Elkhorns Cooperative Management Area

The Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program provides an excellent example of how an inter-agency collaboration can creatively and successfully coordinate science, establish its credibility, and use scientific data as a basis for decision-making. While the collaborative process was Federally mandated and involves a wide array of state, federal, tribal and non-governmental organizations, many of the challenges they faced defining scope, balancing power, and integrating science are characteristic of many inter-agency collaborations. The organizational structures developed for this program provide an innovative model for similar complex collaborations, while the factors contributing to the program’s success and the lessons learned offer important insight to an attempt of any scale to bring agencies together around the management of natural resources.

Origins and Scope

In.

Process History

He said that he definitely thinks solid support still exists at all levels but "It will be interesting to see where we go from here because we've got new players in those various roles" because he changed jobs, Merle Good at BLM retired, Grant Godbolt another ranger in the Jefferson Ranger District moved on, and the Beaverhead Lodge forest supervisor is also new. The people taking over are "new to the process… I think it will be a really good test to the model because it's one thing if you've got folks that established this model and make it work. It will be a good test now to see if the new folks that haven't had that commitment, so to speak, are able to come in and see the value of that model."

Fires

“We had one fire in the Elkhorns, on the west side, and it looked like it could really burn a lot and then for whatever reason, it kind of piddled out. It ended up about three thousand acres in all, which is good.”

Process History

He joined the Department In 1989 as the Landowner/Sportsman Relations Coordinator where he was “filling a staff as well as a line position where I was doing statewide work with landowner relations as well as doing local regional work, and I got involved with the Elkhorns through that…Prior to that I was involved as a citizen with a lot of the Elkhorn stuff because I live there.”

Process History

George left his position as Elkhorn Ranger on February 1, 2000 because he "had the opportunity to work in the Lewis and Clark Forest in a different position." He had been working in the Elkhorns since 1991.

Process History

"That original vision of managing the Elkhorns as a mountain range and working together has been solid from the start to the end."

Same primary partners involved, no other private landowners or agencies have gotten involved. They've toyed with county commissioners and other folks, and they've been invited to participate, but they haven't chosen to become primary partners because they work as volunteers and don't have the time "And when you get involved in some of the projects and the working agreement that we have it takes a lot of commitment in terms of time."

Accomplishments

In

Outcomes

"The main thing that we've accomplished in my mind is that we've established the working relationship between the BLM, Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the Forest Service in terms of working on projects together and truly managing the Elkhorns as a mountain range. To me, that's the biggest thing we've accomplished."

Individual projects include: "We've completed travel management, worked on some abandoned mine projects… reducing hazardous materials in some of our watershed restoration projects… a lot of management planning in terms of implementing the grazing program… we've got a fire plan in place that allows us to manage lightning-caused fires… all the agencies are working together on that… looking at treatment of noxious weeds together… doing our signing, both for travel management and location signs for recreation sites, those types of things are being done together."

Unexpected outcomes

"I was a little surprised that we were able to have the agencies get so comfortable working together. Specifically, I remember in the early '90s, FWP and the Forest Service weren't on the same page in the Elkhorns in terms of management, and that has completely turned around where we still debate how to do things, but we don't debate the overall goals and objectives of what we're doing. And I was really surprised that the agency and department were able to get back on the same page so quickly and stay so solid all the way through."

Landscape Analysis

“The whole impetus on this landscape analysis was to try to understand what processes were really important in the Elkhorns for maintaining a diversity of habitats, and what those historic conditions were as a basis for proposing management. Not to say we’re ever gonna go back to historic conditions. I mean, that was just a best guess and it’s a guidance, not an absolute. But in general, one thing we do know is we’ve lost a lot grassland just due to conifer encroachment and colonization of vegetation because we’ve put out fires for the last hundred years and we’ve grazed livestock very heavily at times in the history of that mountain range. And so, one of our primary emphases has been prescribed burning to make sure that we’ve got winter ranges that are productive and that we’ve got productive grasslands and that we can continue to support livestock grazing. Because one of the things we know is that if these ranches that surround this mountain range go belly up, we’re gonna have a lot of subdivision. And so, right we’ve got a lot of open space that support antelope and lots of other animals. If we lose that, we’ve lost a big part of what that mountain range is all about.”

Effects of fires

“In the Elkhorns it’s not so much this year’s fires as this year’s drought. In fact, my emphasis in the last few weeks has been to monitor grazing allotments to make sure that, in spite of the drought, we’re not gonna let them nuke it. They’re gonna get sent home probably a month early. And that’s gonna be a hardship on them. And we actually did have one guy sell his herd this year, and I don’t know if he’ll subdivide his ranch. He may. So we’re in tough straits in terms of that whole area in Montana right now. Beef’s not selling very high in the market, and none of these ranchers got the hay production that they usually do. So we’re hoping the rain falls from the sky here and we can try to maintain that open space and the whole ecosystem. Because we have seen areas in the Elkhorns where we’ve got this urban interface developed, and I tell you it just complicates things to the nth degree because all of a sudden you’ve got people who view this as their backyard, you’ve got high schoolers having keggers, you’ve got people dumping garbage. The people management aspect is much more complex than I really would have anticipated, but as soon as you get people developing right up against a public land boundary it’s very challenging.”

Accomplishments

“We’ve had some achievements and we’ve had some setbacks. In 1995, we had made a travel plan decision, and implementing that has been a real high priority for us. And the implementation of that has included actually reclamation of roads that were closed administratively as a result of that decision. And we have a positive signing strategy and its consistent across all federal lands in the mountain range. And so it restricts vehicle traffic to designated routes, and so anything that’s not designated open is closed. But we were having a tough time enforcing that because people are so used to negative signs. And so we decided, well the thing we really want to do is return some of those roads back into productive habitats and so that’s been a real focus for the last couple of years, is road reclamation.”

“Another big focus for us has been abandoned mine reclamation, and we’ve worked collectively with the state of Montana and BLM and accomplished a couple of mine projects. Like, say the mine had originally been on a patented mine claim but a flood event had washed tailings downstream so you ended up with mine wastes on a variety of jurisdictions. And that was a challenge for us because the lawyers in the Department of Agriculture don’t like it when you mix wastes in a repository. It’s like, hey, it all came from the same place. So we’ve had our work cut out for us there just getting that through the system. Being able to work jointly and put all the mining wastes in one repository and that kind of thing. But we’ve done a number of those big mine reclamation projects. Which is a good feeling, you know. You get the hazardous mine waste put in a safe place and turn the area into some sort of productive vegetation.”

“We have had three different bighorn sheep transplants, the latest one just this last winter. So we have a total of about a hundred sheep back in the Elkhorn Mountains and they’re doing well. They’ve pretty much expanded their distribution into several different little pods, and from what we can tell the lamb crop is consistent. So we’re real happy with that. And we’ve been doing some burning on sheep winter range to try and enhance their use of public lands and make sure they’re not down on private lands, that kind of things. So we’ve done about a thousand acres of burning in relation to that.”

Setbacks

“The other big project that we had going on in 1996 was that we updated the Deerlodge and Helena Forest plans for the Elkhorn Management Unit and had what I think is probably the best example of really concrete goals, objectives, standards and guidelines that were unique to the Elkhorn Mountains. That project was litigated by a couple of environmental groups whose argument was that because we had specific objectives for vegetation, that we were trying to go from a wildlife emphasis to more of a vegetation extraction emphasis. Which, you know, quite honestly was not the case. We were trying to realistically figure out is, if you’re trying to manage this for wildlife and you want a diverse array of wildlife species and habitats, you know, what kinds of things do you need to be doing? How much grasslands have we lost because of fire suppression? And how dense are our conifer stands as a result of fire suppression and cattle grazing and all the man-influenced things that we’ve done in the last hundred years that have resulted in the habitats that we have out there right now?”

“Anyway, that case was heard in a district court in Missoula and the judge made a decision that we had violated NEPA and NFMA (?) and that it was a significant change so we had to go back and do an EIS. And we appealed that decision to the 9th circuit, and they had also brought in a specific project – it was a ponderosa pine thinning and underburning project – and kind of tied those two together, like ‘Okay, here’s an example, judge. They’re just going in and using commercial timber harvest in a wildlife management unit.’ And so when we appealed, the Department of Agriculture did not want to continue with the appeal because they felt like if we lost in 9th circuit, it would have widespread ramifications. And they just felt like, ‘Well the Elkhorns aren’t that important, we’re not gonna pursue this.’ So, at that point we had a mediator and went through various phases of trying to come up with a settlement. The settlement ultimately – and we just got this like last week – we paid a certain amount of lawyer fees for these environmental groups and what we got was the ability to go back and look at look at that ponderosa pine project. So, we essentially lost that forest plan update and we’re now back under the old forest plan, which from my perspective is really limiting because it deals strictly with big game habitats and doesn’t offer a lot in the way of fish or aquatic habitats or any other species besides the big game. So, that’s on my desk that we need to think seriously about is how do we deal with that? If we want to wait until we have to revise our forest plans anyway, or do we want to try to re-analyze and do an EIS. So that’s somewhat of a dilemma.”

“So, while we were merrily marching along we had done three landscape implementation areas and as a result of those came up with project priorities in each of those landscapes. And so we had Crowcrit(?) drainage, which we’ve been doing a bunch of prescribed burning and range and improvements, and that was in 1994. And then in 1996 we did the north Elkhorns, range decisions and the vegetation project, which again the vegetation was kind of pulled into the lawsuit but we have been implementing the range improvements. And then in 1998, the south Elkhorns. So that would have completed our mountain range-wide look at range and vegetation, and that one, because it was completed under the direction of the new forest plan, we had to drop it. So this year, we’re going to try to figure out how we also deal with the decisions that we’d like to make regarding range management on the south end of the Elkhorn Mountains.”

“The other really significant project that we’ve undertaken is a west slope cutthroat trout restoration project. And we’ve been working with Fish, Wildlife and Parks to develop our goals and objectives for restoring native cutthroat trout in the Elkhorn Mountains. We had six small remnant populations left, and we want to expand the distribution from about seven miles of occupied habitat to about seventy. We went after some grants and we got some grants and we have hired a full-time program manager – a fisheries biologist – for that project, and he sits in our office. He is a Fish, Wildlife and Parks employee, and its 50-50 funded between Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Forest Service.” Hired in June.