Cam Hewitt

Wood River Land Trust

I wasn’t entirely unprepared for the west. I’ve driven through it as a child, camped with my father in the dripping forests of the Pacific Northwest and in the barren grandeur of the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and in my early teens mountain biked the Colorado Rockies. Still, I couldn’t help but be awed by the mountains, the high eternal sage desert, and the sheer amount of space in Idaho. I got my first taste of it driving across the plains of Nebraska and Wyoming, but I rolled into my apartment in Hailey in the dead of night and so was largely ignorant of my surroundings until early the next morning. However, upon stepping onto my porch with the dawn of my first day and surveying the surrounding mountains, I quickly realized that this might well be the best place in the world.
From June until August of last summer, I interned for the Wood River Land Trust in the little town of Hailey, Idaho. Hailey is about ten miles down the Wood River Valley from Ketchum (which is home, oddly, to the likes of Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks, and John Kerry), and just up the valley from the even smaller town of Bellevue. An hour’s climb to the top of Della Mountain next to the house I shared on Willow St. provides the essential broad strokes of the landscape. Della itself is steep and covered in sage like all the mountains in the immediate vicinity of Hailey. From its summit, a look to the north reveals the snowcapped peaks of the Boulder, Pioneer, and White Cloud mountains. Behind these, rising in jagged spires, are the imposing Sawtooths, the namesake of the surrounding Sawtooth Natural Recreation Area. To the south, the sage mountains gradually diminish until they are subsumed by the high sage desert stretching out of sight to the Snake River and beyond. Directly below, seemingly at my feet, winds the Big Wood River, loosely surrounded by the sparse civilization of Hailey and Bellevue.
As an organization, the Wood River Land Trust is dedicated to the preservation and stewardship of land in the Wood River Valley, as well as several parcels across the rugged Trail Creek Pass on the banks of the neighboring Big Lost River and to the north along the swifter Salmon. Their vision is largely congruent with that of most of the residents of the valley; to preserve open space for the sake of people and wildlife alike. Indeed, a key tenet of their mission is to maintain traditional human land uses; hunting, fishing, hiking, etc. (even, in some cases, grazing and off-roading). This willingness to compromise and work with landowners and sportsmen on their own terms is essential in a state where even citizens whose families long ago packed up and moved to Boise pride themselves on the rugged independence of their ranching heritage. The isolated ranching lifestyle is so entrenched that many of the local ranchers still scornfully refer to East coast transplants as “from-aways” twenty or thirty years after their arrival in Idaho. I’m not going to lie, given that I couldn’t figure out a way to mount a gun rack in my Subaru, I at least tried to keep my Mass. license plates as dusty as possible so a casual observer might think the red lettering denoted California (which itself is only marginally more respectable than the East).
The internship itself consisted of a wide variety of tasks, from the mundane to the challenging. I was technically a stewardship intern which meant that I assisted Kate, the Stewardship Coordinator, in monitoring and maintaining he property which we either owned or had easements on. In practical terms, this entailed a lot of weeding, herbicide spraying (the voracious spread of noxious weeds is one of the biggest problems currently facing the west), and dismantling barbed wire fence to ensure the unobstructed passage of game animals. We also used a camera, compass, and GPS unit to establish maps and photopoints of these properties. This documentation is essential should questions ever arise regarding compliance with the easement or the management strategy. Several recent court cases brought by land trusts against non-compliant landowners have foundered due to inadequate documentation.
In addition to outdoor work, I also spent a good deal of time working with Matt, the other intern, to write up baseline documentation for a recently acquired piece of land in Bellevue. Finally, I was given the opportunity to work largely independently on trying to coalesce support among other Idaho land trusts for a badly needed piece of new tax legislation. In addition to all of these “official” responsibilities, I often found myself up on the roof with a bucket of paint or in a tree with a chainsaw trying to take down a stubbornly hanging branch (in retrospect it was a serious mistake to let my boss know that I had once spent a summer painting houses as all painting projects instantly fell to me).
My senior project, which I will be completing during spring semester, will focus on the rift between environmentalism and the “ranching lifestyle” that is so prevalent in the American west. On the surface, this divide is simple; ranchers/farmers feel that environmentalism is a threat to their way of life, perpetrated by an uncaring and intrusive government and by well-meaning idiots from back east. For their part, many environmentalists feel that ranching, particularly on public lands, is a fundamentally untenable enterprise, and a serious threat to an increasingly fragile environment. To an extent, this rift gets at the traditional political divide between liberals and conservatives, as well as a uniquely American brand of anti-government paranoia that is still alive and well in rural areas all over the country. In many ways what is referred to by its proponents as the “ranching lifestyle” is a crystallization of the rugged individualism that is a key facet of the American ethos as a whole (yet, paradoxically, ranching and farming are two of the most heavily subsidized industries in America). Yet, as the population steadily increases and environmental damage mounts, in is becoming apparent that this individualism must compromise. Hopefully, my project will expose the terms of this debate, as well as postulate some compromises between ranchers and environmentalists (or, at least, some workable strategies for environmentalists in the west).
Ultimately, my goals in heading to Idaho were three fold. First, I wanted to learn how citizens are able to effect positive environmental change, specifically regarding land conservation. Land is the most elemental of human resources, yet conservation efforts inevitably raise issues of freedom and private property that get at the heart of the American ethos (hark, is that an SIP in the making?). Secondly, I wanted to get a feel for the west, in anticipation of a probable migration there after I graduate. Third, I wanted to spend as much time in the mountains as possible.
I am happy to report that all of these goals were met. Everyone at the land trust went out of their way to ensure that I experienced all facets of conservation work, from field work to PR, to closed door strategy sessions and board meetings. For this and many other things I owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. As far as the other goals, I did indeed spend a good deal of time in the mountains on foot, bike, and jeep, and I will undoubtedly return to the west at some point after graduation. All in all, it was a fantastic summer, and I sincerely thank everyone at Conn who helped me make it out there.