Cattle in the Sistine Chapel
It’s a finalist for one of the most beautiful places on the
planet.
Tiny Deer Lake, set in a tarn at 9,000 feet in Fresno County, is
a short walk from a jeep trail. Any place as spectacular deserves
to be earned with an arduous hike.
But Deer is just a short amble away from the car.
Looking down from one end of the lake, the patchwork fields of
San Joaquin Valley lies neatly arranged below. Ringed by granite
peaks, the upper end of the lake is fringed with a small beach,
backed by a meadow spangled with Indian paintbrush, shooting stars,
yarrow and a host of other wildflowers.
Cattle in the Sistine Chapel
It’s a finalist for one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
Tiny Deer Lake, set in a tarn at 9,000 feet in Fresno County, is a short walk from a jeep trail. Any place as spectacular deserves to be earned with an arduous hike.
But Deer is just a short amble away from the car.
Looking down from one end of the lake, the patchwork fields of San Joaquin Valley lies neatly arranged below. Ringed by granite peaks, the upper end of the lake is fringed with a small beach, backed by a meadow spangled with Indian paintbrush, shooting stars, yarrow and a host of other wildflowers.
Predictably enough, there’s a serpent in this paradise.
As we wrapped up a picnic there last week, a herd of cattle, led by a well-muscled black bull, ambled across the meadow headed for a drink of water.
We had already noticed that the meadow was pocked with hoof prints, its soft, sandy soil incapable of bearing the weight of cattle.
We’d also noticed that the water in this sparkling lake is stained the color of strong, black tea. Then my nephew noticed bubbles popping to the surface of the lake here and there.
The bubbles were almost certainly methane generated by decaying organic matter and much of that matter is likely to have been manure.
Deer Lake is in Sierra National Forest, a vast tract of wilderness, most of it unfenced.
National forests date to the time when people regarded the land as something to be used, rather than just passively enjoyed. The operating credo was “multiple use, sustained yield.” Thus, the forest is crisscrossed with logging roads. Hunters are welcome. People can obtain permits to cut firewood.
People can also obtain permits to graze cattle, paying a fraction of what they would for the same privilege on private lands.
The idea of driving cattle into the high country each spring, and rounding them up each fall is bound up with the history of the West.
While logging gets most of the ink, livestock grazing occurs on more federal public lands than any other commercial use. The 260 million acres of public lands devoted to grazing cover more than the area of Texas and California combined.
Sometimes that can be a good thing. Grazing applied intelligently can be a valuable tool for keeping habitats healthy, or even healing them.
But is grazing helping anything more than a rancher’s wallet when it’s permitted in alpine meadows at 8,000 feet?
The iconic conservationist John Muir first experienced the Sierra Nevada as a sheep herder. Watching the devastation wrought by his charges almost certainly changed Muir. He came to call sheep “hoofed locusts.”
The Sierra Club blames livestock grazing for contributing to the listing of 22 percent of federal threatened and endangered species.
The landscape in the high Sierra is so fragile that it cannot reasonably support continued grazing. It is time for the practice to end in the most sensitive parts of the great range.
The mountains are so fragile that the number of hikers permitted is limited in some areas. The state Department of Fish and Game discontinued stocking trout in backcountry lakes, not solely as a cost-cutting move, but out of fear that the trout may prey on native frogs.
What will it mean? It will mean that a handful of ranchers who benefit disproportionately from government-subsidized feeding programs will have to find another way to do business. Given that much cattle is raised without benefit of federal grazing permits for alpine meadows, it is unlikely to result in noticeably higher prices for consumers.
Grazing can play a valuable role in the right places – public and private. It’s not reasonable to push grazing out of national forests entirely. Nor is it reasonable to continue to allow it where it makes no sense.
