, hiked around Missoula’s foothills, she noticed abundant knapweed and cheatgrass growing amidst native bunchgrasses and wildflowers. She became interested in studying approaches to control invasive plants. One of the most common techniques is spraying herbicides on noxious weeds and re-seeding afterwards with native seeds. Since spraying paired with re-seeding didn’t seem to be keeping the weeds under control, Nelson wanted to learn what the literature had to say about the efficacy and effects of herbicide use on wildlands. She was surprised to find limited research on the effects of herbicides on complex ecosystems.

For managers to make evidence-based decisions, they would need to understand more about how herbicides impact native plant and soil communities. Nelson decided to collaborate with land managers on several studies to increase knowledge on this topic.

Bring it to the classroom: access a version of this article modified to an eighth grade reading level.

Herbicides are chemicals designed to kill unwanted plants, originally in crop agriculture. They interrupt normal plant growth and can be classified as selective or non-selective. Selective herbicides kill either all broadleaf plants (dicots) or all parallel veined plants (monocots), for example grasses. In contrast, non-selective herbicides kill all plants they come into contact with, which includes both desirable and undesirable plants. One of these, glyphosate, is a chemical most commonly sprayed on wildlands, including forests, grasslands, and shrublands. Glyphosate is commonly used because it rapidly spreads through plant tissue, is cost effective, and degrades rapidly. Regulatory entities have concluded that glyphosate poses a low risk to wildlife; however, independent research has shown glyphosate is carcinogenic.

Agencies at the federal, state, or county level can designate a plant as “noxious” if it is considered “injurious to public health, agriculture, recreation, wildlife, or property.” National policies then require public land managers to regulate designated noxious plants, including in wildlands, and herbicides are a common treatment. For example, the National Park Service sprays to meet the management goal of maintaining historic ecosystem functions. Other agencies spray rangelands, highly trafficked areas such as along roads and trails, and areas burned by wildfires.

Even though agencies consider herbicides useful, there are unwanted side effects. Herbicides can kill both native and invasive plants, and spraying opens up the door for secondary invasion. For example, when managers spray knapweed, cheatgrass may aggressively colonize the area, even after native seed mixes are reseeded. Herbicides can also affect soil, water, and even human health. Given that these potential hazards are not fully understood, Nelson saw a need to gain a better understanding of how herbicides affect wildlands.

“Walking around Mount Sentinel, you can see areas that were sprayed for knapweed [that] now have cheatgrass,” Nelson explains. Nelson adds that, herbicides can be effective at controlling invasive plants. However, in many areas that are sprayed, weeds persist even after spraying. “Reseeding is one method to avoid secondary invasion. However, there is a research gap here.”

She wondered how effective reseeding into soils recently sprayed with herbicides was, so Nelson and her Restoration Ecology Lab partnered with Morgan Valliant at Missoula County Parks and Recreation to study that question. The first study, led by Viktoria Wagner, a post-doc in the lab, uncovered that seeding immediately after spraying prevented the seeds of native species, both grasses and herbaceous plants, from germinating. A follow-up study led by Christine McManamen, a graduate student in the lab, showed that herbicides also have long lasting effects, decreasing seed germination up to one year after spraying. Seeds of some species were more sensitive to herbicides than others. Findings suggest the need to identify the sweet spot—seeding too soon will result in poor germination, while seeding too late misses the window of opportunity and permits secondary invasion. Nelson, Wagner, and McManamen published these findings in the journal Restoration Ecology in 2014 and 2018.

Leading up to this reseeding research, Nelson and Wagner collaborated on another study with Canadian researchers and land managers to assess knowledge about herbicide effects on native plants and the extent of herbicide spraying on public lands in North America. They reviewed articles on herbicide use and found most existing research looked at the effects on agricultural plants, not wild plants or soil organisms. The researchers found 40 publications on the oldest and most commonly used herbicide active ingredient, glyphosate, and far fewer on the effects of several of the next most commonly sprayed active ingredients. “That is very low considering how much we use these,” Nelson explains. Furthermore, in addition to few overall articles, Nelson and her team found that more than half of the published studies had design flaws. Their research did not stop there.

Nelson and Wagner, looking specifically at herbicide use in the United States, attempted to compile data from seven federal agencies that spray herbicides on wildlands. But they found that some agencies did not document their herbicide use. Only five tracked herbicide use on public lands, and only four of those—Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service—agreed to share their data. The Forest Service declined because of data quality concerns.

Furthermore, Nelson and Wagner’s analysis of the agencies’ data disclosed that land managers sprayed herbicides on 2.5 million acres of US federal and tribal wildlands from 2007 to 2011. The researchers conservatively estimated that in a single year, 2010, managers sprayed 1.2 million acres, an area the size of Delaware, with over 220 tons of herbicide, enough to fill two train tank cars. In 2017, the researchers published these findings in a Journal of Applied Ecology paper titled “Herbicide usage for invasive nonnative plant management in wildland areas of North America.”

Nelson’s findings about the volume of herbicides sprayed and the shortage of understanding about their effects highlight the need to better understand invasive species management on wildlands. Nelson suggests that managers “focus on the ecosystem as a whole rather than a narrow goal, such as removing a weed.” And, she proposes when they do spray herbicides, managers could do more to design effective monitoring programs to compare herbicide effects on control and treated sites. “The problem is not that there is not enough money for monitoring effects but rather,” Nelson says, that monitoring often fails due to poor experimental design. Effective monitoring requires planning how data will be analyzed, archived, and shared, and how the monitoring plan will be assessed, prior to implementing herbicide treatments. This is the foundation of evidence-based management, which requires a systems-thinking approach with broad goals. “When we manage for ecosystems, we have to manage that complexity,” Nelson says.

By Lauren Dunn

Lauren Dunn graduated with a bachelor of science in resource conservation from the University of Montana and has worked as a field botanist on various endangered species habitat monitoring projects all over the West. She is interested in the interface of human-land relationships.

Further Reading

Christine McManamen, Cara Nelson, and Victoria Wagner. “Timing of seeding after herbicide application influences rates of germination and seedling biomass of native plants used for grassland restoration,” Restoration Ecology Vol. 26, 6 (2018): 1137-1148, https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.12679.

Viktoria Wagner et al. “Herbicide usage for invasive nonnative plant management in wildland areas of North America,” Journal of Applied Ecology 54 (2017): 198-204, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.12711.

Viktoria Wagner and Cara Nelson, “Herbicides can negatively affect seed performance in native plants,” Restoration Ecology 22 (2014):288-291, https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.12089.

Can a highly coordinated team of experts and weed managers stop a new invasive species?

For many westerners, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is the exemplar invasive weed, well known for thriving in sagebrush landscapes where it crowds out native plants, fuels a devastating fire regime, and threatens wildlife and livestock grazing.

Over the passing decades, researchers, weed specialists, and rangeland managers have learned a lot about cheatgrass, including the patterns of mowing or grazing, kinds of herbicides, and range conditions that can slow it down. But we still haven’t figured out how to really stop cheatgrass’s spread or clear it out of the vast acreages it’s invaded. One of the main lessons has been, keeping cheatgrass out in the first place is much more effective and cheaper than trying to fight back the weed once it takes over.

So when another invasive annual grass—one that’s supposedly even worse than cheatgrass—popped up in Wyoming a few years ago, managers knew they had a small window of time to get control of this new invader, and they leapt into action. Given the cheatgrass situation, no one really believes an invasive annual grass can be controlled once it takes hold. But armed with lessons learned from decades of combatting various annual grasses, the best new herbicide chemical concoctions, and carefully developed strategies for a coordinated plan of attack, one team of weed specialists is out to break that barrier and prove it can be done.

Bring it to the classroom with a version of this article modified to an eighth grade reading level.

In the summer of 2016, a University of Wyoming professor named Brian Mealor took a group of students to the National Guard Training Area in Sheridan, Wyoming, a community of 18,000 nestled against the eastern slope of the Bighorn Mountains, to collect data for a graduate research project. As they set up transects and identified plants, a weird grass kept showing up. Mealor took some photos of it and started emailing his colleagues around the state, setting off a firestorm of worry and action.

The grass was ventenata (Ventenata dubia), also known as North African wiregrass, and it has been creeping outward from Washington and Idaho since its arrival there in the 1950s, spreading by as much as 3 million acres per year. In western North America, annual grasses like cheatgrass and ventenata are the worst of the worst when it comes to invasive plants. These exotic annuals have found an unexploited niche in the ecosystem. They germinate in the fall and sprout in early spring, stealing soil moisture before the native, long-rooted perennials get a chance at it. That gives the invasives a jump start on their growing season and helps them outcompete native plants. The produce prolific seeds, which spread by wind or by snagging on shoelaces and animal fur and drill into the soil, where they can persist for many years.

If rangeland managers thought cheatgrass was bad, ventenata is worse. Its tough stems tangle in mower blades and are inedible to grazers, even early in spring when cows or deer might eat cheatgrass. In the fall, ventenata creates a thick thatch of wiry stems over the ground, further choking out native plants. Like cheatgrass, it promotes fire. It is destroying already-threatened Palouse prairie and ponderosa ecosystems in states to the west.

One of the people Mealor first contacted about the weed was Beth White, a rancher with land adjacent to the National Guard Training Area. Mealor showed her the grass and asked her to keep an eye out for it. Over the next two weeks, as she checked on cows around her grazing association lands, she spotted the grass in more and more places.

“We went from thinking it was in a couple-hundred-acre patch we could get our arms around to it spread to an hour’s drive from one side to the other, in just in a couple weeks,” Mealor says.

Then, in August of that summer, a Natural Resource Conservation Service soil conservationist named Oakley Ingersoll was patrolling a piece of state land where ventenata had been found, trying to get a sense of how bad it was, when he came across another suspicious looking grass. This one had a bristly head of sharp seeds. He identified it as medusahead.

Medusahead wildrye (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) showed up in Oregon in 1887 and took off in the mid-twentieth century, spreading across much of northern California and into the surrounding region. It thrives in the wake of cheatgrass-driven fires and even crowds out the cheatgrass itself. Like ventenata, grazers can’t eat medusahead, which is high in silica and has sharp seeds. In some places, medusahead has reduced grazing capacity by 80 percent as it pushes out the palatable plants.

As ranch manager JD Hill put it while speaking on a panel about the two grasses at Sheridan College last summer, “What’s scarier than something that outcompetes cheatgrass?”

Within a week or two of the medusahead discovery, Sheridan County Weed and Pest sprayed 200 acres there with herbicide.

“At that point we treated every known acre in the state of Wyoming,” Mealor says, “but we’d found it late enough in the season that there was not a lot of time to survey other places.”

Mealor, who talks like a scholar, dresses like a ranch hand, and signs his emails “Grace and peace,” specializes in invasive plant ecology with a focus on sagebrush ecosystems and rangelands. He is described as “the guy who wrote the book on cheatgrass in Wyoming.” (He is the lead author on the 2013 publication Cheatgrass Management Handbook). Though he wasn’t exactly sure how medusahead and ventenata would act in northeast Wyoming’s environment, he knew well the threat these two grasses could pose to wildlife and agricultural operations. And he was already in close contact with a strong team of specialists, land managers, and ranchers in the region.

Mealor teamed up with Luke Sander, an energetic young man who serves as supervisor for Sheridan County Weed and Pest. The two reached out to everyone they could think of who might care about new invasive grasses including Wyoming Game and Fish, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Natural Resource Conservation Service, conservation districts, and ranchers. They called a meeting at the end of that summer, 2016, and began to map out a plan for addressing the two new grasses.

They focused on a few actions. First, they would thoroughly survey Sheridan County (and beyond as necessary) for the two grasses and make careful maps of the plants’ distribution. They would use those maps to create landscape-scale management strategies, identifying the places where treatments would best contain the grasses’ spread. From there they would spray the infested areas with herbicide. And they would carefully study those treatments to determine which chemicals sprayed at which time of year best suppressed the invasives while letting native and desired plants grow.

“It feels kind of like we are … doing a military planning exercise: We stare at maps and we draw polygons,” Mealor jokes.

Along with this on-the-ground work, the group committed to share all their data and information broadly, tackling the monumental effort of compiling and making accessible observations and spraying activities from a whole range of entities. Additionally, they committed to increase awareness about medusahead and ventenata in the immediate community, as well as among weed districts and other partners across the state and beyond through signage, pamphlets, presentations, and other outreach.

Wyoming has its share of other noxious weeds to control, from leafy spurge and dalmatian toadflax to spotted knapweed and cheatgrass, but because ventenata and medusahead were thought to be limited to relatively small acreages, “it presents an opportunity, where if everyone focuses on it as a high priority, maybe we can mitigate it becoming a bigger issue than it is right now,” says Slade Franklin, weed and pest coordinator for the Wyoming Department of Agriculture.

Mealor and Sander’s group met again in January 2017 where they adopted the title Northeast Wyoming Invasive Grasses Working Group, which shortens to NEWIGWG (“nuh-wig-wig”) and articulated a mission: “Minimize impacts to rangelands for wildlife and agriculture by reducing, containing, or eradicating medusahead and ventenata in northeast Wyoming.” More specifically, they aimed to contain ventenata, which has the wider spread of the two grasses already, and eradicate medusahead, meaning get rid of every last plant in the state.

“I think ‘eradicate medusahead’ is a pretty lofty goal. We all think that,” Mealor admits. “But we thought we would go ahead and say the word to try to hold ourselves to a high standard.”

They began to apply for funding to cover the costs of the work they had planned for the coming growing season.

One of their early proponents was Lindy Garner, invasive species coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She quickly recognized that the NEWIGWG effort had all the elements for potential success. Further, medusahead and ventenata posed an imminent threat to the National Wildlife Refuge System and the sagebrush ecosystem where the greater sage grouse is a focus of her efforts within the agency. Wyoming is home to the largest remaining populations of greater sage grouse, a species that narrowly escaped being listed as an endangered species in 2015 with the understanding that states and agencies would continue massive west-wide efforts to protect them and their sagebrush habitat. That would mean keeping invasive grasses out.

One tool at the group’s disposal was a strategy known as “early detection and rapid response.” Taking a metaphor from cancer treatment, early detection and rapid response has long been one way to address newfound invasive species, and recently the Department of Interior formalized this approach with a 60-page document outlining a framework that government agencies and their partners can adopt.

When Garner heard that the National Invasive Species Council was looking for pilot projects to demonstrate the early detection and rapid response framework, “I said, hey, there’s this one. They’ve got their act together.” The council gave some early funding to NEWIGWG. That opened the door to additional federal agencies getting involved and helped set NEWIGWG in motion.

In its first three years, the group raised over $900,000 which they directed toward surveying more than 20,000 acres for the two grasses each summer, using contractors, drones, remote sensing, and other approaches. The group also coordinated spraying every known acre of medusahead, the less widespread of the two species, over thousands of acres each fall, while partnering organizations worked with landowners to tackle ventenata.

In 2016 and 2017, they used a mix of Plateau and Milestone, two herbicides approved for grazing lands that were known to be effective on annual grasses. “With Plateau/Milestone, you can get pretty good control for a year and then … ventenata starts infiltrating back in,” says Sander. “In some places in the second year it looked like we had never even been there.”

In 2018, they received special approval to use a chemical called Esplanade, which works better but is not yet widely approved for grazed lands. Esplanade penetrates the top inch or so of soil and inhibits root growth, stopping the shallow-rooted invasive grasses, “while your other natives are a little bit deeper rooted so they can grow through it just fine,” Sander explains. “It’s a very selective herbicide at the correct rate.” And whereas the Plateau-Milestone mix has to be sprayed in the fall to protect native plants, managers can spray Esplanade throughout the growing season. Esplanade is set to be approved for widespread use on grazing lands later this year.

Almost all the spraying is done by air, which is cost effective because a plane can cover in a couple of hours what would take ground crews several days to spray, but still pricey. “All those medusahead treatments have gone out at no cost to landowners. Zero. Which is starting to get pretty expensive,” Mealor says.

“Sustainable funding has been one of our big pushes,” Sander adds. “We can gather a bunch of grant money because it’s new and sexy and there is a bunch of hype around ventenata and medusahead for three or four years, but we need a funding source that we can rely on for 15 to 20 years.” Even if a dose of Esplanade beats the weeds back for three or four years, “We’re assuming that we have to do at least two treatments and possibly three treatments to be able to completely remove it from the area,” says Sander. “We kind of have a 10-year plan in place for areas, and knowing that going forward we have to manage funding to be able to have money to come back and retreat.”

There is also a research component to NEWIGWG’s work. “We have flight tracks and spray tracks from all the aerial pilots. They have mapping programs in their planes and they give us the data afterwards so we can see exactly where they turned on, where they turned off,” Sander says. “We keep track of what they sprayed, the rates, and the time of year, weather conditions, all that stuff.”

Then Mealor and his students follow up by monitoring the effects on the ground to both the invasive grasses and the desirable native species and analyzing their findings relative to the herbicide application data.

“It’s been kind of a cool collaboration to get some hard figures and facts of what the herbicide is really doing to the landscape,” Sander says. “It’s very surprisingly positive from everything we have seen so far, so that’s good.”

In addition to the surveying, treatments, and research, NEWIGWG also put up information signs and boot brush stations in eight locations, published and distributed a one-page “field guide” to help citizens and partners identify the two grasses, gave over 15 public presentations, and began hosting an annual “Medusa-Nata Tour” that attracts attendees from all over Wyoming and several surrounding states and Canadian provinces, as well as federal representatives from across the West and from DC. The group reports having reached some 4,500 people with information about the threats medusahead and ventenata pose and how to respond.

It remains to be seen whether these efforts will stop ventenata and medusahead from spreading eastward into more rangelands, sage grouse habitat, and the Great Plains. For now, ventenata has been detected on an increasing number of acres throughout not just Sheridan County, but also in Johnson and Campbell Counties. The known reach of medusahead in Wyoming has also increased. These expansions are likely due to both increased awareness of the species as landowners are starting to recognize and report the weeds as well as the weeds actually cropping up in new areas. Late summer aerial photos show the telltale blond swaths of ventenata infestations like brushstrokes on the Bighorn Mountain foothills.

And yet, Sander, Mealor, and the other NEWIGWG partners remain optimistic.

“I-90 is our new fire line, if you will,” Sander says. “If we can keep it north of I-90 and east of the Bighorns and try to contain it in that zone if possible. Our high priority areas are going to be any of those outliers or places that it is encroaching that boundary.”

This winter, NEWIGWG is applying for funding to hire a director and coordinator, someone who can take on the grant writing and bringing together stakeholders as a full-time responsibility rather than piling that work on top of already full-time jobs as Mealor and Sander have done. And the group continues searching for additional funding to cover the costs of this year’s surveying, outreach, research, monitoring, and spraying. In the few years they have been working on this, they have made progress on understanding the weeds and finetuning their management strategy.

“I would describe this project as a flagship project to address this,” says Garner. “They have all the components to make it successful, and they did everything they need to do, and they have the resources to do it.”

“So far to date we have done more landscape treatments than anywhere in the nation, so people are kind of looking to us of what to do,” Sander adds.

In his office at the extension building on the Sheridan College Campus, with a sweeping view across the college’s agricultural experiment fields toward the Bighorn Mountains, Mealor shares a parable. Goatsrue, a plant from the Middle East, was intentionally cultivated in Utah in the 1980s for forage but ended up being toxic to livestock and very invasive.

“It got to be 40,000 acres of documented spread,” he says. “A bunch of agencies came together, very similar to what we are doing here, and implemented a goatsrue eradication program. And over ten years they got it down to a few sporadic patches spread over tens of acres. They almost got rid of it.”

But then, as he tells it, people moved, administrations changed, and federal funding went away. Now there are more than 40,000 acres of goatsrue in Utah again.

“That’s the scary part. We could dump all this time and effort into it, and then some significant thing changes out of our control and it could come undone. That’s the unfortunate reality.” He knows eradicating the species is a stretch, but adds, “We have to build at least management of these species into the culture of this region. … I think we can try.”

By Emilene Ostlind

Emilene Ostlind is communications coordinator at the University of Wyoming Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources and is founding editor of this magazine.

Botanical illustrations by Katherine Benkman, artist intern at the University of Wyoming Biodiversity Institute.

Systematic landscape planning software improves the odds against a despised invasive reed

It’s a hot, sunny day in early April, and I’m out collecting GPS coordinates for stands of wetland vegetation in the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The heat is suffocating on the swampy mudflats, but the gulls and avocets don’t seem to mind as they forage in the shallow water for brine fly larvae and other invertebrate goodies. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, until I look west and spy an ominous wall of smoke about a mile away. While smoke may be cause for concern in other managed wetlands, controlled burning is an important management technique at the Great Salt Lake. Though local air quality restrictions and wind patterns do not allow burning often, it is the most effective method for culling the unwanted invader, Phragmites australis.

Phragmites, or “phrag” as it is commonly called, is a prolific wetland plant that grows in dense monocultures up to 15 feet high. While one subspecies of phragmites is native to Utah, an introduced, more pervasive European lineage causes land managers much more anxiety than its well-behaved native counterpart. Nonnative phragmites is despised for many reasons, including its penchant for clogging waterways, disorienting and trapping hunters within its fibrous walls, and displacing native vegetation and critical bird habitat. Its capacity to quickly populate barren patches of soil has caused a major headache for wetland managers around the Great Salt Lake and across North America.

In 1983, severe flooding caused the Great Salt Lake level to rise dramatically. The briny lake water stripped most of the established vegetation away and left bare earth behind once the water receded. The invasive European strain of phragmites is a disturbance specialist. As such, in the mid to late 1980s it spread like wildfire across the eastern edge of the Great Salt Lake, encroaching wherever bare soil or shallow freshwater was found. Today, European phragmites has carpeted 24,000 acres of the eastern shore, which is almost 38 square miles altogether. Phragmites control now commands the bulk of wetland managers’ resources, including both time and money.

Since 2015, the management agency that manages the lakebed—the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands—has annually requested funds to manage the spread of phragmites around the Great Salt Lake. In 2019, they applied for $500,000 to treat just under 6,300 acres of invaded land, only about a quarter of the total impacted area. But, as a new study out of professor Karin Kettenring’s Wetland Ecology and Restoration Lab at Utah State University shows, successfully removing phragmites requires at least three consecutive years of repeated treatments, ongoing spot treatments of new satellite colonies, and the restoration of previously invaded areas back to native habitat. Given that managers simply do not have enough money or manpower to treat the entire phragmites-invaded area each year, how do they decide where to target their efforts? They require a methodical, data-supported process for determining where their limited management efforts will best contain phragmites and protect the remaining native wetlands.

As a graduate student at Utah State University in the Wetland Ecology and Restoration Lab, I learned about the difficulties facing wetland managers, especially in regards to justifying funding requests to contain the spread of invasive phragmites and to ensure the successful restoration of native habitat. This uphill battle may seem futile to potential funding agencies and organizations, especially without any guarantee that what land managers accomplish this year will persist through the next growing season. After talking to several land managers, I realized I could design a research project to help them address the disparity between their goals and the available resources while limiting the risk of failure for restoration projects. This research would give funders greater confidence in management actions and increase their likelihood to provide resources.

After much discussion with land managers and my thesis committee, I decided to use an approach known as systematic landscape planning to tackle this issue. Systematic landscape planning addresses conservation planning problems by identifying areas within a landscape that together meet management goals while limiting management cost and risk of failure of management actions. I decided to use the software Marxan, because it is the most widely used systematic landscape planning software in the world. It is open-source, highly customizable, easy to employ, and can process a wide variety of spatial data inputs. Marxan optimizes the selection of planning units—in this project, areas to guard against phragmites—to meet set conservation targets, like protecting bird habitat, while minimizing the management cost and risk of phragmites taking over an area. The ultimate goal for this project is to create a spatial plan-of-attack that will attain the desired goals on the landscape for the least amount of management resources and with the greatest potential for successful implementation.

To employ a Marxan optimization solution to this problem, several spatial data elements were needed, including a gridded representation of the study area, a valuation of risk associated with phragmites, management costs, and conservation targets. To create such layers, I developed cost data in accordance with local managers’ knowledge of phragmites control and water management. Next, I subdivided the study area into 1-hectare units, which is a manageable scale for local crews, yet still large enough to be impactful on the landscape. I created the risk layer by employing machine learning algorithms to classify aerial imagery into likely locations of specific wetland plant species. I then used an ecological niche model and landscape data, such as where phragmites is currently found, distance to water, and distance to disturbance, to model phragmites invasion potential across the study areas.

I then developed conservation targets with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and The Nature Conservancy—the two agencies managing these study areas. They were primarily concerned with migratory bird habitat and other ecological functions performed by wetland vegetation, such as soil carbon sequestration, heavy metal retention, and above-ground biomass. I spatially modeled these and several other ecological functions and am using them as the conservation target inputs. Marxan will run each scenario millions of times to generate a near-perfect network of planning units that meet the set targets for the least amount of cost and risk. Marxan accomplishes this objective by randomly selecting planning units until all conservation targets are met for each run. If the new run creates a management plan with less risk and cost than the previous run, it will select the new run as the “current best” and move onto the next run. It runs these random scenarios millions of times so you end up with a management plan with the lowest risk and cost based solely on data inputs. Marxan can also show the user which units were selected the most and least often. The units selected most often are critical to meet set targets while those rarely or never selected are not likely to provide much benefit. While I am still finalizing my modeled conservation targets, I expect to complete this project by fall of 2020. Through this process, I will show wetland managers which planning units they should treat given their limited resources to best meet their conservation targets while reducing the risk of phragmites undoing their on-the-ground work.

The methods developed in this study are transferable to other areas facing similar issues with invasive species, especially invasive plants. As long as land managers and planners can identify areas that are suitable to an invasive species (whether that is through mapping, using a species distribution model, or any other method), they can use the risk-aversion aspect of systematic landscape planning with Marxan to optimize their choice of treatment areas on a landscape. The other layers—cost data, a gridded study area, and conservation target data—can be as simple or complex as the project requires. This method could be used to plan treatments for other problem species in the West including purple loosestrife, cheatgrass, tamarisk, Russian olive, or other areas impacted by the dreaded phragmites. This tool can help land managers like the Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, National Park Service, and state agencies address the daunting task of invasive species control, which is an ever-growing nuisance in the West.

When hard decisions must be made concerning where to allocate limited resources, managers and planners can use systematic landscape planning to create a defendable management plan based on data rather than relying solely on expert or stakeholder opinion. Systematic landscape planning provides a comprehensive and transparent method for prioritizing management efforts where location information or management resources are limited and prudent decisions are required. As phragmites continues its march across Great Salt Lake wetlands and other parts of North America, managers employing this approach will have an advantage in the never-ending battle against its far-reaching roots and shoots.

Text and photos by Aubin Douglas

Aubin Douglas is a Cartography and GIS Fellow at the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Lakewood, Colorado. She is concurrently completing her second MS in the Ecology Center and Watershed Sciences Department at Utah State University. Visit karinkettenring.com to find out more about the Wetland Ecology and Restoration Lab at Utah State University.

Using technology to detect and map new invasive species arrivals

The Noxious Weed

Since dalmatian toadflax was introduced in Wyoming, it has checked off all the boxes of an invasive species—it outcompetes native vegetation, reduces biodiversity, and is not palatable for wildlife or livestock.Land managers in Wyoming still have a shot at reducing or potentially eliminating the weed if they can locate plants before they established large populations. But finding them is the tricky part. Dalmatian toadflax grows in dry, gravelly soil like that found in the South Fork of the Shoshone River on the east side of Yellowstone National Park. The rocky terrain makes it too difficult and dangerous for land managers to survey for dalmatian toadflax. Unchecked, any small populations can grow into a full-on invasion and threaten one of the world’s most cherished protected areas.

Bring it to the classroom with a version of this article modified to an eighth grade reading level.

The Map

Land managers don’t have the time and money to spray every plant. Creating effective strategies to combat invasive species like dalmatian toadflax, then, boils down to mapping their locations. In Wyoming, our maps of invasive species are much more limited than one might think.

Current mapping strategies typically involve a handful of people driving Wyoming’s roads and manually entering data. With thousands of square miles to cover, this approach misses secluded areas, where invasive species might have appeared but not yet become widespread.

The Researchers

Chloe Mattilio, a PhD candidate at the University of Wyoming, is researching ways to overcome the current obstacles to mapping. Her current work focuses on detecting invasive plants through aerial imagery and creating management plans through mapping. Chloe’s advisor, Dan Tekiela, is an assistant professor and extension specialist in the UW Department of Plant Sciences. Dan works with federal, state, and local agencies as well as private land managers to create more efficient plant management strategies.

The Quadcopters

To solve Wyoming’s mapping problem, Chloe and Dan turned to an unexpected solution—drones. They fly consumer-level quadcopters to take pictures of the landscape using multi-spectral sensors that can detect five different bands of light, identifying invasive plants by the wavelengths of light their leaves and flowers give off. Using the quadcopters, mappers can search larger or more dangerous and secluded areas for invasive species.

The Future

Dan says this research is garnering a lot of interest from land managers, landowners, and others. It’s no mystery why. The images the quadcopters collect could create comprehensive maps of invasive species in Wyoming and help prioritize which areas to target.

Dan is careful to say this application still a bit far down the road, but has the potential to save land managers time, money, and energy in combating invasive plant species. Creating affordable, user-friendly software to analyze the quadcopter data is the biggest hurdle to overcome before the technology can be widely available.

“When you have so few people, that’s the important thing. If you can chip away at the fact that we don’t have those eyes on the ground by using those sensors, I think it could have major implications,” Dan says.

Text by Sara Teter, artwork by Cal Brackin

Sara Teter was Western Confluence’s 2019 Science Journalism Intern. Cal Brackin is a Wyoming-based illustrator and community development professional who understands how artists are creating change in an interconnected world. See more of his work at onboardinnovations.com.