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Sharps Fire –A Rancher Surveys the Aftermath
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Wednesday, September 26, 2018
 

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

A wall of dirt blew down the hillside spilling over a rock cliff like a waterfall and ricocheting onto the ground below into a cloud. It obscured our sight as Rancher John Peavey and I bounced along Muldoon Canyon Road in his dusty black GMC pickup.

A month earlier the owner of the Flat Top Ranch had had his vision obscured on the same road by the thick smoke that hung in the air as the Sharps Fire ravaged 101 square miles of sagebrush, bunchgrass, aspen and Douglas fir.

“We really need a rain, a nice gentle rain, now to keep the topsoil from blowing away,” he said. “Since the fire, we’ve had just enough rain to turn the windshield wipers on.”

The last time I had seen John Peavey and his wife Diane on this road was July 30--the morning after the fire started. They had just driven through flames on both sides of the road enroute to Bellevue.

They knew that the fast-moving fire, which had exploded to 27,000 acres overnight, was decimating land that their sheep and cattle grazed. They did not know whether they would lose their ranch and their L-shaped home that had been pieced together with three cabins built in 1870 at the old mining site of Muldoon.

Now, John and I were heading out the other direction to check out areas that he had not visited since the fire.

We passed the lush green EE-DA-HO Ranch where cattle were now grazing land that firefighters had camped on during the fire. We passed Martin Canyon, where John’s livestock had been forced out after someone shooting an explosive target started a fire there in 2017.

As we climbed the winding dirt road six miles east of Bellevue, we saw the first evidence of the Sharps Fire on a mountain slope along a road leading to Bell Mountain. A swath of red fire retardant streaked the hillside above darkened soot.

Beyond that was a black lunarscape.

“I think this is where the fire started,” John said of the fire, which had been started by a Bellevue man shooting an exploding target. “I saw a moose two or three days after it started and it was all black. I wondered if it had got caught in the flames, then I realized he’d just been rolling around in the soot.”

John and his wife Diane had been headed from their ranch to Bellevue to do some grocery shopping when they saw a column of smoke rising from Sharps Canyon. It was not very high yet, but it was angry, John recounted.

They drove through flames as firefighters began to mount an aerial attack. They would dump 100,000 gallons of retardant and water via an air tanker, a couple single engine air tankers and two helicopters that first day, but they were unable to stop the fire.

As soon as they reached cell phone coverage, John phoned his son Tom. Then the couple returned to the ranch via the highway going through Carey since the sheriff had closed Muldoon Canyon Road by then.

Tom and a ranch hand quickly grabbed a couple horses and rode up through the rugged High 5 canyon shouting “Whoop, whoop” as they searched for cattle. But they were nowhere to be seen, as the fire crested the hill above Cold Springs Canyon and began racing downhill to cross the Little Wood Creek.

Just as it was beginning to get dark, Tom emerged through the smoke, taking the 200 cattle through land already blackened by fire with him to a meadow ringed with beaver dams. Others escorted one band of a thousand sheep to the backwash of the Little Wood River Reservoir and another band to lush green meadows that they were confident wouldn’t burn.

Jon and Diane were mesmerized by fire racing down ridgelines.

“We sat at the reservoir watching two airplanes scooping water out of the Little Wood Reservoir. It took them seven minutes to make the circle between the time they picked up water and dumped it,” John recalled.

The couple was at the Cold Springs corral John’s father had built in the 1940s when what John called “incredible flames” rushed towards them.

“I thought, ‘This is it. There’s no escape. We’re going to die,’” recounted Diane.

The next morning the Peavey family was up by 6 on the advice of firefighters who told them, “Whatever you do, do between 5 and 9 before the wind comes up.”

The cows Tom had brought to safety the night before had not stayed put and John and Diane went to find them, bringing them back across scorched land to green turf.

“We could’ve lost a hundred of them,” John said.

Other members of the family arranged for four trucks capable of carrying 250 sheep each and they sent the sheep packing to a friend’s grazing range near Soda Springs. Still others mowed ranch pasturelands and began sprinkling what they could.

John shuddered as the wind strafed his face.

“It’s always windy out here,” he said. “The sun bakes south-facing slopes and creates an updraft and the wind follows.  Imagine what wind like this would do to a fire. They don’t even try to fight fire in the middle of the day out here.”

As we journeyed down the road, we noticed that the fire had created circles of black on some of the hillsides, almost as if someone had cast a big net over the area with the land not covered by the netting getting scorched.

Patches of straw-like bluebunch wheatgrass appeared amidst blackened soil in some places. Sagebrush was burnt to the nubbin, which John noted will pose a problem for the many sage grouse that they had protected with a 1,114-acre conservation easement with the Nature Conservancy.

“We have six sage hens in our yard in Indian Creek, which is surrounded by sagebrush,” said John. “It started with one three years ago, then grew to three. Now, six.”

As we rounded the corner, we were confronted with yet more devastation to a forested area that had long been a favorite rest stop for sheep herders and other travelers. The fire had claimed what John referred to as “the old patriarch tree,” a huge Douglas fir tree that had witnessed the comings and goings of ranchers and miners before John was even born 85 years earlier.

But John also spotted something else—foot-tall green shoots coming up amidst burnt aspen and blackened willows that now resembled deer antlers lining the road.

“That’s kind of exciting,” said John, who earned a civil engineering degree from Northwestern University. “The roots of the burnt aspen are still alive, and new growth is coming off those roots.”

He paused, “I love this drive, no matter what shape. I love the land.”

John Peavey’s grandfather John W. Thomas was a banker who went on to become a U.S. Senator. He  bought several homestead sheep operations and cobbled them together to create the Flat Top Ranch in the 1920s. And John spent summers on the ranch as a boy before taking over the ranch in 1961.

“My grandfather had First Security banks in Jerome, Gooding, Shoshone…” John recounted. “He loaned a lot of money to ranchers and he appreciated the sheep ranchers because they could pay their loans off quicker and easier than the ones that ran cattle.

“I love this land. I love looking out over it in early summer when there’s still snow on the Pioneer Mountains,” added John, whose conservation easement was designed to ensure the valley would look like it did a hundred years from now.

Past a narrow road that used to be Muldoon Canyon Road, John asked me to look over the side to see if I could spot a wash machine and hot water heater. Sure enough, they were there, covered with soot.

John’s mother Mary Thomas Peavey Brooks, who once oversaw the U.S. Mint, had had a new wash machine and hot water heater delivered to the ranch decades, ago, he told me. The deliveryman took the old ones away but dumped them on his way back to Bellevue.

Without chokecherries and willows sucking up the water in Cold Springs Creek, John speculated, the creek will have enough water to connect all the way down to the Little Wood River this year.

 “And it never does that,” he said. “But there’s a lot of beaver in this canyon. They’re going to have a tough time this year.”

We spotted a big landmark rock nicknamed Blackface because of the black appearance it takes on in the afternoon. Peavey stopped at the sheep corral where new poles replaced those burned in the fire.

 One cow had been in the corral when the fire broke out and John had a dickens of a time coaxing it out. He was just about to leave it as flames approached the road when the cow clambered in the back of the truck.

“We got out just as the flames came in,” he said. “I guess maybe she figured we were offering her a better deal.

“I had so much adrenaline going that I didn’t experience fear as much as indignation,” he added. “Just a sick feeling as I watched the fire consume things. This ranch--this is what it’s all about.”

We turned onto the road leading along the Little Wood River where the fire had singed many of the trees. Fire had toasted the land on the opposite side of the road, with only rocky cliffs stopping its advance.

Two horses, probably owned by hunters camping out along the creek, stood in the middle of the scorched earth, nothing to nibble on.

John waited as an oncoming truck pulled over on the narrow road.

“I heard you had a wolf up there last night,” he said as he recognized the driver. “We pulled our lambs off north of here because we lost 10 in one night. I heard the wolves went to work on Brian Bean’s, afterwards.”

Pleasantries finished, we turned into High 5 canyon, which John speculates may have been named for a  card game. What used to be a popular camping area was now a waste land so monochromatic I found myself wishing someone could take a couple crayons to it.

“That used to be the prettiest little stream through there,” he said nodding towards the left.

We bounced up a road with a steep drop-off on one side that the Peaveys had built for a sheep camp after World War II.

“You just put your blade down and move dirt to the outside,” John noted.

Water bars dug into the road had kept rain and snowmelt from creating damaging gullies. But we had to stop to remove boulders that had been dislodged in the fire, rolling onto the road.

In the distance we could see orange aspen amidst green firs on Bell Mountain. In the creek drainage below, dead brown pines stood next to green ones that had escaped the fire.

“They managed to save some of those trees,” John said. “I’m really delighted it isn’t a total loss out here. It didn’t do as much damage up here as I had thought.”

We followed a horseshoe curve in the road and continued on the narrow cooked road, which didn’t look like it had been driven much. The pickup clambered over charred logs and turned precariously on its side as John navigated a narrow uphill stretch where snowmelt had carved a deep gorge in the road.

“Race car drivers don’t have anything on you,” I said.

“Don’t ever buy a used pickup from a sheep rancher,” he replied, as burnt aspen branches scratched the side of his pickup, even prompting him to lean my way as they poked through the open window.

 “We quit using this road because the trees had overgrown it,” he added. “We’re going to have to bring a caterpillar up here and smooth it out.”

The smell of charred wood fills our nostrils as we zigzagged uphill. The sun-bleached vertebrae of an animal lay on the darkened earth—the first evidence of an animal killed by the fire.

“I think these up-slopes burned pretty hot. But even here we have some aspen shoots coming up,” John noted.

He turned the pick-up around in the first wide flat spot we’d encountered as he came face to face with a curve too difficult to navigate. And we retreated the way we’d come.

Back near Little Wood River he showed me where he and Diane had stood waiting for Tom until the smoke became so thick they could barely see the glow of the fire.

“We decided to get out of there and it’s good that we did. We didn’t think it would burn, but it did,” he said.

On the way out John got out of the pickup and opened a gate in case any livestock were still in the uplands and needed to get out. By now the wind was blowing so hard that it was all we could do to stay on our feet.

Mini-dust tornados sandblasted our face, twirling across the ground, as we ran to get back in.

A little further down the road we spotted a tractor seeder that John surmised was brought in by the BLM to seed the flat area. He walked through what resembled chocolate-colored talcum powder covering the rocks. He raised the lid on the seeder holder, but there were no seed inside.

The BLM and other federal agencies will help plant a mix of forbs, flowers, bluebunch wheatgrass and other native grasses through aerial seeding and drill seeding, he told me. They also plan to plant sagebrush and do what they can to control the spread of noxious weeds.

Past the tractor, we turned onto the Flat Top Ranch, marked by a quarter-inch steel sign that John told me “shoots back” bullets fired at it by target shooters. Inside the fence are 4,000 acres of meadow  used for grazing and hay cutting.

The meadow will be more important than ever in the next three years as the Peaveys will be unable to run sheep and cattle in many of their traditional grazing areas on the 23,000 acres of private and public land they use, Peavey said.

“We’ll probably be able to find places for the sheep,” said John, who takes one of his bands north through Porcupine and Cove Creek areas, which are also important migration routes for pronghorn antelope, mule deer and elk. The sheep head into Hyndman Basin, coming out on the Ketchum side.

 “We don’t have every acre spoken for so that gives us some flexibility,” he added.

John said the schedule his livestock follow for grazing the land should actually help the land recover.

His cattle spend the winter grazing on the Kimama desert north of Rupert, then walk four to five miles a day north to their spring range west of Craters of the Moon National Park before heading onto the ranch in mid-summer. The sheep spend winters grazing near Bakersfield, Calif., and Wells, Nev., returning to Idaho in early April and doing their own march north so they don’t have to begin grazing the area around Flat Top Ranch until mid or late June.

There, he said, they graze perennials in August, creating a protected place for seeds in their hoof prints. And the seeds are then nurtured by fall rains and winter snow. The plants the livestock graze are better able to withstand fire than tall ungrazed plants, he added.

We drove past a field of dry grass—the first to dry up after the water recedes in early summer. It would have burned had fire reached it, Peavey said. Just beyond it was a green alfalfa field full of contented Black Angus.

When the Flat Top was ordered to evacuate, John and Diane evacuated to their winter home in Indian Creek. They were evacuated from it as the fire pushed north.

“We were afraid the fire would circle around to the east and come back at the ranch from that direction,” John said. “It got close to Muldoon and our friend’s ranch there. But then it moved north into the Cove Creek and Porcupine Creek areas.”

John has heard all the talk from valley residents who are indignant that the penalty for starting the fire is a simple misdemeanor. Some have suggested the man who started the fire should be indentured to the Flat Top Ranch.

“The best idea I’ve heard is making him fight fires for a year,” he said. “But fire is part of the landscape. And the grass will come back—it’ll just take two to three years of no grazing. This country will be pretty again. And it’ll be interesting to watch it recover.”

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