I moved to Montana in 1992, the first time at least. In hindsight, I realize the norms that governed the West — specifically who claimed possession of place — were shifting in that last decade of the 20th century.
This shift has reshaped notions about access to public land where citizens can roam and hunt freely, as well as the ethics of fair chase hunting.
Before I made my move I lived in urban, or at least suburban, Southern California. My sense of the West was formed watching at a distance the previous decades of conflict shaped by environmental laws passed in the 1970s: the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts. I’d read about these battles for timber, livestock grazing, water rights and the diversion of trout streams for irrigation.
I knew of the West mostly through the words of writers like Edward Abbey, who taught me to be “displeased” at the condition of land overgrazed by cattle, or William Kahrl, who documented in his fine book “Water and Power,” William Mulholland’s diabolical scheme to steal the water of the Eastern Sierra’s Owens River.
Mulholland and his agents fooled landowners in the Owens Valley into believing those agents represented the Bureau of Reclamation, rather than the Los Angeles Water Department. The farmers thought they were selling to make way for a grand irrigation project to gin up agriculture in the remote valley.
But once the city owned the land and controlled the water rights that came attached, Los Angeles built an aqueduct and diverted the river south.
And so things stood for more than 50 years until a new battle emerged on a trickle of a stream meandering through a sagebrush plain to a dying desert sink.
That sink, in the rain shadow of the Sierra just east of Yosemite National Park, is Mono Lake, and it was also a victim of Mulholland’s scheme. The saline lake was the terminal basin one drainage north of the Owens watershed, and engineers cleverly figured they could wrangle the entire flow of Mono Lake’s main tributary, Rush Creek, and siphon it to the Owens.
Rush Creek linked the waters of June Lake Loop, a popular mountain fishing resort, and then, historically at least, it meandered to the lake.
The mid-1980s was an especially wet cycle in the eastern Sierra, however, and due to high flows, Rush Creek was allowed to resume its journey to Mono Lake for two years. That water carried brown and rainbow trout, which thrived and reproduced.
Dick Dahlgren, a cigar-chomping fly fisherman who lived in nearby Mammoth Lakes, heard rumor of these trout, and went fishing. He walked and fished the length of rewatered Rush Creek and described trout prowling the brackish water where creek and lake mingled, feasting on brine shrimp.
It turned out Rush Creek was a pretty fine trout stream. More importantly, while California law didn’t allow the curtailing of water rights to protect a saline desert sink, no matter its productivity as a waterfowl breeding ground, it did protect fisheries from water diversions.
Dahlgren and a persistent lawyer, Barrett McInerney, sued the renamed Department of Water and Power and won, undoing some of the damage Los Angeles had wreaked across the Eastern Sierra. Rush Creek was rewatered, permanently, saving trout and revitalizing Mono Lake. To the south, Water and Power was forced to rewater sections of the Owens River and is trying to mitigate the dust storms that blow off the now-dry lakebed at its terminus.
Mono Lake was an old-school extraction fight over use of a precious resource. I knew what those were about. I had to move to Montana to learn about the new battle: who gets to access those resources now that we’ve determined they are often more valuable left in place?
Next week: The battle for access on Mitchell Slough.
Rob Breeding’s website is www.mthookandbullet.com.