Utah Issues
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Volunteer with the Grand Canyon Trust and help us extend our reach and positive influence on the ground.
We need your help with gathering browse data, documenting grazing impacts, and conducting beaver habitat surveys, biological inventories, and springs assessments.
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The Tushar Allotments Collaboration
The Trust is now following up on results of an intensive, 2-year collaboration (April 2007 – April 2009), on two cattle allotments that have numerous resource problems. The Tushar Allotments Collaboration originated in 2007 when the Trust and six other conservation groups proposed it in lieu of litigating a decision regarding eight cattle term-grazing permits on the Fishlake National Forest.
The Collaboration, which is cosponsored by the Utah Farm Bureau and the Trust, includes 21 participants — permittees, conservation groups, Fishlake National Forest, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, a County commissioner — who jointly examined the two allotments during 2007 and 2008 and prepared recommendations in the April 2009 Tushar Grazing Allotments Final Report. We are examining beaver habitat in Pine Creek and in aspen communities, which are linked to the presence of many species. The Collaboration will meet in January 2010 and January 2011 to review progress on the April 2009 commitments.
Documenting issues on the two Tushar allotments
During summer 2009, the Trust:
- Helped the Forest Service build a sturdy fence around a large wetlands in one of the allotments.
- Helped the Forest Service build seven permanent, 16- by 16-foot range cages to track the recovery of mountain mahogany, sagebrush understory, riparian meadows, and cottonwood and aspen recruitment over multiple years and compare current livestock grazing management on both allotments.
- Intensively monitored riparian and other sites in the two allotments that had been monitored in 2008 to review first-year results of changed management.
We documented continuing problems that must be addressed:
- Refusal once again by the permittee of Ten Mile Allotment to add to and maintain the allotment’s northern boundary fence as required in his permit, once again allowing Ten Mile cattle to enter a closed allotment.
- Continued failure to meet forest riparian stubble height standards in a number of Pine Creek / Sulphurbeds creeks — in a pasture that was supposed to be rested in 2009–2010.
- Trespass of cattle into two exclosures that have been built too poorly to withstand cattle pressure.
- Continued degradation of a major spring seep in Ten Mile Allotment.
Click here to access the 22 Tushar Allotment reports prepared by the Trust in 2009.
Significance to other livestock allotments in southern Utah
The resource and livestock management problems we continue to study here are common to many other national forest allotments. Consequently, the information, relationships, and solutions generated by this process are proving to be helpful beyond the confines of these two allotments.
Your donations and membership dues make our research, monitoring, and restoration work in Utah possible.
