Page 6C
OUTSIDE
East Oregonian
Saturday, October 13, 2018
‘Ag is what has paid me back for the efforts I put forth — if it is a passion
for someone else, I want to help create a return for that passion.’
— Woody Wolfe, a landowner who’s using a hunting raffle to fund a scholarship for an Oregon State University agriculture major from Wallowa County
Eastern Oregon hunt raffle to benefit OSU ag scholarship
By KATY NESBITT
For EO Media Group
A conservation ease-
ment in the heart of Wal-
lowa County farmland is
being managed to grow
large white tail buck deer
for big game hunting — and
philanthropy.
Landowner
Woody
Wolfe said he’s managed
the river bottom to grow big
white tail bucks for several
years and with a handful of
Land Owner Preference elk,
buck and doe tags issued
through Oregon Depart-
ment of Fish and Wildlife,
he has a few tags to share.
“In 2016 the largest
white tail buck in the state
was taken off my property
by a neighbor,” Wolfe said.
At the time, Wolfe said,
the buck ranked fifth in
the Oregon black powder
record book.
Chad Garrett has guided
hunts on the Wolfe Ranch
for several years and is
well familiar with the Wal-
lowa mid-valley land with
views of the surrounding
mountains.
“Woody has a lot of tro-
phy game on his place,”
Garrett said.
As he’s become known
around the county, Garrett
said he’s been asked to help
local clubs and nonprofits
raise money through hunt
raffles, allowable under
Oregon state gaming laws.
When
Wolfe
was
approached by Wallowa
County Center for Wellness
for a donation he looked
for advice from staff at
The Nature Conservancy’s
Zumwalt Prairie Preserve
that offers raffle hunt oppor-
tunities to local nonprofits.
Then he turned to Garrett
for help.
With a website and a
PayPal account 100 tickets
were sold at $100 apiece in
six days. Garrett was paid
for his effort, Wolfe said,
and $8,500 went to the
EO Media Group File
Woody Wolfe is using a hunting raffle of Land Own-
er Preference tags to fund a scholarship for an Oregon
State University agriculture major from Wallowa County.
Center.
According to Garrett, the
winner of that raffle was a
man looking to kill his first
white tail buck to qualify
for the Super Slam of North
American Big Game — the
legal taking of all 29 of the
traditionally
recognized
species of big game animals
native to North America.
Wolfe said the experi-
ence got him thinking. With
such a rapid response to the
first raffle, what other wor-
thy causes could he support
by raffling some of his Land
Owner Preference tags?
“If I could raise that
money that with one tag or
two, I thought about what
cause do I feel is the most
valuable to me?” Wolfe
said.
The answer was a schol-
arship for a Wallowa County
high school graduate pursu-
ing a degree in agriculture at
Oregon State University. As
a sixth-generation Wallowa
County farmer, agriculture
is close to Wolfe’s heart.
“I think an education
can facilitate people who
want to go into agriculture,
whether in ag service or pro-
duction,” Wolfe said. “Ag is
what has paid me back for
the efforts I put forth — if
it is a passion for someone
else, I want to help create a
return for that passion.”
Again Wolfe turned to
Garrett for help. He set
up a website and a Pay-
Pal account to facilitate raf-
fle hunts and serves as the
guide. After Garrett’s time,
Wolfe said each scholar-
ship award will be around
$7,500.
This year two raffles are
offered to raise money for
the scholarship. Garrett said
100 tickets are available for
$100 apiece for each hunt.
The winner of each of the
two raffles will receive a
three-day guided hunt and
lodging.
Garrett said the first
scholarship will be awarded
in 2019, but the money will
not be available until the
winner’s junior year, when
he or she declares a major.
The winner must also have
maintained a 3.0 grade-
point average those first two
years of college to claim the
scholarship.
Tickets are available
at www.biggamerafflehu-
nts.com through Jan. 1.
The raffle drawing will
be held Jan. 10. For more
information call Garrett at
503-367-0207.
Amber Baesler/Jackson Hole News & Guide via AP
In this Saturday, Sept. 22, 2018 photo, volunteer Oliver
Schofield digs up a temporary trail near the Taggart
Lake trailhead in Grand Teton National Park, Wyo. After
the “decompaction” the park’s vegetation crew will re-
seed it with grass and other native plant species.
USDA ARS
Fire in an ungrazed sagebrush community.
Using grazing as wildfire tool
By CODY COTTIER
Jackson Hole News And
Guide
Kirk Davies finds that
grazing can reduce fire risk
By BRAD CARLSON
EO Media Group
Kirk Davies and his fellow range-
land scientists in southeastern Oregon
for years produced studies showing
earlier grazing reduces future fire risk
while benefiting native plants.
Now they are working to figure
out how to apply these lessons on the
larger scale that the vast sagebrush
steppe landscape often demands.
“With these findings established,
now the challenge becomes prioritiz-
ing where to apply this in land man-
agement,” said Davies, lead range-
land scientist with USDA Agricultural
Research Service in Burns.
Issues inherent in working on the
usually large-scale range include
coordinating and moving people,
equipment and cattle; a limited num-
ber of cattle available; and some pub-
lic opposition to public-lands grazing
altogether, let alone as a management
tool, he said.
“We are hoping to work with more
landscape ecologists, looking at how it
applies across the landscape,” Davies
said. That would include investigat-
ing, long-term, how rangeland plant
communities respond to fire whether
they are grazed or not, and deriving a
grazing approach to suit a location’s
unique fire risk — deciding how
much to graze and in which season,
for example.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Manage-
ment Burns District has used targeted
grazing to help reduce fine fuels,
particularly annual grasses, District
Manager Jeff Rose said. The effort
is on a fairly small scale now, but the
district is working with ARS to help
scale it to a level that will be effective
in larger landscapes, he said.
Fires haven’t yet materialized on
treated, grazed areas and it’s hard to
predict where a fire will start, Rose
said. “There is a lot of anecdotal evi-
dence that it will work,” he said.
Davies and colleagues conducted
research for years before publishing a
Grand Teton park-
goers lend a hand
to public lands
USDA ARS
Kirk Davies, lead rangeland scientist for the USDA Agricultural Research
Service in Burns, Ore.
Kirk Davies
Title: Lead rangeland scientist,
USDA Agricultural Research Ser-
vice, Burns.
Age: 40
Hometown: Princeton, Ore.
Education: Ph.D., rangeland ecol-
ogy, Oregon State University; dual
B.S., rangeland resources, crop and
soil science, OSU.
Family: Wife and three children
2009 paper documenting that grazing
can help native plants.
“We saw that long-term ungrazed
areas, when they were burned, were
subsequently invaded by exotic
annual grasses,” he said. “We found
moderately grazed areas recovered
to the native plant community. They
didn’t have that invasion and were
much better off.”
The 2009 study’s text said in part
that even plant communities that
aren’t accumulating fire fuels beyond
historical levels may need low-se-
verity, fuel-reducing disturbances to
improve resilience to more severe
disturbances.
Researchers in turn began looking
into fire severity.
In ungrazed areas, “we found
we had larger and hotter fires, and
those fires caused higher mortality of
desired native annual bunch grasses,”
Davies said. “We also found ungrazed
areas were much more likely to ignite
with an ignition source and more
likely to spread … with higher flame
heights and faster-moving fire.”
Even areas that went ungrazed for
just one or two years were found to
have greater fire risk, he said. More-
over, grazing in the fall or spring
ahead of peak summer fire season
greatly reduced the risk of severe fire.
Findings from the research-
ers’ 2010 study included that mod-
erate grazing reduces wildfire risk
by decreasing fine fuels available
for ignition, and limiting spread by
reducing fuel continuity, the text
said in part. While moderate grazing
makes prescribed burning more dif-
ficult, it can help produce a mosaic
burn effect that can reduce a fire’s
speed and overall size.
Their other studies found that dor-
mant-season grazing increased mois-
ture levels to an extent that an area
was at risk of fire some two months
later into the summer season; and
that winter grazing can reduce wild-
fire size, intensity and spread in shrub
areas; prefire grazing increases post-
fire resistance to exotic annual grass
invasion and dominance for decades;
and fall and spring grazing decreased
ignition probability and a fire’s abil-
ity to spread by increasing fine-fuel
moisture while decreasing fuel mass
and height.
JACKSON, Wyo. —
How many volunteers does
it take to build a fence?
They might tell you it
depends on how passionate
those volunteers are about
building that fence.
On National Public
Lands Day, there was no
shortage of motivation as
a small band of outdoors
lovers helped with renova-
tion projects in Grand Teton
National Park.
“It’s
never-ending,
there’s always trail work,”
said Donna Niemi, a vet-
eran volunteer with the
park, as she and a dozen
others began dismantling a
buck and rail fence along
the trail to Taggart Lake.
“If we’re hiking and
using the trails,” she said,
“we feel like we need to
take care of the trails.”
After
volunteering
weekly for the past five
years, Niemi knows that
care can take many forms.
On this day it meant creat-
ing a taller, improved bar-
rier between hikers and the
park’s horse corrals beside
the trail.
“The taking down is
gonna be a lot easier than
the putting up, I tell you
that,” Niemi said, hauling
away one of the old logs.
The fence did fall fast,
as the volunteers pried out
rusted nails and stripped off
aging rails. But they hus-
tled on the construction,
too, and within a couple
of hours a new one sprung
up in its stead. Not profes-
sional pace, perhaps, but,
speed aside, the extra hands
are a boon to overburdened
park employees.
Angela Timby, the park’s
trails volunteer coordina-
tor, organized the event.
She walked along the fence
rails, a small sledge ham-
mer in hand, surveying the
work and directing mem-
bers of her temporary crew.
She’s glad to have them,
if only for the day.
“With the increase in vis-
itation and the limits on our
resources,” she said, “it’s
extremely valuable to have
support from volunteers.”
National Public Lands
Day, according to the
National Park Service, is
the country’s largest sin-
gle-day environmental vol-
unteer effort. On Satur-
day, the 25th anniversary
of the holiday, it expected
200,000 people to partici-
pate nationwide.
At about 100 national
parks and 2,600 federal
public land sites, volunteers
rehabilitated campgrounds,
improved trails, restored
natural habitat and cleaned
beaches.
Even Secretary of the
Interior Ryan Zinke pitched
in, painting historic build-
ings at Grand Canyon
National Park. Later in the
day he met with legisla-
tors to talk about efforts to
address the Park Service’s
$12-billion
maintenance
backlog, a slew of overdue
projects postponed due to
budget constraints.
While they’re sorting
that out, Timby said that
in the meantime Grand
Teton has a solid volunteer
base. Some, like Niemi and
her husband, Doug, both
Sierra Club members, con-
sistently attend Timby’s
weekly Thursday sessions
as well as National Trail
Day in June. Others serve
as “ambassadors,” educat-
ing visitors about the park’s
rules and the importance
of protecting wildlife and
other resources.