News from the Volunteer Program

By Kat Wilder

I have two sons.  One, a cowboy, lives in New Mexico; the other lives and surfs in Hawai`i.  If you knew either parent, you could guess which child was raised mostly by whom: cowboy/rancher father or environmentalist/writer mother.  And you might guess why the marriage didn’t work.

Driving down a long dirt road that spans a portion of House
Rock Valley, following a cowboy in a three-quarter-ton pickup pulling a
gooseneck trailer, two saddled horses inside, I was thinking about this odd
coupling of rancher-environmentalist.  He stopped to let me pass, and we arrived at the same place—the Kane Ranch headquarters.

Kane Ranch Headquarters

This ranch was purchased by the Grand Canyon Trust in 2005, but this is no dude operation—three generations of a ranching family cowboy here.  They’ve been gathering the low country, preparing to drive the cattle up to the summer range on the Kaibab Plateau.  I speak about the ranching operation with JR, the patriarch of the family, as his son, ranch manager Justun Jones, trailers off somewhere else.  JR tells me they can run more than 1,000 head up on the Paria Plateau—a 220,000-acre lease that’s part of the Two Mile Ranch allotment, also owned by GCT—and several hundred down here in the House Rock Valley.  The Forest Service, BLM, and Arizona State Land Department dictate how many animal units these leases can handle; currently GCT runs fewer head to give the drought-ridden terrain a rest.

JR came to this country when he was fourteen; Justun has lived on the Arizona Strip since he was four. They cowboy ahorseback here, JR tells me, roping calves to brand them.  “If they use a [squeeze] chute that means they can’t rope and their horses aren’t any good,” he says.  Like my ex-husband, these are old-school cowboys.  Yet they’re working for an environmental advocacy group.  I don’t get it.

The House Rock Valley and Vermilion Cliffs

I ask about water, a precious resource in this vast, dry country.  JR tells me it gets drawn out of springs in the Vermilion Cliffs and piped under the highway to different pastures.  Water at the headquarters comes out of the canyon behind the ranch house.  Built in 1877, the sandstone slabs cut from nearby cliffs and stacked, puzzled, and mortared together by an earlier Mormon ranching family, the house now hosts GCT personnel and volunteers.

The last volunteers for this weekend of monitoring grassland restoration experiments arrive and we meet, eat lunch, and receive an introduction to the work ahead.  In 2006, GCT chose a site of poor soil—overgrazed and trampled due to its proximity to corrals and water—to fence off and seed with Indian rice and needle-and-thread grasses, Squirreltail, and Sandberg bluegrass.  A year later, they drill-seeded a nearby area with the same species, both experimental attempts to reintroduce and support the original grasses of the land.  We will count native grasses, and exotic Russian thistle seedlings, better known as tumbleweed.

After supper I return to my temporary shelter at Marble Canyon Lodge.  In the morning I cut down from 89A to the worksite following the mental map of dirt roads that were  laid out for me the night before.  I don’t get lost:  The roads, like the land they cross, interrelate with water—they go away from pavement and toward sources of water for cattle, while the land in this flare of House Rock Valley moves in low undulations toward the north rim of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River.

The group works within the fenced acre, some counting, others replacing strings that mark transects. I join the latter group, and when we finish tying the last knot we join the counters.  At first I’m just record-keeper, an easy task:  ____Russian thistle; ____ of this kind of native grass, or that.  It’s immediately and abundantly clear that the alien Russians overpopulate the indigenous by the hundreds.

As volunteers move to the drill-seeded site, I am left to prostrate myself to the thistles:  I must finally get down on my knees to count the tiny seedlings.  It’s hard to see the smallest ones, less than half an inch tall, yet at dinner my transect partner and I receive a round of applause for counting the most Russian thistle: With his 100 and my 194, we recorded nearly 300 tumbleweeds growing in a six-by-six-foot plot!

When I lie down to sleep that night, I see thistles—thousands of tiny, delicately leafed Russian thistle seedlings.  Try as I might to count sheep, I cannot.  This is when I comprehend the marriage of rancher to environmentalist in this new century.

Cowboys know good feed and water from bad—despite the depiction of the tumbling tumbleweed as symbol of the West, they know it as a big, round, rolling, worthless weed.  Still, they would never get down on their knees to count it, even in an effort to unravel it from the web of life here on this rocky soil.  And the volunteer botanists on board, their faces inches from the dirt, magnifying glasses scrunched to their eyeballs as they struggle to identify native seedlings, would not climb on a horse to push cows across a hot, dry desert flat, even in hopes of stomping out tumbleweeds.

Yet this is a relationship that works, in the same way that my two sons are brothers—because there’s common territory.  Parents, in my sons’ case.  In the case of GCT and the cowboys, it’s love of the land.  And, luckily unlike my
cowboy husband and me, they have that most necessary ingredient for a
successful union:  the willingness to listen, and to learn.