An Argument for Beef

(Warning: I don't know much about US Public Land policy. So this is coming from a perspective of ignorance. I'm probably mistating a lot of 'facts'. Bear with me. Contact my friend, Dusty, if you want better information.)

Made it yesterday to Mackay Reservoir. Was setting up my tent below an ancient cowboy cemetery a little after 8pm. It was my first really good riding day since day one. I felt energized, mostly by the necessity of covering 55mi of waterless wasteland, but also by the stark beauty (is that the word?) of the place. Almost all of the land I pedaled through was BLM land (public land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management.) It has very few restrictions. Ranchers with the right permits let their cattle graze on it. You can camp anywhere you please. You can drive your off-road vehicle all around it. Make a fire anywhere. And this isn't a little plot of land. It included a whole mountain range and huge prairie-like basins. Almost all 55mi that I pedaled through. And along the way I noticed some signs that said the land (or part of it) was under consideration by congress for Wilderness designation. That would mean it would have major restrictions. I think these include no motorized vehicle travel. No bicycles. Certainly no cattle grazing. And no more development whatsoever. I thought, "Wouldn't that be nice." More wild areas are alright with me.

Once I finally topped out on Willow Creek Summit, I had a screaming downhill with a nice tailwind. I was nearly out of water at this point, and had another 30mi to the reservoir. I was making such good time (steady pace of +20mph for the first time since I left WA) that I decided to take a 5mi detour to see a fault line from a 1983 earthquake which shook the valley and raised the mountains 17 days before I was born. When I came back down the dirt road from looking at the faultline, I decided I needed water for the evening. I had enough to get to Mackay but I didn't want to go all the way that night.

Like I said, this is empty BLM land. Some cattle here and there. But in the whole 55mi from Challis (SHALL-is) to Mackay (MACK-ee) I passed no towns, maybe 6 ranches, and about as many dilapidated and abandoned homesteads from a century ago. So finding water was going to be difficult. I was lucky to run across a functioning ranch 21mi outside of Mackay. Just as I pulled my bike into the gravel parking lot, a fellow came driving around a barn with a horse trailer in tow. I waved at him and pulled off my sunglasses to indicate I had something to say. He waved back at me then drove right on by, and down the road. I started to get nervous, thinking it was going to be another replay of the night before.

I leaned my bike down to the ground and walked up to the building that I thought was the house. Lots of trash around it. Knocked on the door. A girl's voice said, "Come on in." I knocked again, because I thought that sounded too friendly for a rancher, like she was maybe expecting someone other than a skinny out-of-towner in tight pants. She said, "Come in," again. I opened the door to a living room that seemed to lean with the whole building. Everything made out of wood. A yellowed portrait of Abe Lincoln on the wall. A wagon wheel in the corner with flowers on it. In the far room, the kitchen, a painfully stooped old woman was facing away from me. I said, "Hello," and she turned around. I indicated that I was biking through and was hoping to fill up my water bottles. She said, "Oh, come on in. Come on in. We've been having trouble with our water, though." She showed me her sink and turned the water on to check if any came out, like she hadn't turned it on all day. "Well it works. Now, this is how you get hot, and this is how you get cold," she told me. And then she said, "Now tell me about yourself." Of course I said a little about myself, but I was too full of questions for her.

Marge Fulton is 91 years old. She's lived there, 21mi outside of Mackay all her life. She was there when the '83 earthquake hit. She said she had just graduated from university when the Depression knocked everyone flat, but I backcalculated and that would have made her 11 years old. She may have gotten the Depression mixed up with WWII. She taught English at Mackay high school for most of her life. ("But really, teachers in towns this small have to teach EVERYTHING," she said, making sure I knew she had done it all.) She kept ending her stories with, "Now tell me about yourself." She showed me a recent newspaper clipping that told about the Marge Fulton Scholarship, $1000 to a deserving Mackay HS graduate. Every year some of her previous students donate $1000 dollars and give it away in her name. She has a son, Gordon, who flies airplanes, and is going up to Alaska in a week. She finally said, "Now tell me about yourself," and I went ahead. I started to explain where I was from, what I was doing in the middle of Idaho, that I was going to study physics in the fall, that I was a little nervous about it.

Gordon walked in right about then. He was a little suspicious. But he was really gentle and soft-spoken. A different kind of rancher than I'd imagined in my head. I asked him a bunch of questions about ranching on BLM land. They have 500 head of cattle. Doesn't seem like much, but out here in the high desert, that requires an unimaginable amount of land. I asked him why ranch in the west then, and he said it was the almost free land. For a very small permit fee, he had access to the land he needed in the form of BLM land. It balanced out, though, he said, with the ranchers in the South, who have lots of cheap grass, but expensive plots of land. I began to connect his story with those signs I'd passed that said, "Under consideration for Wilderness Designation." I didn't ask him what would happen to him and his family if that land became a Wilderness Area. I made a guess.

Pretty early on into our conversation, he stopped himself and said, "And I bet your a vegetarian aren't you?" It wasn't aggressive. He was embarrassed to be talking to me about beef cattle. It was like a gentle country priest might stop himself from talking about God to a city dweller and say, "Oh, now I bet you're an atheist aren't you." I told him I liked cow meat.

Before I left, I asked Ms. Fulton if I could take her picture. I pulled out my disposable camera, and she waved her hand in front of her face and turned away. But I convinced her.

As I was walking out, Gordon was talking to her about Alaska. I caught that he wasn't sure he could find help enough around the ranch to get away. Someone had backed out.

I thought about them as I rode off toward Mackay Reservoir for the night. I don't know enough about the situation to argue one way or the other, for wilderness designations, or for ranching on BLM land. I don't even know if those two are opposing arguments. But meeting Gordon and Marge Fulton, a hearty rancher and his mom living in the middle of nowhere, scraping their subsistence from a tract of land that's not quite theirs, gives me pause about my initial environmental impulses.