The Fourth Week - Day Eighteen: ¿Como se dice moooooooooo en español?
6/27/11:
This morning started off with a bang: a meeting!
Neil, wanting to give Yelena and me a sense of the other part of his job, brought us along to a Travel Management Rule (TMR) meeting on the Tusayan Ranger District. TMR was the latest controversy; in an attempt to encourage regrowth and preservation, certain cross country roads through the KNF were to be closed. Criticized by both environmentalists advocating even greater measures and by citizens worried they wouldn’t be able to collect firewood as they had for years, TMR represented the latest tensions between the government and the public. It was Neil and his fellow KNF experts that were saddled with the responsibility of mediating.
The purpose of the meeting was to hear expert opinions about which areas of the KNF should be opened to cross country travel and which areas (being archaeologically-, biologically- or otherwise sensitive) should be closed. The main concern was the damage that would be done by vehicles as the public went about collecting dead and downed wood. The actual collection of this wood was largely positive; it removed an excess of fuels that made wildfires so uncontrollable. However, the public often made redundant roads or damaged the KNF in this process. Justifying their opinions by SHPO (the State Historic Preservation Office), Neil and the other experts helped protect the KNF by allowing travel in some places and prohibiting it in others.
As a reward for being meeting-bound (a strange shift after days and days outside!), Neil took Yelena and I on a mini-field trip in the Tusayan District. We stopped at the Moqui Stage Station, now nothing more than an old cistern, where a historic stage coach line from Flagstaff brought tourists to the Grand Canyon from 1892 to 1901. As we drove, Neil pointed out the Arizona Trail, which leads from Utah to Mexico and winds its way through parts of the KNF. The crème de la crème, however, came in the form of a two-thousand year old rock art site. Under the low hanging lip of a jutting rock roof, the stone was lined with pictographs.
For the first time, I was struck by the immensity and diversity of this forest. Made up of 1.6 million acres, the KNF surrounds the Grand Canyon; north of the Canyon is the North Kaibab (where I’ve never been!), and south of it is the South Kaibab, divided into the Tusayan and Williams Districts. Even Neil, who’s been here for twenty-one years, finds places in the KNF that he has never seen before.
During this jaunt, we also (sigh) did some work: surveying various tanks in the area. Tanks are sources of water that ranchers use for their cattle. The KNF, being public land, allows ranchers to raise their animals here for a very low cost. While out and about in the KNF, it is not uncommon to see wandering herds of cows tromping through fields and groves of ponderosa pines, driven forth by their own whims.
We surveyed three tanks (Bloody Tank, Sagebrush Tank, Peterson Tank) and cattle made their presence known at each. The lumbering beasts were oppressively apparent at Petersen Tank, our final survey. Milling about in the dry burnt dirt and kicking up orange dust, they rolled wide eyes at us, shying away from our approaching transect. The herd eventually broke out into a shuffling run, a large chunk veering towards me. I, of course, started mooing like a mad fool at them. Throwing myself fully into the lowing, it took me a good couple of minutes to realize that I wasn’t actually as far away from Yelena or Neil as I’d first judged, and that yes, they could probably both hear me.
Before embarrassment had the chance to cripple me, a pickup rolled onto the scene and Neil strolled over to greet two Latino ranch hands. By the time I circled around to the truck (I was furthest away on the transect), the two men were pulling away. Neil said they’d spoken only broken English, and I lamented the fact that I hadn’t gotten to speak any Spanish with them.
Instead, I had to settle for the inarticulate language of the lovely, lumbering, lowing cows.
Photos: 1. Yelena and me at the Moqui Stage Station cistern 2. Two-thousand year old pictographs 3. Cows and the KNF
No comments:
Post a Comment