Comparison photos are fun!
The exclosure protects the springs from grazing. This is on BLM land in the Mountain Springs grazing allotment. Copyright Ralph Maughan
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
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. . a picture worth a thousand words.
SO: This is the allotment in central Idaho where the permit is held by the Hewlett Packard heiress, n’est-ce pas? Mary Hewlett Jaffe. Fancies herself a botanist, or likes flowers, or something. Seems what she really likes most is playing Cattle Baroness -at the expense of the public and wildlife.
Why, kt! You know something about Boulevard Springs. 😉 I’ll bet you know a bit about the adjoining 50,000 acres or so of BLM land too.
Wasn’t the Mountain Springs grazing allotment named something else?
Ralph – it was called the San Felipe. Jon Marvel, WWP; Linn Kincannon, ICL; and myself (BWCC) worked for more years than I want to remember, trying to bring better ecological conditions to the Mountain Springs aka San Felipe allotment. WWP is still working on it. I’ve turned nearly all my energy toward helping wolves.
Back in the 90’s, we went on range tours, hosted national media, monitored the 97,000 acres intensely, and took 1000’s of photos. The only reason BLM took extra effort here, was that chinook salmon (that swim all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Idaho) live in Road Creek, which is part of the allotment. Road Creek has been protected and is much improved over when I first saw it near 20 years ago.
But the other creeks, springs and seeps, remain battered and degraded, like outside Blvd Springs. My final attendance at a San Felipe grazing meeting was in 2000, when the BLM stood up and said once again to the allotments sorry condition “it got away from us again”
Can remember being told that the heiress mentioned in a previous post, has been brain washed by the ranch manager, and thinks everything is just fine. Hard to believe someone could ignore the damage done by cattle to this beautiful landscape.
Much of this allotment is in Wilderness Study Area, but all the dirt 4WD “ways”, fencelines, watering troughs, dug out and watering holes, has so diminished the Wilderness quality that BLM did not rec. it for Wilderness, and none of it is in the bill now before Congress for the Boulder-White Clouds.
I know that Road Creek is much improved, but a trip to Mountain Springs usually makes a disbeliever out of those who think the West should be reserved for the livestock nobility while the rest of us play along with ineffective talk about how the cows save the area from subdivisions.