blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

An Overview of the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch

By Bryce Andrews, 6-18-08

Week 1 | Week 2

In 2005, the Clark Fork Coalition paid for an environmental assessment of the property. In that document’s introduction, the experts from Land and Water Consulting described the ranch as follows:

The subject property is located east of Interstate 90 near Galen, Montana and approximately 10 miles south of Deerlodge, Montana. The property is bounded by Interstate 90 and agricultural land on the west. The north, south, and east boundaries of the subject property adjoin predominantly undeveloped forest and grass hills. The Deerlodge National Forest boundary adjoins the southeast boundary of the subject property. The Clark Fork River and Modesty Creek run south to north through the west side of the subject property. Dry Cottonwood Creek, a northwest flowing tributary of the Clark Fork River, runs through portions of the east side of the subject property. The property is accessed by East Side Road and Forest Road (FR) 85.

	Bryce Andrews, this summer's ranch hand at Dry Cottonwood Creek in the Deer Lodge Valley

To this I’d add that the ranch covers 2,360 acres and spans about 1000 feet of elevation. In an aerial photo it’s a mess of angles, boxes and straight lines, like an etch-a-sketch doodle. The ranch divides naturally into two main parts, the river corridor and the uplands. The former is a long, relatively flat rectangle of lush, irrigated and cultivated soil. Smack in the middle of it is a stand of gnarled old cottonwood trees claimed by a pair of Great Horned Owls. Down by the river, the fences are so overgrown that cattle are restrained more by willows than wire.

The ranch is an odd piece of ground: Though pretty and secluded, it is bisected by a public road that accesses the Deer Lodge National Forest and therefore sees a lot of traffic. Hunters come in droves when the seasons are open. Locals drive up to cut posts and poles. Occasionally, a ragged hiker wanders out of the mountains. Some of these are traversing the spine of North America, walking from Canada to Mexico on the continental divide.

I’m walking too, following a barbed wire fence around the perimeter of section 27. The land is sharply creased, folded into a series of draws and ridges running north to south. From the Southeast corner of 27, I look west down the fence. On the farthest rises it looks perfect, like a pencil line drawn with a ruler. It slices across the contours of the land.

In the foreground, the fence is messier. Posts lean out of line. A slack top wire suggests a break somewhere. I drop into the first gully. The sparse grass that usually grows here is altogether gone where cattle trails parallel the fence. In the badly eroded bottom there is a three-foot gap between the fence and the ground. A cow could walk through and hardly scrape her back.

I snip barbed wire from the little coil I carry, weave one end through the fence from top to bottom, pull down hard and wrap the other end around a rock the size of a microwave. This fix, known as a deadman, won’t hold forever.

Struggling up the other side of the draw, my boots slip back almost as far as I can step forward. I sweat, stumble and pound staples where they are missing. As soon as it gains the top of the ridge, the fence plunges again.

All this up and down makes me want to cuss the land and the fence. That isn’t right, though, because this is good pasture, and the fence is decent for an artifact of the 1970’s. The problem is that it cuts straight across rough spots in the topography, maintaining a straight line when a deviation would be easier on the grass, the cattle and me.

Straight lines like the one I’m walking have been around for a long time. In 1785 congress signed off on the Land Ordinance Act, which included provisions for creating and implementing the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), a method of dividing land that promised to drape an enormous, imaginary sheet of graph paper across the rough topography of the American West.

Thanks to the PLSS, the Dry Cottonwood Creek Ranch and most everything else west of the Mississippi are divided into a grid of square mile sections originating from a line running through Clarendon, Arkansas. It’s an inflexible system, a senseless way of carving up land that ignores the unique wrinkles of a place like this.

The next gulch is deep. At the bottom, wires are broken. They lay snarled in the sand. I follow one, lifting it from the dirt, shaking the barbs apart and straightening out kinks. I twist loops in the broken ends and splice them together with a short piece nipped from my coil. I lose my grip on one end and it springs away, curling along itself like a snake striking in reverse. It scrapes across my forearm leaving a furrow that wells up with blood.

It’s just a little cut, but it gets me thinking: Thirty yards northeast, this draw is gentle and shallow. Fifty yards southwest, it’s nonexistent. There is no place worse than right here for a fence to cross. I blame the 1785 congress. I’m starting in on Clarendon, Arkansas when I notice the wool. The white fiber is matted together and wrapped around the wire in a series of small donuts. I know the culprit herd—I’ve chased them off the ranch before, herded them back to our neighbor’s grazed-out pastures with a mixture of annoyance and pity. As I drove them, the sheep stopped to graze whenever they could. They clipped off forage with hungry desperation.

This fence runs between our property and his for one mile. I pay special attention to the bottom wire as I walk, and by the end I think I’ve seen enough snagged wool to knit a sweater. I’ll have to do something about the sheep. Soon.

Week 3

"On Rivers and Ranching" is a blog by a ranch hand working on the Clark Fork Coalition's Cottonwood Creek Ranch to unite conservation and ranching practices in the middle of the nation's largest Superfund complex -- the upper Clark Fork River. Click here for more.

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