By Brandon Dabling

It's impossible to comprehend this kind of vastness. Sitting on top of a ridge, forming one side of the bowl, the land runs on for miles, interchanging thick green grass and dirty sage for beaten trees and dying cheat grass. This is the type of vastness that's only limited by the human eye or an interrupting mountain in the neighboring county.

Eighteen miles out of Beaver, Utah, and a few more from what most would consider a road, this is a place few come and even fewer understand. But the few who do understand it, understand it intimately.

Local rancher Pete Yardley climbs back in his dirt- layered 2001 Dodge Ram 2500. The truck looks like it was once red, but it's getting hard to tell. His 12-year-old son Carter pushes some wire across the bench and slides up next to him, one leg on each side of the hump. This is their work truck.

"You better give me room to shift," Yardley said, gently sliding his son's leg to the right.

Yardley's friend and Beaver County Commissioner Chad Johnson puts out his cigarette, lowers his head and crawls in the back of the truck.

It's been more than a year since Yardley's ranch was hit by the Milford Flat Fire, burning much of it and causing the BLM to place even more of it off-limits for this year's grazing. When it comes to his land and the fire's impact, he doesn't speak in acres or square miles. He speaks in valleys and horizons - head of cattle and how much time it takes to gather them in the fall.

Last year Yardley was running 500 head of cattle on this land from May 1 to Oct. 15. This year, he'll be lucky to do 200 for two-thirds of that time.

The truck rolls up to another patch of green pasture running along the mountainside with grass more than a foot tall.

"See all this land?" Yardley asked. "This was all hit by the fire - the fire of 1996. We still can't use it."

He looks with a "can you believe that smile," and turns his eyes back to the road. When it came to allocating grazing land this year, he said, the BLM simply wrote-off much of the area as unusable, regardless of the status of the individual parcels.

"The thing is, I can guarantee you that not one BLM guy lost his job over this fire," he said. "But they have no problem telling us to stay home [and not work]."

Between Yardley, his cousin Floyd and another local rancher, Clark Bradshaw, 160 of 1,100 cattle were killed in the Milford Flat Fire and another 5 percent were severely burned.

The ranchers had just finished grazing on the first of four rotations when the fire wiped out the three remaining pastures, leaving the first untouched and forcing the ranchers to put all 1,100 cattle on a small piece of land, a fraction of the normal grazing area - but the land yielded and survived.

"You have a lot of government men who have never been on the land," he said picking up his thought. "They're dictating how to run the land and they ain't ever stepped on it. We're all the third or fourth generation here. We ain't going to ruin the land.

"We're leaving this for our kids," he said as he smiles and places his thick hand on his son's neck. Carter smiles, tugs at his hat and looks away.

Without land for grazing, Yardley and the other ranchers were forced to freight out their cattle and pay to have them fed and taken care of.

"We all sold so much of the cattle during the winter because we didn't have anywhere to go," he said. "We eliminated 10 percent [of our cattle] during the winter, because we didn't have any other choice."

It's the fees that are killing them. Bradshaw is paying $18-20 a head per month for his 300 cattle that he freighted 260 miles to Evanston at $3,200 a load. He's already sold 50 and is now looking to sell 50 more.

For the cattle staying in the area, the charges are just as bad. Hay is at $200 a ton, up 70 percent from previous years. At this point, there isn't a bale within 500 miles of Southern Utah, Yardley said. Most of it is coming in from Montana, or anywhere else they can get their hands on it.

"Basically, when you put a pencil to it, we're doing it [ranching] for free," he said. "We just can't afford to get out. Because once you get out, you don't get back in."

Fire's Economic Toll

While the fire was devastating to ranching, Beaver County Economic Development Director Robert G. Adams is quick to point out that the fire's overall effects were limited and, in the long term, a benefit to the community. He doesn't see the fire as giving the county any type of economic setback, temporary or permanent.

"Fire's not always a tragedy," Adams said. "Yes, three people died and a lot of cattle, and that's not acceptable. But five years from now, when these ranchers have less cheat grass and more robust vegetation, I'm sure they'll see the fire as a blessing."

It's the meantime that is the struggle.

While hurting ranching, the fire expedited the long in the works project of upgrading the county's electrical poles, finally getting power to some of the area's pig farms. With the old poles destroyed by the fire, the power company had little choice but to make the upgrade.

"We'd been trying to get Rocky Mountain out here for a long time now," Adams said. "But as soon as that fire hit, they were right out here."

Pete Yardley shifts the truck back into four-wheel drive. The road is steep and rocky and the middle is washed out. The truck starts up the side of the road, nearly climbing the hill sideways. There aren't any breaks between bumps now. Dust is flying in through the rolled-down windows. Carter raises his hands to block a wire sliding towards him off the dashboard.

"When are you going to fix these roads for us out here?" Yardley asked, looking to the county commissioner, Chad Johnson in the back seat.

"I told you, we're working on it," Johnson answered. "Besides, this one isn't even ours. It's a state road."

Yardley takes the truck to the top of the hill and stops on level ground.

"You see that black mud up there?" he asked, pointing to his left. "That used to be a pond. It took me a few months to find that after the fire."

All in all, Yardley has about 23 ponds to provide drinking water for his cattle. After the fire, he brought in a hydraulic pump to clean out the few he could, but even those are still filled with black ash from the fire.

"We clean them out, but they just fill right back up, and it ain't cheap to clean these things. About $5,000 a piece," he said.

23 x 5,000 = $115,000

He gives a half-smile and rolls his eyes. He's seen this math before.

The government doesn't help the ranchers clean the ponds or redirect water to the area, even though the water helps keep the wildlife alive. The financial burden rests solely on the ranchers' shoulders.

Around the corner he points up on the hillside.

"All that purple up there," Yardley said. "That's dead cheat grass. Two weeks ago, the cows would've gone crazy over that. Now they wouldn't touch it. It's just a fire hazard. It's going to have to burn at some time."

He shows a few more areas and talks about entire areas of dead grass ready for another disaster.

"This area will burn again."

County Commissioner Johnson leans forward over the front row of seats.

"The problem is that they [the BLM] have a process for when the land is bad, but they don't have a plan for when it's good."

And without a plan for when the land is good, the land becomes bad and it becomes bad fast. The cause of most fires isn't because it has been too dry, but that the area has had a wet spring, and the cattle weren't allowed to eat the grass before it died.

That was the case last year.

"That's the problem with the BLM," Yardley said. "It all comes out of a book. It doesn't matter what's on the ground. You have all these people on the east coast who went to college and they read it in a book."

The Yardleys and Johnson pull up to one last stop, overlooking the north end of the ranch. The mountains straight ahead block the view of Milford on the other side. To the north, the ranch stretches to the Beaver-Millard county line, where another rancher's land picks up. In all directions, the land keeps going -- thick, green and untouched and off-limits.

Yardley and Johnson agreed that the ranchers could use most of the land if the BLM could find a way to be more responsive to the land.

"We realize there is a place for government," Johnson said. "It's public ground and we don't argue that. I guess where we differ is in what is the best use and over-management [of the land]." He pauses for a moment. "I don't want to come down too hard on the agency, but these guys [the ranchers] have been on the land for 140 years. We need to develop a dialogue where someone from the BLM comes to the land and says 'Yeah, you guys can use this.'"

BLM agents assessed the land's usability for this year and agreed that a lot of it could be used, but they ultimately didn't have the final authority to determine what land could be used. In the end, the report didn't change the bureau's final decision about what land was available to the ranchers and when the cattle could start grazing. Yardley said he believes that, once again, it came down to red-tape in the agency.

"We've had some really good BLM guys and some good rangers," Yardley said. "They know what's right, but they have to deal with the policy."

Yardley turns the truck around and begins heading home. He jokes that his wife will never let him come home with his truck this dirty. Carter folds his arms tightly against his body in the front seat. He quickly reaches up and turns off the air-conditioning.

"You know I only got two settings in this truck: high and off," Yardley said. "And you know how I like it." He puts his hand out and turns it back on.

After only a couple minutes, Carter makes another quick move and switches it back to off. He can't take it.

"Fine," Yardley said, smiling down at his son. "I'll let you warm up for a bit."

Copyright Brigham Young University 2 Jul 2008