An interview with John Hay and Don Schramm of the Rock Springs Grazing Association

By Temple Stoellinger

The Rock Springs Grazing Association (RSGA) represents one of the oldest and most complex grazing operations in the American West, born from a conservation crisis more than 100 years ago. The association operates across two million acres of southwest Wyoming’s distinctive checkerboard landscape—a pattern of alternating public and private land sections created by 19th-century railroad grants—which has provided both challenges and opportunities for innovative range management.

In the early days of westward expansion, grazing of public lands was unregulated, and first come, first serve. By the turn of the 20th century, nearly 900,000 head of migrant sheep swept through southwest Wyoming annually, leaving the country “like the top of a desk—nothing left,” as Schramm and Hay describe it. As local ranchers watched their rangeland deteriorate, they recognized that survival required organization and collective action. The fragmented ownership pattern, however, made coordinated management nearly impossible.

Out of these conditions, local ranchers in southwest Wyoming formed RSGA. Rather than competing for access to scattered parcels, local ranchers organized to lease entire blocks of private railroad sections while working to secure federal grazing permits on the interspersed public lands. This strategy gave RSGA control and management authority across large, contiguous areas that no purely private or public operation could achieve.

Within this area, RSGA established its own conservation-based management principles, setting livestock numbers based on carrying capacity rather than market demands and implementing rotational grazing practices to protect the resource. This local, cooperative approach to range management later influenced federal policy. When the Taylor Grazing Act was passed three decades later, the newly formed Grazing Service adopted similar ideas—such as locally administered permit systems and regulated stocking levels—to guide use and stewardship on public lands.

Today, RSGA continues to demonstrate how collaborative management across fragmented ownership patterns can balance conservation, agriculture, and industrial development in the modern West.

John W. Hay III is a fourth-generation Wyomingite and chairman of RSGA. His family has been integral to the development of Rock Springs for over a century—his great-grandfather, John W. Hay Sr., arrived in the late 1880s as a Union Pacific Railroad supervisor, married into the founding Blair family, and purchased controlling interest in Rock Springs National Bank in 1907. Before joining RSGA, Hay graduated from the University of Wyoming and served as president of Rock Springs National Bank.

Don Schramm retired from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) after 37 years as an engineering and operations manager, mostly in Wyoming’s checkerboard regions. He holds a bachelor’s degree in forest engineering from the University of Montana and is a licensed professional surveyor. Currently serving as land operations manager for RSGA, Don reviews, negotiates, and coordinates surface use agreements across nearly one million acres of deeded and leased lands in southwest Wyoming, managing everything from livestock operations to energy development and cell towers.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Western Confluence: How does RSGA manage grazing across such a complex landscape where ownership alternates every other square mile between private and public lands?

RSGA: The checkerboard in the Rock Springs area of southwest Wyoming is roughly 40 miles wide by 80 miles long—about two million acres total. BLM comprises around 48 percent of that, so think of it as roughly a million acres of BLM and a million acres of private and other ownership. Within that private and other million acres, RSGA holds about 520,000 acres, while the other four major owners hold about 480,000 acres. It’s all known as the BLM Rock Springs Allotment—a common allotment encompassing deeded and leased land where we’re the sole holder of the BLM winter permit.

The private land ownership in this area of the checkerboard has become increasingly complex over the years. What was originally federal railroad grant land given to Union Pacific transferred to Anadarko, then Occidental, then Orion. Orion retained two entities: “Aggie Grazing” for everything except trona and “Sweetwater Surface” for the trona portion. Coal properties were sold to Wildcat Coal, while much of the oil and gas remained with Occidental/Anadarko Land Corp. Today, we maintain leases with Anadarko Land Corp, Aggie Grazing, Sweetwater Surface, and Wildcat Coal. There are also other landowners with independent BLM summer grazing permits in the checkerboard that we don’t lease from—the historical arrangement was winter use by us, summer access by them.

Despite this complexity, the key advantage is that we maintain control across the entire two million acres through ownership, lease, or permit arrangements. Managing these large, diverse areas allows us to take a flexible approach that many smaller operations cannot. Unlike some grazing associations that allocate specific use areas to shareholders, we don’t follow that model. We have range on both the north and south sides of the railroad and interstate, and winter conditions vary dramatically between these areas. If your allotment were fixed on the north side and deep snow came in, you’d be stuck. There’s no equitable way to assign fixed areas while ensuring equal opportunity for all shareholders.

WC: How does RSGA coordinate day-to-day winter grazing across the checkerboard?

RSGA: Members coordinate with our range rider, John Pierre Erramouspe. Folks call him to ask where the feed is and what areas make sense. Sheep, being herd animals, can go most anywhere that’s open; cattle aren’t herd animals and need to be in familiar areas where they know feed and shelter. So cattle tend to use parts of the lease they’re accustomed to, while sheep use whatever is open and accessible. Before coming on, most people tour the lease, then coordinate with John about who’s where and what’s sensible.

The lease opens December 1. There’s always a bit of a “race for grass”—people pass good feed to get to favorite spots. We have a fivemile rule that says once you set up in an area, others should give you about five miles of space. It works in concept, not always in practice, especially with cattle mixing. Everyone tries to respect each other, but neither sheep nor cattle read maps. It’s a work in progress every year, and Mother Nature ultimately dictates use. We think this is the best way to manage it so everyone has a fair shot.

WC: How complicated are the legal arrangements that hold this all together?

RSGA: Actually, less complicated than you’d think. We have straightforward lease arrangements with the private companies— basically updated versions of the old Union Pacific forms with some modifications over time. The BLM permit is standard, and we pay based on actual use, not acreage. For state lands, we pay based on their estimate of animal unit months in the leased sections. It could be much more complicated than it is, and it hasn’t changed much over the years.

It’s worth noting that when RSGA was created, there was no federal land control. That didn’t start until the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934, which created the Grazing Service, a predecessor to the BLM. There’s a legend that John Hay’s dad knew Ferry Carpenter, the first director of Division of Grazing, and influenced some of the early rules to follow RSGA practices. That’s just legend, but it’s interesting to think about.

We think the real difference between then and now is in how decisions get made. Back then, local grazing advisory boards assisted the Grazing Service with grazing decisions based on actual on-theground conditions and needs. Today, decisions come from Washington DC, and local BLM offices appears to have very little authority. In our opinion, if you want to improve public lands management, you’d put decision-making back in local hands where people understand the specific conditions and challenges.

WC: What challenges or opportunities does the checkerboard present for your members?

RSGA: The alternating ownership gives us far more usable ground than if we only had private land. In most BLM permits, the BLM portion is the bulk of the ranch’s usable country. For example, in the Pacific Creek Allotment there are about 200,000 BLM acres and maybe 5,000 private, so we have very little leverage there. In the Rock Springs checkerboard, with something close to fifty-fifty ownership, we actually have a seat at the table. That said, our “seat” applies to grazing decisions, not to BLM planning processes, major oil and gas development, or other land-use decisions.

WC: This region has long been shaped by energy development— from coal and oil to trona and renewables. How has energy development intersected with grazing in the checkerboard, and how does RSGA navigate those overlapping land uses?

RSGA: This isn’t split estate like you see around Gillette, where you have private surface over federal minerals. Here, we call it “parallel estate”—federal surface with federal minerals on one square mile, private surface with private minerals on the next. When RSGA purchased the surface estate from Union Pacific, the railroad retained the mineral estate. Because of this pattern, you have to work together. No oil and gas unit can proceed without coordinating with other land managers.

Our philosophy is pro-development and multiple use, and it has worked well. Mineral-related income lets us avoid annual shareholder assessments. While we still charge for grazing, only about half of our shareholders actively run livestock; the others hold their shares for the dividends generated by mineral and surface-use revenues. Oil and gas activity has been extensive over the years, and while livestock numbers have declined, it hasn’t hindered grazing.

Renewables present different challenges, though. Solar requires fencing and becomes single purpose, which conflicts with our multi-use approach, so we say “no thanks” to solar. Wind has a much smaller footprint per megawatt and doesn’t interfere with grazing, so we’re open to discussions. But only with strict conditions that oil and gas development remains the priority, grazing continues uninterrupted, we retain access to all areas, and all existing uses continue. We’re currently negotiating with one company and may talk with another, but it’s challenging to draft agreements that protect our interests while meeting their development needs.

WC: How does RSGA balance livestock grazing with wildlife conservation and increasing recreational use?

RSGA: When the association formed, they thought the country could handle 350,000 sheep. Today, with drought and other resource conflicts, we’re far below that capacity. Deer numbers rose over time but are down now, while elk have jumped dramatically and are approaching wild horse numbers, making it important to manage them at levels the land can support without conflicts. Antelope had a hard winter in 2023 but should rebound; deer may not recover due to elk competition and chronic wasting disease. We meet regularly with Game and Fish on population numbers and targets, and they coordinate with BLM on infrared counts for wild horses and elk.

Conserving the range is the only way any of this works. We keep things in balance, and our livestock numbers aren’t the limiting factor. Remember, RSGA is a winter operation. Plants grow in summer, and we graze dormant vegetation in winter, so winter sheep grazing has negligible impact compared to the greater year-round impacts from wildlife and horses. If summer grazing by anyone overuses the range, that removes winter feed for everyone. We monitor wild horses and elk closely to ensure winter feed remains available for all species, including the pronghorn and deer that migrate through but aren’t here year-round.

On public access, many locals assume it’s all BLM land. To avoid liability, we don’t grant permission, but we don’t deny access either. People hunt and fish. Our private lessors don’t want hunters, though that’s hard to enforce. RSGA and Game and Fish have established management units on about 15 miles of the Green River that are open for hunting and fishing.

Recreation pressure has definitely increased with ATVs, side-by-sides, dirt bikes, cyclists, and backpackers. The numbers aren’t overwhelming, but they’re up. Tools like onX create confusion by showing “BLM roads” that aren’t actually guaranteed public access in our checkerboard, since BLM doesn’t hold easements and counties often don’t either. That’s been a problem, particularly with organized events. Anything commercial on RSGA land requires a permit and insurance, and we tell people to stick to main county roads, not every two-track.

WC: Looking ahead, what are you watching for? What are the biggest challenges facing RSGA?

RSGA: In grazing, ranchers running sheep face major challenges with labor availability and cost. Department of Labor wage requirements now make it hard for operations to pencil out, so I expect sheep numbers will decline from current levels. Statewide, we’ve gone from around six million sheep in 1910 to maybe a quarter million today. This is excellent sheep country but less ideal for cattle in the winter, since cattle aren’t herd animals.

With fewer grazers and more shareholders holding for dividends, we have to work closely with industry—oil and gas, coal, trona, and renewables—so there’s a reason to hold the stock while protecting the resource. Think of RSGA as a large land trust and Wyoming asset where development must be done right. There’s talk of rare-earth mining now. Wind farms can be “here today, gone tomorrow,” so we need solid longterm agreements.

Our current BLM permit is winter only, but if cattle numbers grow and sheep decline, longer seasons in fall and spring might make sense, though that could conflict with summer inholders. We don’t have a perfect scheme worked out yet. We want grazing to continue, though the model may need to change. Some people joke, “maybe we should graze buffalo,” but they’re hard to control and people insist on petting them.

Temple Stoellinger is an associate professor of environment and natural resources and law at the University of Wyoming.

Mix of public and private lands causes fire management challenges 

By Kristen Pope 

A bolt of lightning crashes down and hits some brush, which begins to smolder. The wind transforms wisps of smoke into visible flames and the small fire quickly becomes a mass of orange flames—headed straight for neighboring homes. If this small ignition occurred on one of the six million acres of public land in the western US that are completely surrounded by private land, it would be more likely to become a bigger, more problematic fire, according to researchers. 

Fire management is more challenging in areas where public and private lands meet, whether they are completely “stranded” or another part of the wildland-urban interface. The mix of land ownership types and uses can lead to very different objectives and approaches. One community in Oregon is taking on these challenges through a cooperative public-private effort that works with landowners to prepare for wildfires and reduce the risk of catastrophic fire in the first place. 

The mix of public and private lands that shapes parts of the wildland-urban interface results from a number of factors, including policies from the time of westward expansion. During the 19th century, government grants were made along the new transcontinental railroad corridors to encourage people to build nearby, with every other parcel becoming private, and remaining parcels reserved by the government. Today, many of these reserved parcels are still public land, surrounded by private land and forming what’s known as the “checkerboard” pattern found in some parts of the West.  

University of Wyoming associate professor Bryan Leonard and colleagues explored how these and other lands surrounded by private lands, which they refer to as stranded lands, impact fire considerations in a 2021 article in Environmental Research Letters. The researchers studied fires that ignited on western public lands between 1992 and 2015 and found that ignitions on stranded public land were 14-23 percent more likely to grow to over an acre than other fires. They also analyzed the impact using 5-acre and 160-acre thresholds, and found similar results— that ignitions on stranded public lands are more likely to get bigger than those on more accessible public lands. 

They also found that fires on stranded public lands were more likely to escape the crucial “initial attack” phase of firefighting, which involves rapid containment efforts that occur within the first one to eight hours after an ignition and is a key indicator of how large fires are likely to ultimately become. “If it stays small, the damages are going to be pretty limited, but as soon as it escapes that initial containment then it’s much more likely to become problematic,” Leonard says. Overall, they found that fires on stranded public lands become 18 percent larger than those that began on public land that is accessible.  

In certain states, including Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming, the fires that began on stranded lands made up 10 percent of acres burned, in spite of only making up 3-6 percent of ignitions. Leonard and his colleagues also found that, on average, stranded fires were two to three times as large as non-stranded fires in these states

Not every state had the same results, though. In a few other states, including Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah, the 1 percent of fires that started on stranded public lands only accounted to 0.27-1.5 percent of the area burned in those states. 

“I expect this has to do with differences in the extent and nature of stranded lands across these different states,” Leonard says. “Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming have some of the most extensive checkerboarding of private and public land thanks to the legacy of the railroad land grants. While not all checkerboarded lands are stranded, the two are often highly correlated, and it is not hard to imagine that conducting fire management activities is more difficult in a highly checkerboarded landscape than in one with a relatively isolated stranded parcel.” 

Vegetation type, in addition to land ownership, may have contributed to this difference between states. “Most of the stranded lands in these three states are grasslands, which are associated with the faster initial spread of fires,” Leonard says. 

The reasons why fires that start on parcels of stranded public lands are more likely to become large could be related to difficulty of accessing those lands for management, detection, and response. Even before a fire sparks, fuels management can reduce the threat of wildfire, including mechanical thinning, prescribed fire, and invasive weed management. “While many public lands are in need of additional fuels treatment, this problem is systematically worse on stranded land due to access issues,” Leonard says. In the study, stranded lands were 5 percent less likely to be the focus of management projects. 

“The same access issues can also complicate and slow the ‘initial attack’ once fires start, by creating confusion and logistical hurdles associated with determining land ownership and obtaining access, says Leonard. Even when private landowners are eager for assistance with fires and fire management on these lands, there can be barriers to access like locked gates that take up time. Leonard says, “These issues might be compounded in settings where the landowners have a less than amicable relationship with public land managers due to past access disputes.” 

While stranded public lands can lead to significant fire management hurdles, these only represent one type of situation where public and private lands coming together complicates fire management. The wildland-urban interface (known as the “WUI”) is a transitional area where human development abuts undeveloped wildland vegetation, and is often found where public and private lands meet. The WUI has grown rapidly in recent decades, increasing by 33 percent from 1990 to 2010. A 2018 study found that houses in these areas are increasing by 41 percent, and that the WUI is the fastest-growing land use type in the Lower 48. That growth is attributable to multiple factors. 

“[The WUI is] a beautiful place to live. Most people who care about the environment would like to live closer to nature, maybe see wildlife from their kitchen window,” says Volker Radeloff, a professor in forest and landscape ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the study. “The other major factor is that downtown areas are expensive to live in and there’s a housing crisis, and so some people are also pushed out of urban areas and they have to move out into the wildlife-urban interface because that’s the only place they can afford to live. When we look at the WUI, it spans the gamut. There is Malibu WUI, but also trailer parks, and every socioeconomic group is found in the WUI.” 

USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station

The continuing growth of the WUI is problematic for both fire risk and fire management. “If a fire occurs it places more people at risk. They have to be evacuated, firefighters have to focus on protecting structures, and so forth,” Radeloff says. “The other side of that coin is that most fires are started by people, so the people living in those landscapes, the power lines, barbecue grills toppling over, arson, the whole suite of different reasons for ignitions—they are all concentrated.” 

This is particularly true in the kind of WUI called the intermix because it involves homes dotted among the vegetation. In contrast, the other type of WUI, interface WUI, involves high-density housing near a large tract of wild area. Interface WUI areas may have less vegetation to burn and more hard barriers, like roads and pavement, that can act a fire breaks, but when fires impact these areas, they can race through neighborhoods quickly, igniting house to house. 

The WUI also poses challenges to fire preparedness. When landowners have different management objectives—and budgets—it can be challenging to find good solutions. One private landowner may prefer a thick forest close to their home for privacy and wildlife observation, whereas a nearby homeowner may prioritize creating defensible space for fire protection. A public parcel of land might be managed for ecosystem services, while a timber tract may focus on maximizing the price of timber products. 

“If you have ten private landowners, they have twelve different opinions about how to manage the land, and there are different objectives,” Radeloff says. “One will prioritize aesthetics over fire safety, over biodiversity values, over income from timber harvesting, and so forth. In the wildland-urban interface where houses are, the land is privately owned so it becomes very hard to coordinate and do something like a prescribed burn unless all landowners are in agreement.” 

Finding solutions to fire management when dealing with a variety of public and private landowners can be a challenge, but a partnership near Klamath Falls, Oregon, is working to reduce fire danger and promote forest health where public and private lands intermingle. The Chiloquin Community Forest and Fire Project (CCFFP) uses cross-boundary management to improve forest health while working on fire resistance and response. 

The project focuses on a 38,800-acre area that is 60 percent forested and at high fire risk. The Chiloquin area includes large tracts of national forest, with fingers of private land interspersed, largely running alongside waterways. It is a complex WUI area with a mix of land ownership types and both industrial and nonindustrial uses. 

“There are a lot of subdivisions that may be completely surrounded by Forest Service [land] or surrounded on three sides by Forest Service, so there is a lot of interface between the private and the public land in Chiloquin area,” says Leigh Ann Vradenburg, project manager for Klamath Watershed Partnership, which is the watershed council overseeing the project. In her role, she works with federal and state agencies, nonprofits, and private landowners on ecosystem restoration projects in the Upper Klamath Basin. 

CCFFP maps and inventories the region to identify priority treatment areas and obtains grants to reduce fire risk, including money for private landowners to manage fuels on their own land. Outreach is a key component of this effort, including meetings, workshops, mailings, phone calls, and on-the-ground visits. Vradenburg and partners also collaborate with larger forest health and wildfire resiliency projects to do large-scale planning efforts. She says CCFFP has more than 32 landowners participating, and the project has already treated more than 4,400 acres of private land. 

One of the barriers they face is landowners’ reluctance to treat their land if neighboring parcels are not doing fuel treatments. People in rural communities also like their privacy, she says, which includes visual barriers, such as trees separating them from roads and public lands where people might be recreating. However, she works to build trust and overcome these barriers.  

“We’re non-regulatory, we’re non-threatening,” Vradenburg says. “We come in from the position of advocating for the landowner and helping them to understand what the forest could and should look like but then also understanding what their needs are. Do they run cattle out there or have objectives for timber harvest? We’re working to support them in their forest management and land management goals.” 

CCFFP is part of the Chiloquin Wildfire Initiative, which is a partnership with Chiloquin Fire and Rescue that focuses on creating defensible space around homes and helping landowners treat small properties, including providing brush trailers to help people haul off materials. Additionally, they are increasing outreach and education efforts, with plans to go to local schools and events to educate people about wildfire. 

Cooperative public-private efforts like this initiative rely on the willingness of government entities and private landowners to work together to meet fire management challenges. “I think we were fortunate to have a good community to work with,” Vradenburg says. “Sometimes it takes all the players in the right places and Chiloquin has been an example of that and the success of that is shown by the acres treated and the landowners involved and so it’s something we’re really proud of.” 

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer who lives in the Tetons. Find more of her work at kepope.com. 

Header image: 2013 Alder Fire in Yellowstone National Park (Mike Lewelling/National Park Service) 

Climate change threatens the Sámi way of life, and so does the green transition

By Camilla Sandström

Long ago, it is said, the Indigenous Sámi people of the North made a quiet, sacred promise with the reindeer. They would look after each other, bound in mutual trust and survival. The reindeer herders would ensure the herd’s safety and provide food in exchange for a portion of the animals to support their families. Whether a myth or a deeply held belief, this connection between herder, reindeer, and land has formed the bedrock of Sámi culture, defining a way of life that remains tied to the landscapes of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Russia.

This strong bond has shaped not only the Sámi people but also the lands they inhabit, known collectively as Sápmi, an area that is still perceived as relatively ecologically intact. But today, like many regions home to Indigenous communities, Sápmi faces mounting pressures not only from climate change, but also from the efforts to mitigate that change. The “green transition,” or shift toward a fossil fuel-free society, has brought wind farms, mining, forestry, and more to the region. Without proper consultation, these projects threaten the reindeer’s grazing lands and disrupt the delicate balance that has sustained this culture for centuries. As a result, the ancient promise between the reindeer herders and the reindeer is becoming harder and harder to uphold.

The landscape of Sápmi is characterized by a continuous rhythm of change, from dark days to bright nights, warm summers to freezing winters. Beyond spring, summer, autumn, and winter, the Sámi people define four additional seasons: spring-summer, autumn-summer, autumn-winter, and spring-winter. This seasonal calendar, which structures the lives of the Sámi people, is based on the migrations of their semi-domesticated reindeer. In Sweden, this often means a journey of nearly 450 kilometers—from the high mountains near the Norwegian border in the autumn-winter to the forest lands by the Bay of Bothnia in winter, then back again in spring-winter. This cyclical migration, intrinsic to Sámi culture, is made possible by the longstanding, legally upheld right of nomadic reindeer herders to use the land, public and private, for seasonal grazing.

Yet with climate change, these eight seasons are narrowing. Winters are becoming shorter, with as many as 58 days of snow already lost. This complicates the reindeer’s passage across previously frozen rivers and lakes, making routes increasingly dangerous as the ice thins. While the lack of snow can make food more accessible, “in Norway’s coastal areas where we herd our reindeers during the winter,” says Ina-Theres Sparrok, a herder in the Voengelh Njaarke reindeer herding district in Norway, “it complicates herd management and creates friction with local farmers.”

In other cases, climate change can make lichen, reindeer’s primary food source, harder to get to. “Unpredictable, extreme winter conditions, from heavy snowfall to cycles of freezing and thawing, creates thick layers of ice that trap the vital lichen below, making it increasingly difficult for the reindeer to forage,” says Ante Baer, a reindeer herder in the Vilhelmina Norra reindeer herding community in Sweden, and Sparrok’s partner of over a decade. (Disclosure: Baer and Sparrock are the author’s son and daughter-in-law.)

During these bad winters, it becomes more challenging to keep the herd together, Baer says, which also makes it more difficult to protect the reindeer from large carnivores such as lynx, wolverines, and eagles year-round, as well as brown bears during the spring-winter, spring, and summer seasons.

The summer, with its warmer temperatures and diminished snowfall, stresses the Arctic-adapted reindeer and brings new survival risks during heat waves. In these ways and more, the effects of climate change are already deeply felt in reindeer husbandry, reshaping the migratory patterns and the very fabric of Sámi life.

The green transition, which has emerged as a necessary response to the pressing challenges of climate change, has brought additional strain to these lands. Long used by the south for its resources, Sápmi has been host to mines, hydroelectric dams, and other extractive industries for more than a century. Today, the pursuit of cheap energy is accelerating a surge of activity, from battery factories and renewed mining ventures to large wind energy projects. For the reindeer herders, this relentless demand brings a double burden: the climate itself is changing, and so, too, is the land they rely on to preserve their way of life. A recent report on the impact from a Norwegian wind park on a reindeer herding community illustrates how one encroachment causes a chain reaction: loss of grazing areas disrupts seasonal pastures, directly impacting herd health, herders’ finances, and finally their livelihood, language, and culture.

Forestry, too, is increasingly seen as a key component of the green transition, due to its role as a significant carbon sink absorbing carbon dioxide and storing it long-term, while also providing renewable materials and bioenergy that substitute for more carbon-intensive products. However, in Sweden, it has also reduced the land rich in lichen—a critical food source for reindeer—by as much as 70%. This has left the landscape fragmented into smaller, isolated patches, increasing grazing pressure on the remaining areas. In Norway, forestry has a smaller impact, but farming, recreation, and tourism are increasingly occupying crucial mountain valleys, creating a lot of activity in areas that were previously rather pristine.

Research reveals that the cumulative effects of these various industries on Sámi lands are rarely fully considered, often leaving Sámi herders in court defending their right to land and the essential bond with their reindeer, with outcomes that vary. This undermines sustainable reindeer husbandry, which relies on a profound interdependence between people, animals, and land. “But,” says Baer, “it is possible to make some accommodations through careful planning, forest management, and collaboration.”

The Sámi, along with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, have long advocated for improved planning processes that more fully consider reindeer husbandry and align with international conventions on Indigenous rights ratified by the four nations encompassing Sápmi. For example, one pathway for cooperation is a formalized consultation process embedded in forest certification schemes, which would require co-planning between forestry companies and reindeer herding communities. Recently, the introduction of free, prior, and informed consent has also provided herders with a new tool to protect vital grazing lands from further encroachment by forestry activities. However, effective processes remain lacking outside of the forestry sector, particularly those that would provide opportunities for co-planning and mutual consideration. This gap has become even more apparent as an increased sense of urgency fueled by climate change is accelerating decision-making around resource extraction.

Despite the many challenges they face, Baer and Sparrok, who are both 29, remain committed to a future in reindeer husbandry. They see the growing demand for healthy, unprocessed foods and the increased recognition of nature-based solutions as opportunities for their way of life to be part of the answer. They also acknowledge the urgent need for both individual and collective action to address climate change and the biodiversity crisis, and they believe reindeer herding offers unique insights and practices that align with sustainable land stewardship.

“We have been here for countless generations, adapting ourselves and our practices to this landscape,” says Baer. “It would take a great deal to move us from this place because our lives and the lives of our reindeer are woven into this land. We are still here, and we intend to stay.”

Camilla Sandström is a professor in political science at Umeå University, Sweden and UNESCO Chair on Biosphere Reserves as Laboratories for Inclusive Societal Transformation. Her research focuses on how policy and governance can be designed to meet environmental goals and effectively manage conflicts between different objectives.

Header image: Reindeer on the move. (Ina-Theres Sparrock)

Finding a balance between tradition and modernity in Mongolia

By Maria Vittoria Mazzamuto and Sukhchuluun Gansukh

Editor’s Note: In this story, authors Mazzamuto and Gansukh imagine the lives of Tserendorj (Цэрэндорж, meaning bravery and wisdom), a herder on Bogd Khan Mountain, and his daughter Tuul (Туул, named after the Tuul River, symbolizing flow and life), who studies wildlife conservation. Inspired by the authors’ colleague—a fellow wildlife biologist who comes from a herding family—Tserendorj and Tuul are composite characters. Their experiences and voices are grounded in an in-person survey the authors conducted with residents of Bogd Khan Mountain and the authors’ firsthand experiences on the mountain.

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As the sun rises over Bogd Khan Mountain, Tserendorj watches from the doorway of his ger, the round, felt-lined home that has been part of Mongolian life for centuries. The golden light washes over the forested slopes where Siberian larch, pine, and spruce meet the green and yellow steppe of the valleys. This is the place Tserendorj has known since childhood, where he and his ancestors have guided their horses and cattle, along with some sheep and goats, across sacred lands for as long as anyone can remember.

But something feels different. The hum of distant construction breaks the morning stillness, and Tserendorj can see the outline of a new road coming up the mountainside. Tserendorj sighs, reflecting on the changes that have come so quickly, as if the mountain itself is shifting under his feet. “This place has always taken care of us,” he says, “but now I wonder how much longer it can.”

For centuries, Bogd Khan Mountain has stood as a symbol of resilience, a natural fortress towering thousands of feet over the vast Mongolian steppe. It’s not just any mountain; it’s sacred. One of the world’s oldest protected areas, revered and cared for by the Mongolian people since the 12th century, the mountain became a special protected area almost 100 years before renowned sites like Yellowstone. Generations of monks, nomads, and wildlife have coexisted on its slopes, the mountain shielding them from the rest of the world.

But even this sanctuary is not immune to the tides of change sweeping through Mongolia. At the foot of Bogd Khan, Ulaanbaatar, once a small city in the steppe, has transformed into a bustling capital home to nearly half the country’s population. As its influence creeps up the mountain, the pressures of urbanization are being felt most acutely by people like Tserendorj, whose nomadic lifestyle and spiritual traditions have helped keep the balance between human and nature for centuries.

Tserendorj, now in his sixties, remembers the stories his father and grandfather told him as a child. They spoke of the mountain’s spiritual importance, how monks once lived in the Manzushir Monastery on the southern slope, and how prayers for the mountain’s protection were a daily ritual. For the nomads, the land wasn’t just a resource; it was a living being, revered and respected. “For us, the mountain is alive,” Tserendorj says, watching his herd of horses and cattle grazing nearby. “It has given us everything we need, and in return, we have always been careful not to take too much.”

This delicate relationship between people and nature was central to Mongolian life. Buddhism and traditional shamanistic practices fostered a deep respect for the environment, ensuring that the mountain’s resources were used wisely. Nomadic herding, in particular, allowed the landscape to rest and regenerate between seasons, leaving little trace of human impact. With the herders’ light touch on the land, Bogd Khan’s ecosystems thrived, supporting deer, wolves, and the elusive Pallas’s cat, all living in the mountain’s high altitudes since time immemorial.

But now the city feels uncomfortably close. Tserendorj’s daughter, Tuul, travels back from the city each weekend, where she studies wildlife conservation at the university. She often speaks of the new roads, the ever-growing skyline, and the recreational trails winding up the mountain. The city, she says, offers new opportunities and new conveniences. But Tserendorj is uneasy.

“When I was young, we had the mountain to ourselves. This road, the buildings, they were never here,” he says, looking toward the forest where new trails for hikers have appeared. “Now there are people up here all the time, leaving behind trash, scaring wildlife.”

Indeed, Bogd Khan has become a hotspot for outdoor enthusiasts. Hikers and cyclists frequent its trails, while pine seed collectors and mushroom gatherers venture deeper into the forest. Roads and construction projects further fragment the landscape, threatening the habitats for all wildlife.

“It’s not just the people; there are also more horses, more cows,” Tserendorj explains. His own herd has grown larger, not because he wants more livestock but because the pressures of modern life demand it. When Mongolia was a satellite state of the USSR and everything was collectivized, herders had only as many animals as they needed to live. But after socialism fell in the early 90s, herders took ownership of their own livestock. Now, everyone is focused on growing their herds to secure their future.

The market for meat, wool, and especially cashmere has surged, making livestock one of the few ways to ensure a stable income in rural Mongolia. “People say it’s our way to survive the new demands,” Tserendorj adds. Yet, there’s another reason, too: the climate. Harsh winters—known as dzuds—can wipe out entire herds, so herders are building up their numbers to protect against those losses. “It’s like a safety net,” he says. “If we lose animals, we still have more to fall back on.”

As Tserendorj’s herd has grown, so has the strain on the land. Overgrazing has stripped the once-lush meadows, and the herding dogs that accompany larger livestock populations have started to chase off and prey on the local wildlife. “It feels like there’s not enough space anymore,” he says. “We need to feed our families, but the mountain can only give so much.”

Tuul listens intently to her father’s concerns. She knows all too well how the pressures of modern life are straining the balance that herders like her father have maintained for generations. But she also sees hope in her studies, hope in the possibility of finding new solutions that can protect both the mountain and their way of life.

One evening, Tuul approaches her father with an idea. She’s been learning about new technologies that could help manage livestock and protect wildlife at the same time.
“Father,” she says gently, “we can’t stop the changes that are happening, but maybe we can adapt. There are ways to protect the land and your herd without overusing it.”

Tserendorj looks at her, skeptical but curious. “What do you mean?”

Tuul explains that remote sensing can track the movement of livestock and wildlife, ensuring that herders avoid overgrazing in certain areas. She also suggests that by rotating grazing locations more carefully and reducing the number of livestock, they could allow the land to regenerate more effectively. Tuul speaks passionately, her words a blend of her academic knowledge and the deep respect for the land her father has taught her. “We could also work with conservationists and administrations to set aside protected areas for wildlife,” she says. “The mountain needs space to breathe, just like our herds.”

Tserendorj listens, nodding slowly. Bogd Khan is more than a mountain to him; it is part of his identity, his past, and, he hopes, his future. The old ways have always worked for him, but he sees the wisdom in what his daughter is saying. Perhaps this new generation, with its mix of tradition and science, holds the key to protecting the mountain and their livelihood.

He imagines a future where his grandchildren walk these same slopes, herding livestock as he once did, while also benefiting from the knowledge and tools of a changing world. “I’ve always trusted the mountain,” Tserendorj finally says, “but maybe it’s time we trusted new ways too.”

It’s that deep connection to the land, combined with a willingness to embrace change, that offers a path forward. After all, this mountain has stood the test of time—and with the right care, it can continue to stand for generations to come.

Maria Vittoria Mazzamuto is an adjunct faculty member of the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming specializing in wildlife conservation. She has integrated ecology, animal behavior, and conservation biology into her wildlife research, providing a comprehensive understanding of ecological processes, species dynamics, and ecosystem functioning. Over the past few years, Dr. Mazzamuto has been at the forefront of several impactful projects in Mongolia, particularly within the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of Bogd Khan Mountain. In collaboration with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, she aims to implement conservation actions to protect small, medium, and large mammals in this region.

Sukhchuluun Gansukh is the head of laboratory of mammalian ecology at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Biology. His research focuses on community ecology, rodent physiology, and biodiversity conservation. He currently leads research on mammalian diversity and species interaction in the protected area of Bogd Khan Mountain Biosphere Reserve and non-protected areas around the capital city of Ulaanbaatar that are under human pressure.

Header image: At Manzushir Monastery on Bogd Khan’s southern slope, prayers for the mountain’s protection were a daily ritual. (Arabsalam/Wikimedia Commons)

Local communities lead the protection of an endangered antelope 

By Tesia Lin 

In the 1990s, Kenya’s hirola antelope population “plummeted from 15,000 to an estimated 300-500 animals,” says retired professor Dr. Richard Kock. As chief veterinary officer for the Kenya Wildlife Services at the time, Kock became involved because a virus called Rinderpest was a suspected cause of the antelope’s rapid downturn. The veterinary department was a new feature of the young agency, as was an emphasis on community-based wildlife management. Kenya’s declining wildlife, including hirola, had spurred the reorganization of government conservation agencies and a growing focus on including different stakeholder perspectives in order to better regulate and meet management goals. The changes, within Kenya and broader African conservation communities, were not smooth ones, Kock recalls.   

An early test for the new agency came when Elders of the Somali ethnic group sought the agency’s aid in their stewardship of the hirola antelope. “They were saying, ‘We really like this animal, and we don’t want it to get taken away.’ They felt that they had a right, in a sense, to decisions made with this animal, as it was sort of sacred,” recalls Kock. But the team didn’t at first listen to their suggestions, reasoning that state authorities had rights over the antelope, not local people. “Being sort of arrogant conservationists, we thought, ‘Well that’s a nice idea, but we’re thinking something else instead,” says Kock. Suspicious of the motives of local people, the team instigated relocation of a substantial number of hirola to Tsavo National Park to reinforce a small, previously translocated population. Without seeking further advice from the Elders, this created tension.  

While places like Kenya are scientific meccas for foreign researchers hoping to work with “exotic” wildlife, people trained in other parts of the world are no match for the wisdom that local and Indigenous communities provide when it comes to cultivating or stewarding the land and its resources. Because these communities have persisted for centuries among eastern African wildlife, their understanding of the balance between people, wildlife, and the land is both deeper and more expansive. 

Thus, when the Somali Elders requested assistance with a fenced-in sanctuary that would protect the hirola from predators, Kock recounts the idea as contrary to (what was then) best practice. “Their requests went against some [Western] principles of conservation,” he says. Fences cut animals off from the rest of their habitat, creating barriers to migration routes and reducing access to water and other resources. This can be particularly problematic in arid ecosystems like those in eastern Kenya, where water and good forage are already scarce.   

But the team didn’t have many more promising options. Captive breeding had been fruitless and expensive in other countries and was considered unsuitable for this shy antelope. National parks and reserves had worked for other large mammals, including predators, but that success made them unlikely to support hirola. The sandy-colored antelope are highly visible in today’s grasslands, herd in small numbers, and leave their young relatively unprotected, all making them easy prey. Putting them in parks where predators were thriving could hurt the hirola numbers or stall population growth. Expanding national parks to encompass the hirola would also displace local people, whereas moving the hirola to existing parks isolated them from a beneficial environment alongside deeply invested protectors—the Somali community.  

The Somali people have lived alongside hirola “since time immemorial.” The antelope, which Kock calls “living relics,” are thought to have existed in Kenya for almost 7 million years. As recently as the Pleistocene (which ended around 12,000 years ago), populations roamed from the Horn of Africa to the continent’s southern tip. However, as the climate changed, so did the vegetation. Open, desert-like land that previously sustained the hirola dwindled and fragmented, pushing them closer to pastoral communities, where the antelope found benefit in cohabitating with cattle. Cattle sites were better fertilized, resulting in more grass for consumption, and humans were protecting their livestock from predators, which increased hirola survival rates too. 

Rather than see this as a conflict, Indigenous communities observed connections between the hirola, livestock performance, and land fertility. Only nourished land was capable of sustaining both hirola and cattle, and the presence of hirola suggested healthy cattle, since the two are vulnerable to droughts and the same diseases. The hirola presented no harm to cattle and instead became tied to cattle well-being.  “They became a symbol of good things, achieving a sacred value among the people,” says Kock.  

As Kock and his team learned more about the depth of this relationship, they also realized the infeasibility of Western conservation ideologies. Echoing a need for change during this same time period, the hirola was re-classified into its own genus, Beatragus, prompting the International Union for Conservation of Nature to elevate the species to critically endangered. This re-classification not only generated more interest and resources for conservation efforts, but it built momentum for the team to re-evaluate their approaches to restoring hirola populations. They began to accept that the Somali Elders—strong and committed in their efforts to save the hirola—had knowledge integral for maintaining hirola populations and that overlooking their advice would be data missing in the conservation effort. Kock says, “We didn’t have to work with the people, but it was the sensible thing to do to manage the species, so we eventually felt it was important to more concretely give them our support.”  

As the millennium turned, a new community-based organization, the Northern Rangelands Trust, was set up out of the Lewa Conservancy (which Kock directed at the time). Partially motivated by the tension and misunderstandings surrounding previous hirola translocations, this innovative trust developed to address the growing need for involvement of local and Indigenous communities with wildlife related issues on a local level. Unlike government-owned national parks and reserves, trusts and conservancies tend to be smaller community programs that actively incorporate local people into stewardship. The trust worked with the Somali ethnic community to fulfill the Elders’ suggestions for a fenced refuge, and in 2004 laid the framework that became the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy. This conservancy is owned and managed by local, Indigenous people and is focused on empowering the pastoralist communities. Given the opportunity to sustainably manage both their rangelands and hirola populations, the conservancy has since begun to see the recovery of the antelope. 

“Problems at home need a home-grown solution,” says Dr. Abdullahi Ali. Ali is an Indigenous Kenyan, founder of the Hirola Conservation Program, and a University of Wyoming alumnus. He has always shared his home of Garissa—a small town situated by the Tana River in eastern Kenya that calls itself “Home of the Hirola”—with the antelope. Its enduring presence throughout his life inspired him to pursue a conservation career that puts his Indigenous knowledge first.  

Growing up in the midst of Kenya’s changing conservation policies, he often noticed how scientists external to Indigenous communities would come in and misunderstand the situation at hand.  For example, he says the enthusiasm for African predators caused scientists to seek out proof that predators were responsible for declining hirola populations. This excluded other factors contributing to hirola decline, such as habitat degradation, and it would have highlighted predator control as a solution. But predator control is resource intensive and, because “Africa has a multi-predator system that is key to ecosystem health,” Ali says, it could upset the delicate balance of natural and human communities.  

For Ali, protecting the hirola is about maintaining that balance through grassland restoration, a more approachable method backed by his research. Ali’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Wyoming focused on the impact of habitat degradation on hirola antelope. He found that habitat change in eastern Africa from open grasslands to forested woodlands had been accelerated by the loss of elephants that no longer removed a lot of the woody trees. He believed that this could be remedied in a way that benefitted both local communities and ecosystems. Since “almost 70% of wildlife in Kenya thrives and coexists on community land,” he says, restoring grasslands to support the hirola also helps sustain people’s livelihoods.  

Now, Ali’s Hirola Conservation Program endows eastern Kenyan communities with resources to conserve hirola, and inadvertently livestock, at a local level. The program employs people to essentially replace the work of elephants by thinning trees and planting native grasses. These same people then harvest the grass seeds and sell them back to the program. Farmers also receive suggestions on how to selectively graze their livestock on these grasses to ensure sustainability, and communities learn to help monitor hirola populations.  

Given that the people have strong intrinsic cultural attachments to the land and wildlife that provides for them, many communities have established their own small conservancies, blending centuries of inherited knowledge and observation with modern needs for conserving wildlife. These smaller, more localized conservancies are a powerful tool for conservation and community development, Ali says. “Conserving in our own land improves the living standards of our communities, and helps minimize competition and conflicts.” 

If given space and inclusive voices, both Ali and Kock believe that ecosystems can recover—and thus, people can recover. Ali believes, “When you empower the communities, you can feel a larger impact of conservation,” not only for the animals, but for the people. Despite the earlier involvement of many stakeholders in hirola conservation, it was the integration of foreign ideologies and science with locally-led approaches that drove the development of solutions that ensured both hirola and human well-being. Ali believes that “there is a lot of conversation globally about putting conservation in local hands; we should add to that momentum. We all want to save the animals and the planet.”  

Tesia Lin is an ex-wildlife biologist and current biological systems researcher. She is passionate about learning from communities whose lifestyles and cultures are historically intertwined with their land, and is grateful she has the opportunity to share their stores.   

Header image: These sandy-colored, desert-adapted antelope are highly visible in todays grasslands, making them more vulnerable to predators. (Hirola Conservation Program)

How the intersection of wildlife ecology and social science can improve human-wildlife conflict management

By Ezra Stepanek

Bruna Ferreira tried to go into her conversations with the people living around Atlantic Forest State Park without expectations. That was the point of Fantastic Detectives, the program she leads in central Brazil aimed at developing community-driven strategies for coexistence between people and wildlife. With farms, ranches, and villages surrounding the 3.6 square miles of protected area, it seemed like a recipe for conflict. There were some cases of mountain lions and other predators killing livestock, but Ferreira and her team were not making any assumptions. Instead, they were asking the community to define the problems they experienced and share their ideas for living alongside wildlife.

She was still skeptical when she heard story after story of black jaguar sightings. “My grandfather saw a black jaguar,” one rancher told her. “I was driving, and I saw one off the road,” another claimed. “It seemed really impossible, because there haven’t been any register of [black] jaguars in the area for decades,” she says. Then, just a few months after hearing these stories, the team caught a black jaguar on the wildlife cameras they set up in the state park. “People knew about it earlier than any of us that were researching there,” she says. “It was amazing to see and hear and then look through the people’s stories with new eyes.”

Fantastic Detectives is part of an emerging field that combines social and ecological understanding to attain a better picture of the complex interactions within a landscape shared by people and wildlife. This is a departure from conservation management and planning that focuses only on ecological data, like habitat suitability, and disregards people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors completely or until the end. Meaningfully including people from the beginning, Ferreira and others say, is a far more effective way to reduce human-wildlife conflict and improve conservation outcomes.

“Generally, we see when there is a coexistence project, there are [conservationists] that come and say, ‘These are the methods you can use to avoid predation [of cattle] and all that,’ but they don’t often ask what the farmers want or what the ranchers want,” says Ferreira. Situations like this often result in regulations that locals feel are forced on them and don’t reflect the situation on the ground. After being left out for so long, communities can be wary of engaging with researchers at all.

Fantastic Detectives, with support from the Cerrado Mammal Conservation Program and Colorado State University’s Center for Collaborative Conservation fellowship program, plans to develop a conservation and coexistence action plan that involves local people every step of the way. “We want this action plan that can be really implemented and can be made in collaboration with everybody, so everybody has ownership of the process,” Ferreira says. Hearing stories from the local people, like black jaguar sightings, has been the first step in building trust between the local people and the team. Their discussions and workshops with locals are centered around conserving the iconic, but threatened, jaguar, mountain lion, hoary fox, and maned wolf. The Fantastic Detectives have also presented in schools, hosted a fire training, and shared what they captured on camera traps to open the conversation.

Already, Ferreira has noticed a world of difference in how friendly the people are compared to the beginning of their research. One farmer, who was one of the team’s first interviewees, called her a month after they visited to report a huge jaguar pawprint on his land. He sent pictures and invited the team to come back to visit. “It was really special because after a month away, he still remembered us and talked to us,” says Ferreira. The key, she says, is just letting people into the conversation. “When you just give them time to talk, they engage in the projects because it’s more near what they know.”

Because they are still in the early stages of their work, the Fantastic Detectives have yet to observe tangible conservation improvements. Nevertheless, Ferreira is hopeful their efforts to create a collaborative space will not only foster human-wildlife coexistence but also increase citizen participation in conservation efforts.

Dr. Keifer Titus also studies conflict between agriculture and conservation, but on working lands in Montana. Before starting the field work for his PhD in Wildlife and Fisheries Biology from Clemson University, he had seen and heard a lot of negativity about ranchers in the West. “The people that [do] extractive agriculture or agriculture in general almost always get a bad rap, right? Like, they’re the ones doing the harm for the wildlife.” But, he says, “when I got out there and interacted with these folks…it couldn’t have been more opposite. These people care more about the land than most. They want to see wildlife doing well.” Those conversations showed him that “if we could just, from the beginning, get these stakeholders on the same page, it just would do so much better for conservation and preservation of culture and livelihoods,” says Titus.

Like Fantastic Detectives, Titus’s work is grounded in bringing local stakeholders into the conversation from the beginning, specifically to coproduce science, which he says can create better conservation strategies for both people and wildlife. “Without public buy in, most of the time [wildlife restoration and conservation efforts] are unsuccessful, especially in the long term,” says Titus. Where his work goes beyond community engagement is combining data about ranchers’ attitudes towards wildlife with common spatial modeling techniques to create a map of social and ecological conditions on a landscape. “We’re really good at modeling the environmental side. A lot of times we can have the best habitat available for the species we’re looking to restore or conserve, but if social conditions aren’t right, it’s a barrier to achieving a lot of the restoration goals that we might have,” says Titus. Being able to see where both factors are favorable, called areas of socio-ecological suitability, can help conservationists make more informed decisions on where to focus their efforts.

For example, part of Titus’s work was trying to identify the best place to do habitat restoration for mountain lions in and around Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. To do this, he developed maps to identify places with both high habitat value for mountain lions and high local tolerance for them. To measure tolerance, Titus and his team sent out mail surveys to Montana ranchers across the plains region asking them to agree or disagree with statements related to their attitudes towards the species, their support for incentives and conservation for the species, and how they behave toward the species on their land. Titus mapped the survey results, relating tolerance to things like the proportion of public lands and the presence of conservation easements around respondents’ ranch lands. Then, he modeled habitat suitability according to land type, elevation, terrain, and the distance to roads and water. Based off only the habitat data, the public land in the wildlife refuge appeared to be the best candidate for habitat restoration. But tolerance was relatively low there. Conversely, further north of the wildlife refuge in areas with more private land, the habitat quality was much lower but the tolerance for mountain lions was the highest, which “seemed backwards to us from the ecology side of things,” says Titus.

Since Titus’s framework was one of the first of its kind, he was uncertain if the suitability results reflected an accurate picture of the landscape. He had the opportunity to share his results at the Nature Conservancy’s Matador Ranch Science and Land Management Symposium, where wildlife researchers, ranchers, and the public come together to discuss the latest research. Titus and his team spoke with some of the same ranchers surveyed to collect tolerance data, who confirmed the accuracy of the predictive maps. Because higher quality mountain lion habitat is in the wildlife refuge, those working around it are more likely to have had negative interactions with mountain lions and therefore lower tolerance. The ranchers living where mountain lions don’t frequent as much have higher tolerance because they haven’t had any issues with them. Bringing the two sets of data together helped create a clearer picture than each on their own. “It hit home that it’s so much more than habitat, and it causes us to need to think creatively about how we’re aiming for restoration,” says Titus, who now works as a postdoctoral scholar in the Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Science at Oregon State University.

Though his model is among the first, socio-ecological integration is a growing field. A 2023 literature review in Landscape Ecology found 104 articles that used integrative approaches like Titus’s, with the majority from 2020 or after. There were several different approaches in analysis, including attempts to understand the complicated drivers behind tolerance and incorporating predictions about the outcomes of possible management strategies. Common research questions included where on a landscape human-wildlife interactions occurred, what ecological and social factors impacted interactions the most, and if interactions could be accurately predicted to improve management strategies.

The review also pointed out challenges and opportunities for growth, particularly around the measurement of sociological data. According to Titus, social variables like attitudes and tolerance can be hard to map onto a landscape, fluctuate often, and take time and money to repeatedly survey for. A lack of standard methodology, on the other hand, makes collaboration and comparison across studies difficult. But none of these challenges are stopping Titus. “While it might not be systematic, necessarily, from a Western science perspective, there’s tons of qualitative information that can really help us move the needle for wildlife.”

The more research there is, the better. As new studies fill in gaps and streamline the process, socio-ecologically integrated approaches will become easier to implement widely and may start to change norms in the conservation community towards always including diverse voices in the conversation. Titus is very excited at the possibilities: “I think this is going to be the next frontier of how we approach wildlife restoration in working lands.”

Ezra Stepanek is a WyACT Science Journalism Intern and an undergraduate student at the University of Wyoming. He is studying environmental systems science, environment and natural resources, and communication.

Header image: A black jaguar and a mountain lion photographed by wildlife cameras in Atlantic Forest State Park (Courtesy Bruna Ferreira).

Traveling abroad to find home

By Katie Doyle

Last winter, I stepped out of a cable car packed with people and onto a volcano in the Canary Islands, staring speechless at the North Atlantic Ocean 12,000 feet below. It was the furthest I’d ever been from my home in Wyoming and the incredible reality promptly knocked the wind out of me. My classmates on the study abroad trip scattered, eager to explore Mount Teide, whose eruption helped form Tenerife, the largest of the seven Canary Islands. I heard someone behind me ask the purpose of the barbed wire fence that stretched out before us, and the cable car operator replied, “It’s to keep the sheep out.” I immediately snapped out of my bewilderment and into wildlife biology mode, unsheathing my binoculars and searching for a good spot to settle in.

As I sat on top of Teide, binoculars glued to my eyes, I felt the familiar excitement and hope course through me that had I felt so many times during my four years working seasonally in wildlife management in Montana, Idaho, and Texas. During those years I honed my deer, elk, and bighorn sheep spotting skills, and I was thrilled at the chance to perform my favorite activity to look for a new species in a foreign place. It felt both familiar and strange, the kind of experience that blew my mind, inspired me to continue travelling, and made me miss home all at once.

Unfortunately, our group was limited to one hour at the top of the volcano. When our time was up, I reluctantly put away my binoculars and stored away this sunny memory to call upon during the long, dark Wyoming winter to which I would soon return. Although I did not spot them, the sheep held my attention for the remaining few days of our trip. As our bus took us down winding roads away from the park, I asked our guide, Omar, to tell me everything he knew about them.

As he described the sheep, a species called mouflon, he showed me a picture on his phone of a large male with big curling horns and dark brown fur perched on the side of a cliff. Like the bighorn and barbary sheep they resemble, mouflon thrive in steep, rocky, and dry environments like those found in Teide National Park. He explained that hunters introduced them to Tenerife in 1970 to diversify big game hunting opportunities on the island. Mouflon hunts did not become as popular as people expected, and with no predators to keep them in check, their populations flourished in the national park.

Teide’s high, rocky features are a great fit for the mouflon, but the land that encircles the volcano is home to delicate plant species that have suffered from the sheep’s introduction and population growth. Omar pointed out the bus window at a scene that looked so much like the sagebrush steppe I was used to back home, and he explained that many of the plants we saw are endemic to Tenerife, meaning they do not grow naturally anywhere else in the world. Introduced mammals like mouflon sheep and European rabbits eat and trample these delicate species. Coupled with recent rising temperatures, this has increased stress on the plants and the park biologists that manage them. Twice a year, managers cull the mouflon populations to cut down their numbers on the island and reduce their impact on the plants.

The brown, rocky ledges turned to lush green forest as we drove, and massive turquoise waves rode onto black sand beaches. The awe and bewilderment rushed back into my mind, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the mouflon. Even though I knew the amount of stress they cause to native vegetation and park biologists, and that ultimately they should not be here, I still wanted to see them browsing the high cliffs.

This internal conflict reminded me of the landowners and managers that I work with in Wyoming to better understand the human side of wildlife management. I chose this type of work for my graduate studies after finishing my wildlife degree, entering the field, and quickly realizing the inseparable effects that wildlife and humans have on each other. Recently, my focus has been on private landowners outside of Yellowstone National Park, who are most affected by deer, elk, and pronghorn that migrate out of Yellowstone and onto private lands during the winter, when resources are few and scattered. Once there, they can damage infrastructure, compete with livestock for food, and pass diseases to livestock. I spent a year traveling to these landowners’ homes, sitting at large, wooden kitchen tables and listening to stories of grandmothers who counted migrating deer each fall and fathers who taught their sons and daughters to “leave some hay for the elk” when harvesting each year. Their love and respect for wildlife shone through as they spoke of their responsibility as stewards of the land and their job to keep it healthy for all who inhabit it. But their brows furrowed and wistful looks faded as they detailed the time and money that living with wildlife requires. For them, the season’s first migrating animal can spark just as much worry as it does joy.

As we pulled into the parking lot of our hotel, my classmates and I talked about the effect that our time in Tenerife had on us and what we wanted to take home from the experience. Some students felt that the trip broadened their professional opportunities, others excitedly talked about the bird species they could now cross off their “must see” list. I felt that my experience confirmed my career choice. My interest in the people involved in the protection of our natural resources grew immeasurably and my eagerness to find the mouflon told me that the wildlife management field is where I belong. The travel brochures show beautiful landscapes and fun in the sun, I thought, but the value of travel is found in the parts that hit close to home.

Katie Doyle is a graduate student at the University of Wyoming pursuing the master’s degree in Environment, Natural Resources, & Society. This piece was produced for the Western Confluence magazine fellowship course.

An opportunity for all

Perspective by Ashlee Lundvall

One August morning in 1999, I swung my legs out of my bunk and pulled on a stiff, new pair of Wrangler jeans. I was at a teen camp in Wyoming, and I had chores to complete before we left that afternoon on a backpacking trip. Little did I know that day would be the last day I stood on my own.

Growing up in Indiana, I was a year-round, four-sport athlete, starting the school year with volleyball and moving through basketball, fast-pitch softball, and slow-pitch softball. After hitting six feet in the 6th grade, basketball had become a special passion of mine. I loved the teamwork, the physicality, the competition, and I found a sense of deep satisfaction every time I stepped on the court. Sports were my identity, and the future I imagined for myself. 

In a split second, that was all taken away. Following a freak accident at that camp in Wyoming, I found myself sitting in a wheelchair, listening to doctors tell me I would be seeing the world from a much shorter vantage. My dreams of a career involving sports were demolished as I struggled to accept a new identity in a paralyzed body.

This was a challenging time for me, but it was also a time of growth and discovery. I realized that sometimes it takes more courage to let go of old dreams that you don’t even recognize anymore in order to move on to new opportunities. I knew I wanted to help others, and I understood my journey had purpose, but I didn’t know where that would lead me. 

During graduate school, I met a young man from Wyoming. We shared a love for the outdoors and we both wanted to start our new life together out West. When we returned to Wyoming, I found that the rugged beauty of the land hadn’t changed, but I had.  I was presented with a choice; I could hide away in self-pity, or I could venture out in the wild and find a new purpose. As intimidating as those mountains seemed, a spark within me craved the challenge. I was eager to discover a new field, a new competition, a new team. And I found it outdoors.

These days, you can find me hunting, flyfishing, camping, and four-wheeling miles of mountain trails. The vast Wyoming landscape has become my arena, the place I seek out that deep satisfaction from my youth. I have found healing in the outdoors, and along the way I have forged lasting friendships and rediscovered a passion for sharing it forward. 

Now my drive is to protect this opportunity for future generations while ensuring that it is accessible to all, regardless of their ability level. Everyone deserves the chance to uncover the adventure and rich fulfillment that I have found outside. 

I believe, in the words of the Sisterhood of the Outdoors, that “we have to give it away to keep it.” We must conserve these wild places, and that will only happen if we are willing to share our knowledge and experience and passion. If we don’t show the next generation the path, we risk losing this way of life. But if we give freely and joyfully, we can see it grow and flourish. 

So share your story. Take a kid fishing. Look for philanthropic opportunities in conservation. It doesn’t take much to make a difference, but you have to be looking for the hole that only you can fill. And you have to be willing to fill it.

Some may see my disability and believe my life is thin and bleak. I hope they pause long enough to glimpse the richness and pure joy I have unearthed. And I pray they can find that same life-altering experience.

Ashlee Lundvall is a wife and mom who lives on a farm in Powell, Wyoming. She is the Head of School at Veritas Academy. Ashlee serves on the Wyoming Game & Fish Commission as well as the Wyoming Hunger Initiative.

Skyrocketing housing prices drive residents out of desirable outdoor recreation communities

By Kristen Pope

Jackson, Wyoming, is famous for its amazing outdoor access, but finding an affordable place to live there is a perpetual struggle. “We know that housing [in Jackson] is very expensive and it’s out of reach for most of our seasonal and younger workers who are less established in their careers,” says April Norton, director of the Jackson/Teton County Affordable Housing Department. In Jackson, the median sale price of a single-family home in 2022 was $3.5 million, a record high for the community. Due to the high cost and shortage of housing, as many as 40 percent of local workers live outside the county and make lengthy commutes, sometimes on icy, snow-packed roads in nearly white-out conditions. During the busy summer season, some live out of their vehicles on nearby public lands. Other long-term residents have simply moved away. 

And Jackson is not alone. For many small mountain towns, the very features that attract people also make them challenging and expensive places to live. Communities throughout the West endowed with natural amenities—nearby forests, mountains, trails, beaches, and wildlife—are seeking ways to capitalize on the economic opportunities that come with outdoor recreation and tourism. At the same time, they strive to avoid sacrificing the characteristics, such as quiet trails and little traffic, that make these places so desirable to live in the first place. 

Researchers from Headwaters Economics, an independent, nonprofit research group, explored the challenges communities like Jackson face, along with potential solutions, in a recent report entitled The Amenity Trap: How high-amenity communities can avoid being loved to death. 

The term “amenity trap” describes “a place with natural attractions that make it a great place to live but also threaten it,” as throngs of tourists strain local infrastructure while short-term rentals and wealthy residents, including part-time residents, drive up housing costs for local workers. So, what can communities do to escape the trap? The report authors offer a range of solutions and examples that communities can consider to provide more affordable housing for local workers.

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The housing crisis, in both affordability and availability, is a nationwide problem, but a few factors make it especially acute in outdoor-oriented communities throughout the Mountain West. Located in rural areas with great outdoor access, these towns are generally considered nice places to live, where people can admire gorgeous scenery and embrace an active lifestyle that may involve skiing a few laps or going for a trail run on their lunch break. Those qualities also attract people looking for second homes, remote workers, and tourists, all of whom compete with locals for limited housing. 

And the competition is stiff. Wealthy individuals may purchase second (or additional) homes in cash, making their offers more attractive and higher than those from people relying on mortgages, which generally cannot extend above a house’s appraised value. Limited buildable land and a limited labor force also make housing problems especially pronounced in some outdoor amenity communities.  

This housing shortage detracts from quality-of-life for residents and can even imperil their ability to remain housed.  The Amenity Trap report cited a 2020 study saying median rent increasing by $100 per month is associated with homelessness rising by 9 percent. A 2022 Teton Region Housing Needs Assessment survey found nearly half of renters in the region who chose to complete the survey had been forced to move in the past three years, often more than once, due to factors like their residence being sold or converted to a short-term rental or a significant rent increase. When fewer properties are available for local workers to rent, this drives prices even higher. 

“When communities have a deep toolbox to draw from, I think they can start to move the needle.” Megan Lawson

Many of Jackson, Wyoming’s, vital workers, including teachers, healthcare workers, snowplow drivers, and emergency responders, live outside the county or even across the state line in Idaho. Commuters can be stranded in inclement weather, and driving long distances every day isn’t cheap. The Teton Region Housing Needs Assessment found these commutes cost an average of $500-850 per month. And commuting negatively affects communities when those hours behind the wheel each day cut into time engaging with loved ones or participating in civic life. 

“In the next five years, we need to build 2,000 housing units just in Teton County, Wyoming,” Norton says. And the number is almost double when considering the wider region, including Teton Valley, Idaho, and northern Lincoln County, Wyoming, she says. But finding a place for new structures is a challenge since 97 percent of the county is public land—mostly Grand Teton National Park and the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Of the 3 percent that is private land, several thousand acres are under conservation easement or other restrictions, leaving a very small footprint for building homes. The lack of housing availability is a factor that, coupled with soaring costs, has pushed many long-term residents to move away.

These problems echo around the Mountain West. In Big Sky, Montana, census data shows that 78 percent of Big Sky’s workforce now faces commutes of more than 40 miles. Further, many of the communities that Big Sky workers commute from also face housing stresses. The Big Sky Community Housing Trust reported the average cost to purchase a nonluxury condo at nearly $1.2 million. They also reported a 0 percent vacancy rate for long-term rentals at the end of 2022.

David O’Connor, the trust’s executive director, says a healthy vacancy rate would be closer to 5 or 6 percent, where market forces can impact rent levels. “So probably the greatest impact of a 0 percent vacancy rate is unfettered growth in rental rates,” he says. “There just is no throttle then to try and keep those rates down because from the perspective of the market, demand is then infinite and supply is not, so it’s just basic economics and the price goes up.”

Communities can be reactive and try to stop growth, do nothing and wait, or be proactive and plan ahead. According to the Amenity Trap report authors, trying to restrict growth by methods such as limiting building permits can have unintended consequences like driving up the cost of available housing. 

“When communities are faced with change, it’s very understandable to want to put the brakes on, but what we’ve seen is that it doesn’t affect the attractiveness of your community, it doesn’t affect the desirability, and people still want to come there,” says Megan Lawson, economist at Headwaters Economics and co-author of the report.

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The Amenity Trap report describes a range of tools communities can consider to address housing for local residents. “With all the different strategies that communities are using around housing, there’s no single program or policy that’s going to solve the housing challenges these places are facing,” Lawson says. “But I think … when communities can try, can have a deep toolbox to draw from, I think they can start to move the needle .”

One strategy is to make more rental units available to local workers, including by incentivizing homeowners to rent to local workers. Durango, Colorado, offered “ADU amnesty” to legalize existing unpermitted “accessory dwelling units” such as apartments above garages and in backyards. Now, Durango is incentivizing the construction of new ADUs by offering $8,000 rebates for a set number of ADUs that meet certain requirements, including the owner renting it to a local worker who uses the space as their primary residence, and committing to the program for two years.

Big Sky, Montana, provides financial incentives for homeowners to offer long-term (one- or two-year) rentals to locals, with higher amounts for homes that have more bedrooms to hold entire families. However, without guardrails these types of programs risk benefitting investors and second homeowners more than local residents. In a similar “Lease to Locals” program, Summit County, Colorado, had to cap the amount owners could charge renters after some set rates the local workforce generally couldn’t afford. 

Limiting short-term vacation rentals is another way to make more homes available to local residents. Bozeman, Montana, uses zoning to restrict short-term rentals in certain neighborhoods. While such measures can increase available housing, they can also be controversial since they impact residents and businesses running short-term rentals as income sourc es. The Big Sky Community Housing Trust also provides local homeowners with cash incentives to put permanent deed restrictions on their properties that prohibit short-term rentals and specify occupants must work locally. Jackson, Wyoming, is working on a similar deed restriction program to ensure more homes are occupied by members of the permanent local workforce. 

“It hits two birds with one stone,” Norton says of Jackson’s program. “It’s providing stable housing for someone who is working locally, but it’s also protecting community character, so we don’t have to build up bigger all the time. We can protect some of these cool funky houses in town, too, that have been workforce housing and hopefully will remain workforce housing.”

In some outdoor amenity communities, a few local businesses such as ski resorts provide employee housing for a limited number of employees. For example, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort offers limited housing for full-time employees including shared 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom apartments with no pets allowed and very limited parking. Another option is a shared motel room with two queen beds, one bathroom, and a mini fridge and microwave, but no kitchen. This motel is a 20–30-minute bus ride from the ski resort, and pets are not allowed. Vail Resorts also offers housing options for employees who don’t mind having roommates. In many communities, there are more people seeking employee housing than beds available.

Another approach communities can take is to build more houses, if land is available for construction. Jason Peasley, executive director of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, says the housing issue has existed for more than 40 years and part of the solution is to increase housing supply. After an anonymous donor gave 534 acres of open land adjacent to Steamboat Springs for affordable housing, the Yampa Valley Housing Authority began planning the Brown Ranch project. The county’s current housing shortfall is 1,400 units, and the project includes plans to build 2,300 new homes by 2040. Neighborhoods will be built for affordability and sustainability, as well as connectivity and health equity.

“We can expand the size of our community to accommodate our workforce and make sure that those who work in Steamboat and want to live in Steamboat have that option,” Peasley says.

In another effort to create additional housing, the Big Sky Community Housing Trust is building RiverView Apartments, a federally-funded low-income housing apartment project scheduled to be ready in 2024. 

The difficulty of creating additional housing spans beyond planning. It also requires people to physically build the structures for people to live in. A short supply of labor (as well as housing for laborers) compounds the housing challenge in many outdoor recreation communities. The Amenity Trap report discusses modular housing as a potential solution being used in parts of Colorado. Rather than requiring workers to spend weeks or months on-site building a home from the foundation up, modular homes are built in a centralized location, such as the Fading West factory in Buena Vista, Colorado, and then transported, installed, and finished in less time than building on-site. “Prefabricated and modular homes are typically not distinguishable from traditional stick-built houses and, importantly, must meet the same building code as stick-built homes,” the report states, adding that such homes can cost 10-20 percent less than homes built on-site.

Funding is another challenge that limits housing programs. Different communities turn to approaches like debt financing through bonds, which may rely on funding from local property taxes, and forming partnerships between public and private entities to spread out costs of housing solutions. Others focus on taxing tourism to help pay for housing programs and solutions. Steamboat Springs, Colorado, now charges a 9 percent tax on short-term rentals, which is estimated to bring in $11 million for affordable housing initiatives, including the Brown Ranch Project, over the next 20 years.

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As communities already entrenched in challenging housing situations seek innovative solutions, other communities that are starting to develop their own outdoor recreation economies can plan ahead. Escaping the trap and addressing severe shortages of affordable homes requires, the report authors say, proactively creating comprehensive housing solutions ahead of or along with economic development plans, not after the fact. By learning from places like Jackson, Wyoming, and taking the lessons from the Amenity Trap report to heart, communities can create housing solutions in tandem with developing ways to boost their economies and enhance quality-of-life for residents and visitors alike. The report’s authors emphasize that each community is unique and will need its own set of tools to address its individual situation.

“The challenges around housing that communities are struggling with right now are not new,” says Lawson, but now there is “a much broader group of people who are interested and paying attention to our policies around housing.” She says as community members see more people affected by a lack of affordable housing, they are starting to understand how housing challenges affect their neighbors, local businesses, and other aspects of community. This sets the stage for community leaders to take action.

“I think the challenges are a lot more visible now, and that gives an opportunity for more voices at the table around changing our housing policies.”

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer who lives in the Tetons. Find more of her work at kepope.com.

 

Header image: Steamboat Springs, Colorado, (Steve Estvanik, Shutterstock).

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.”

~

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)

How place and technology meanings shape conflict around outdoor recreation development

By Wes Eaton and Curt Davidson 

In the fall of my first semester as a visiting professor at the University of Wyoming, a stranger knocked on the half-open door to my new office and said, “There’s a town in Wyoming where people are saying that an outdoor recreation development proposal is tearing their community apart. Want to look into it with me?”

The stranger was Curt Davidson, a new professor of outdoor recreation and tourism. I had never heard of the thing stirring up the controversy, a via ferrata, which Davidson described as a protected climbing route—rungs, ladders, and cables installed on cliffs to assist climbing. It was the community conflict that intrigued me; people around Lander, Wyoming, were increasingly divided on the prospect of building a via ferrata in the nearby Sinks Canyon State Park. I am a social scientist specializing in conflict and collaboration around controversial environmental issues. I wondered if lessons from conflicts around water management and energy transitions, which I’d studied in the past, might apply in the world of recreation development. I told Davidson I was in.

As we began meeting and interviewing the people of Lander, we soon found that via ferrata meant much more than iron rungs and ladders, and rarely even that. We wondered if what seemed to be an intractable controversy about specific issues might instead be viewed through the lens of how Sinks Canyon State Park and via ferrata mean different things to different people. We hoped this lens could help foster understanding in the situation at hand, as well as provide a means for decision-makers and developers to sidestep future conflict.

We began our research by reading up on Lander, a former mining town southeast of Yellowstone National Park and the Wind River Indian Reservation, now known as a recreation destination and gateway to the Wind River Mountains. Between the Winds and Lander, the middle fork of the Popo Agie River runs through Sinks Canyon, where visitors access campgrounds, hiking and biking trails, and sport climbing from a state highway. Sinks Canyon State Park covers 600 acres near the mouth of the canyon, while the rest is managed mostly by the US Forest Service.

Next, we scoured news articles to find out how the situation got to where it was. From what we could tell, officials from Sinks Canyon State Park had released a new master plan in October 2020, following a series of public meetings and a public comment period. The plan included a proposal to install a via ferrata on a north-facing cliff in the canyon, which a group of community members had pitched as a way of attracting visitors and boosting the local economy.

After the plan’s release, a retired Wyoming Game and Fish biologist and peregrine falcon expert raised concerns that the proposed via ferrata route crossed a known nesting site, kicking off what quickly emerged as an organized campaign. Lander residents rallied around the mantra “Keep Sinks Canyon Wild” and formed the vocal citizens group Sinks Canyon Wild, which distributed yard signs, knocked on doors, and organized community events. A group of about 40 opponents even surprised Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon on the Lander airport tarmac when he flew in to attend another event.

In the face of growing criticism, someone close to the debate suggested an alternative site on a south-facing cliff called the Sandy Buttress, but that didn’t end the controversy. In addition to concerns about the peregrines, critics accused Wyoming State Parks of ignoring public comments, making decisions behind closed doors, and valuing the state’s outdoor recreation economy over local concerns. As the campaign against the via ferrata grew, vocal support dwindled to a private matter. By the time we arrived, Wyoming State Parks was the sole public voice for via ferrata in Sinks Canyon.

Our first visit put us at the Middle Fork Restaurant on Lander’s Main Street in time for a late breakfast. Our rented university sedan gave us away as outsiders, but when we announced that we were researchers interested in conflict surrounding the via ferrata issue, the community opened to us, with thoughtfulness and engagement from all sides.

We began interviewing people that day. Over the course of three months, we spoke with 29 stakeholders, including recreators, wildlife enthusiasts, business owners, Wyoming State Parks employees, area residents, and local tribes. During our interviews, as well as informally at the Lander Bar, we were often told, “I don’t understand the via ferrata.” This could mean, I don’t understand why someone wants the via ferrata here, as well as I don’t understand why people are so upset over building it here. These weren’t statements of ignorance, but claims offered with humility. People in Lander and elsewhere, while clear about their own positions, were genuinely flabbergasted by those on the other side of the matter. Within this gap in understanding, we heard “via ferrata is tearing this community apart.”

As researchers, we were not trying to parse out who was right or might be at fault, or claiming to have special insight as to whether the via ferrata should or shouldn’t be installed. In fact, less than a year after we completed our interviews, Wyoming State Parks canceled the project, rendering what ought to be done a moot point. Instead, we aimed to better understand the fundamental drivers of different positions on the issue by focusing on the idea of “fit.”

A substantial body of social science research says that community support for new development is most likely when the technology involved is seen as “fitting” with a place. A perceived mismatch brews resistance. Because people draw on their personal experiences and community norms when forming ideas about the world around them, the same place and technology can mean very different things to different groups. As such, there is a wide range of ways people feel about or relate to a place (place meanings) that can match or mismatch a range of ways people view a technology (technology meanings). Social scientists disentangle and map these various possible combinations into “symbolic logics,” where a position of support or opposition is the logical conclusion of a particular pair of place and technology meanings.

Using these ideas, we proposed that critics in Lander saw the via ferrata as inappropriate for Sinks Canyon, whereas proponents saw via ferrata as a natural fit. This framework is useful for making sense of seemingly irreconcilable differences because it shows how any position is perfectly reasonable, given a certain view of Sinks Canyon and a specific way of thinking about via ferrata.

Take for example the people we interviewed who see Sinks Canyon as a wild and sacred place. They emphasized the diversity of wildlife along the park’s canyon walls and the dense riparian habitat along the Popo Agie River, pointing to the opportunities for wildlife enthusiasts. They highlighted that Wyoming Game and Fish has an agreement with State Parks to “preserve and manage important habitats for wildlife.” They also frequently referenced Indigenous groups and culture and were concerned that the proposed location “puts this via ferrata now right at the entrance of the canyon, right on a cliff that has petroglyphs and pictographs, right on an area that is culturally very significant.”

Now consider those who insist that the rungs and cables of a via ferrata would be an eyesore, saying, “We don’t need more junk going on up there, you know?” To them, the physical infrastructure—the rungs and cables—of the proposed technology doesn’t fit with the place’s wild aesthetic. They stressed this mismatch by labelling the via ferrata things like “playground,” “jungle gym,” and “plaything”—objects belonging in more developed recreation spaces.

Others opposed the via ferrata because of a different mismatch of place and technology meanings. They agree that Sinks Canyon is a wild and sacred place and objected to what they saw as the via ferrata’s commercial nature. The proposal at the time used a concessionaire to manage the route and included what officials hoped would be a nominal fee; opponents declared this out of sync with the public nature of a state park. Focus on the commercial dimension aligned with larger suspicions people held about the role of private interests and political motivations in the project, which ultimately came to symbolize valuing economic progress over wild places that ought to stay special. As one critic said, “We need a whole different lens to look at the planet, and my attention to the via ferrata is about that. It’s a little, trivial, kind of ridiculous thing, but it represents [an inability] to grasp the fragility of our planet and Wyoming’s unique place in how wild it is compared to the rest of our planet, and especially our country.”

Even proponents of the via ferrata agreed that it did not belong in wild spaces, with one saying, “I would not want the next via ferrata to be in the middle of the Wind River Range, on Gannett peak and the Gannett Peak Wilderness Area.” But to that interviewee and others, Sinks Canyon State Park is not wild. Instead, they called it a “gateway” and a “transition zone” between the wilderness of the Wind River Range and the development found below. Some called the state park a “planned” place, pointing to existing recreational infrastructure like parking lots, restrooms, campgrounds, and the highway running through it all. The pocketed, limestone cliffs themselves have made Sinks Canyon a hotspot for rock climbing, with more than 500 developed sport routes (although most of these are in the national forest, not the state park).

Another interviewee pushed back on the idea of the canyon as sacred, particularly the proposed via ferrata location at its mouth, saying “You’ll not find any sites where [Indigenous groups] did any camping or any ceremonies, no evidence of that activity.” Instead, it is a “pass-through,” used for travel, migration, foraging, and hunting—but not for sacred purposes.

To many sharing these pro-via ferrata views, Sinks Canyon State Park is seen as an appropriate place for new recreation development that avoids encroaching on what they see as truly sacred or wild places elsewhere. In general, via ferrata proponents focused not only on the technology as a form of recreation and education in keeping with the canyon’s current use, but also as a way of enhancing and equalizing that use.

The canyon’s cliffs currently offer mostly expert level climbing routes. In contrast, the via ferrata’s handles, cables, ladders, rungs, and safety clips could make climbing more accessible to more users. One advocate was excited that “we could open this up to underserved populations and have ways of allowing school groups and college groups and you name it. The opportunities are there for us to use this in an equitable way.” More generally, the via ferrata represented increased access to the health benefits of outdoor recreation by providing another means for people to spend time outside.

Another proponent highlighted the via ferrata as an interpretive tool that would complement the state park’s educational activity repertoire, saying “I see this more as an education tool to teach the climbing sport or climbing pastime lifestyle, but also teach about the beauty and the history of Sinks Canyon.” In this view, climbing the via ferrata would fit in alongside visiting the mysterious sink and rise of the Popo Agie River, experiencing the diverse local wildlife, and exploring hidden waterfalls and caves. It’s not a threatening, novel technology so much as “one more hook to catch kid’s interests,” as one interviewee said, or a way to increase visitors’ “stay time,” another said.

Other folks who saw Sinks Canyon State Park as a place of extensive use and development still attached a different meaning to it: the canyon is vulnerable to, rather than ideal for, additional development. To them, further alteration represented a line in the sand they didn’t want to cross, with one saying, “My greatest worry is basically that Sinks Canyon is death by a thousand cuts. You know, this [via ferrata] gets it a hell of a lot closer to the thousand. I mean [the park] is just a small area.”

Many interviewees shared stories of trampled paths, increased trash and pet waste, and overuse of the canyon by recreationists of all types. They worried that what was once the norm for them within the park—solitude, peace, wonderment—was disappearing, and that more users brought in by the via ferrata would only add to the problem. “If we don’t limit ourselves and ask ourselves to lighten up our footprint in the outdoors,” said one via ferrata opponent, “we’re going to trample it to death.”

Our research generated a figure illustrating some of these “symbolic logics” of fit that underlie support for, or opposition to, the via ferrata proposal. Admittedly, this framework does simplify things. Making meaning in everyday life is hardly so concise or linear. Nor are the given examples exhaustive of all the possible meanings and combinations of meanings people ascribed to place and technology.

There were, for example, people who saw Sinks Canyon as a recreational space but didn’t view the via ferrata as a legitimate form of recreation, saying it wasn’t “real” climbing. There were also those who saw via ferrata as worthwhile but blamed the shortcomings of the south-facing Sandy Buttress, warning it would be “a rinky-dink version of what a via ferrata should be.”

Despite the simplification, these logics remain a powerful tool for illuminating and charting out the values, motivations, and deep place attachments shaping peoples’ contrasting views on what is good for their community. This can get us a long way towards our research goal of building understanding among supporters and opponents, if people are willing to learn about, and take seriously, the meanings others hold that are different from their own. They can still disagree about whether Sinks Canyon is a wild place or a transition zone, but if they set aside their doubt for a minute and try on the other position, they may see the logic in it. We like to sum this up by saying, “If you’re furious, get curious.”

A close look at our symbolic logics reveals additional insights. First, it can be perilous to ignore or violate locally salient place meanings, no matter how beneficial a technology seems. In the case of via ferrata, even a technology that increases recreation’s accessibility (which is generally viewed favorably) was no match for concern for protecting a space that symbolized threatened wilderness. Second, different combinations of place and technology meanings can lead to the same position, which opens creative thinking for sidestepping potential outdoor recreation development disputes.

Communities and decision-makers wanting to manage contention around outdoor recreation development might take advantage of these insights when designing community engagement processes. A project leader might begin by finding out which meanings are tacit and prevalent for a place. This could give a sense of what types of development might fit well. Next, they could join, extend, or begin a new community dialogue to build understanding and potentially forge new, shared meanings along the way.

The best time to tap into and create shared meanings is before a big development announcement. That’s because people often hold multiple meanings for the same place—recreating in a place they hold sacred, for instance—but these meanings tend to congeal when someone feels “their” place is threatened. New technologies often constitute a big threat to place; the via ferrata proposal, for example, catalyzed the Sinks Canyon Wild citizens group dedicated to protecting Sinks Canyon when there wasn’t one before. Once a community builds a shared understanding, it can work to identify a reasonable “fit” between place and outdoor recreation development.

In this way, lessons learned from the Sinks Canyon via ferrata conflict, which appears to have ended, might assist other communities and decision-makers wanting to get ahead of conflict around outdoor recreation development. The authors, Wes and Curt, hope to support and continue learning from and with Wyoming leaders willing to build on this approach for current and future projects.

Wes Eaton is visiting assistant professor with the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. His work is on the science and practice of collaborative approaches for managing complex socio-environmental challenges.

Curt Davidson is an assistant professor with the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. His work focuses on recreation with special attention given to recreation development, health and wellness, and experiential education.

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Acknowledgments: We thank the stakeholder interviewees who shared their stories with us. We lightly edited some interviewee quotes to protect personal identities. Our research was funded by the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation, Tourism, and Hospitality (WORTH) Initiative, which is the sponsor of this issue of Western Confluence

Header image: Climbers enjoy a via ferrata in Spain. (Photo by Frantisek Duris on Unsplash.)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.