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Justin Schaaf surveyed the draw cut deep into the side of a prairie hill riddled with sagebrush and prickly pear on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. The sun beat down on a 90-degree, late-August Saturday with a slight southerly wind providing some relief on the hilltops but in the ravine, which was calm and stagnant, the air was oven-like.
Schaaf smiled. Just moments earlier a fence had split the upper and lower portions of the draw. But now the fence was gone and Schaaf, his 7-year-old son Torrin and the small group of men helping him were panting in the shade under a large evergreen shrub chugging sports drinks and admiring their work.
For six years Schaaf has been taking volunteers onto the southern range of the refuge to clear barbed and sheep wire fences deemed unneeded as ranching leases expire and fences decay. The work allows the refuge’s wildlife to move more freely across the range.
The work is especially necessary for pronghorns, which are unable to jump fences and, depending on the fence, unable to squeeze below. When this happens, America's fastest land animal can be trapped and killed or left to die in barren pastures when the snow piles up in northeast Montana's harsh winters.
Schaaf founded the group Keep It Public with friends Greg Blascovich and Pat Curran to organize and fund conservation projects nationwide. So far, most of their efforts have been focused on Haxby Point on the CMR’s southern range just below Fort Peck Reservoir.
Torrin Schaaf, 7, cuts wire on a fence he, his father, and a group of conservationists were removing from the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in late August.
Haxby Point is not the kind of place one happens upon. The remote peninsula jutting into Fort Peck Reservoir is accessible by a single gravel road running north out of Jordan along the point’s spine. Side roads and dusty two-tracks split off on occasion like ribs from a backbone, but the casual motorist has a slim chance of finding their way out onto the point, and if they did it's unlikely they’d stray far from the main road.
But the spot Schaaf and his crew were working on this year was another story.
“That won’t make it,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Fort Peck Station manager, Aaron Johnson, said pointing at my small SUV. The trucks would make it a little farther, he said, but the last mile or so he’d have to ferry the crew in on side by sides across sagebrush, draws, boulders and scratch gravel. The only trail indicating the way was bent grass left hours earlier as Johnson’s team of three tried to find the best path to the remote fence line.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service station manager Aaron Johnson, right, shows Scott Heidebrink a fence off in the distance before he and a group of conservationists removed it on a late August Saturday.
Schaaf’s affinity for Haxby started, perhaps befittingly, with a pronghorn, also called antelope.
“I showed up because … I wanted to shoot an antelope buck on the Grimsrud place and it still showed up as a conservation fund. So, I reached out to the conservation fund and they said, ‘yeah we allow public access but funny thing you called because that’s no longer ours, it’s the CMR,” Schaaf recalled.
He reached out to the Lewistown USFWS office, and they directed him to Johnson. Schaaf learned the once 10,000-acre ranch, covering most of Haxby’s northern expanse, was riddled with barbed-wire fence. So, he began his effort to take as much of it down as possible. So far, he estimates his group of volunteers has pulled more than 20 miles of fence.
"This is public land, it’s good for the rancher that’s grazing this, it’s good for the wildlife and it’s good for the people that want to recreate like myself," he said.
Justin Schaaf pulls a fence post on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in late August.
For Johnson, the USFWS station manager, the work has been going on for far longer and farther than Haxby. His office started removing fence all over the eastern range of the CMR when he took over the Fort Peck office about 15 years ago.
“When I got here I started noticing all these pastures that were vacant, that for whatever reason the lease was gone on them, so it just kind of became something we started getting rid of,” Johnson said.
They’ve used the Montana Conservation Corps, idle rangeland firefighter crews and volunteers like Keep It Public's to take out hundreds of miles of fencing. Johnson’s efforts spurred action across the refuge, and soon the western refuge offices were also ripping out unnecessary fence lines. One case Johnson highlighted was The Mule Deer Foundation’s efforts to remove about 70 miles of fence on the UL Bend of Fort Peck Reservoir south of Malta.
Randall Williams snips barbed wire on a fence he helped take out of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in late August.
The end is finally on the horizon, Johnson explained.
“We’ve done a little bit here and a little bit there and we’re actually starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel now,” he said, “and we’ve got a lot of things to kind of pick up, but the big 5-, 6-mile long fences, they’re gone.”
Johnson had two reasons for taking out the fences. The first was purely aesthetic. He wanted the wildlife refuge to be as pristine and natural as possible. The second was habitat. Over the years animals have been snared in the fences and left to die of exposure or deprivation. In some cases they’ve been unable to reach food or water. This is especially true for pronghorns.
Scott Heidebrink rolls recently cut barbed wire on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in late August.
In order to move freely, since pronghorns cannot jump a fence, they require at least 18 inches of clearance from the ground to the bottom wire to crawl under fence lines. Preferably that bottom wire would be smooth, Johnson added. The needs of pronghorns have become so well-established over the years that every new fence installed by the U.S. government has to adhere to the specifications.
The policy has met some resistance among ranchers in the region, but Johnson said perceptions are changing over time.
Each year a group of conservationists gather on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge to clear needless barbed-wire fences
“Well, a lot of the ranchers don’t really like it, but a lot of them were the old school, you know? [But] the younger guys kind of say, ‘well I guess it’s not such a big deal.’ They’re just a lot more open to ... wildlife friendly fence,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s view of the useless barbed-wire is clear though, and perhaps best summed up in a single anecdote.
“Every time the wire gets disposed of in the trailer for recycle, [Johnson] says, ‘see you in hell,’” explained his assistant station manager Shay Piedalue endearingly. The whole crew laughed.
Randall Williams, with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, takes a long walk across the prairie to access remote fencing he and a group of conservationists were removing from the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.
Before they’d started pulling out the fence in August, the three strands of barbed-wire and dozens of green T-posts were the only visible sign humans had ever tread on the land, and now it was mostly gone, the landscape returned to a state not seen in decades.
If Schaaf and Keep It Public have their way, the entire expanse would look the same way – giving the deer, pronghorn and elk the freedom to roam unpenned by any human-made structures.
Schaaf grew up in Glendive, “about as far east as you can go in Montana.” He spent his childhood in the badlands of Makoshika State Park and among the prairie grasses nearby. As far as he knows, that prairie is in his blood. His family homesteaded the Missouri River Breaks on the mouth of the Musselshell River in 1897. They’ve bounced around since, but they’ve always called Eastern Montana home.
“There’s not a lot of people who like the prairie, but I don’t see myself ever leaving it,” Schaaf said. “Some people find home in the mountains, and I found my home in the Breaks and in the prairie.”
Scott Heidebrink, with American Prairie, pulls fence on the southern range of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.
Eventually he moved with his wife to Fort Peck to conduct trains. He built his free time around hunting, fishing, hiking and exploring the area. His draw to the outdoors sparked a passion for conservation and wildlife management.
For all the volunteers amid the Keep It Public crew, the prairies hold a special place in their thoughts and adventures. The wild, remote and barren lands add to the allure. By his best guess fewer people explore the inner-reaches of the refuge than anywhere else in Montana.
“[There’s] probably fewer people around where we are today than in 20 miles of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, so it’s a lonely spot, but it’s unique to have this much ground all to yourself,” Schaaf said.
The broad, open and diverse landscape is paralleled only by its biodiversity. Almost all of Montana’s game species inhabit the refuge from bighorn sheep and elk to mule deer and pronghorn. Those creatures also inhabit Schaaf’s fond memories of the grass and gumbo badlands.
“One of my most memorable moments,” he recounted, “is sitting up in a spot not too far away from here one September morning and watching the sun come up behind me and hearing bull elk scream. There were probably 15, 16 bull elk in the bottom of the coulee all fighting over about ... 12 cows with one big guy that was kind of running the whole show ... and I looked off to the south and there was a herd of pronghorn running across the flat, and then even beyond those pronghorn, I was able to see three or four mule deer bucks that were sky-lined on the butte.
"And I looked around, and without ever leaving my butt, I was able to see bull elk ruttin’ and buglin’ down in the bottom, pronghorn running across the prairie and mule deer bucks sky-lined on the horizon. And I had it all to myself. There was no one else out here.”
Justin Schaaf and his son Torrin ride in the bed of a truck while picking up barbed wire and fence posts left behind after a group of conservationists removed fencing on the southern range of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.
The CMR began as the Fort Peck Game Range following construction of the Fort Peck Dam in the 1930s. Today, it covers more than 1.1 million acres and has grown to encompass large swaths of the prairie surrounding the reservoir. In that time policies surrounding grazing, wildlife management and government management of the land have shifted and grown. Removing old fences is a part of that evolution.
Fears of development or human encroachment are not as concerning for Schaaf as future wildlife policy could be. As he puts it, the CMR will probably be the last place people move near in Montana. But the wildlife and especially elk populations are a different story, and he believes efforts by some lawmakers to push for the commercialization of hunting and favoritism toward landowners is the future battle for conservationists like himself.
According to Schaaf, privatizing elk is, “Basically taking the opportunity from your average everyday Joe and giving it to people, organizations or private landowners and allowing them to sell those opportunities rather than the state of Montana dividing those opportunities equally amongst people.”
He fears a perceived growing sentiment among landowners and wildlife managers in the state to view wildlife as a commodity rather than a public resource. It’s a policy shift that threatens hundreds of years of Montana hunting tradition, he said, and Schaaf thinks it will be “something that we’ll be fighting for a while to keep [wildlife] in the public trust.”
Instead, Schaaf would rather the state worked toward strengthening the state's hunting traditions and see the uniquely Montanan model protected well into the future.
FWS assistant station manager Shay Peidalue, at right, ferries Justin Schaaf in the middle and Patrick Sievert on the left via side-by-side to a remote fence they will be removing from the CMR refuge in northeast Montana.
“I’d like to see more of what the last hundred years has been,” he said. “And it’s been that way since Montana was a territory that these, our wildlife, are managed for the public and managed as a public resource and no one owns that wildlife. And every single person has it regardless of whether it passes onto your property for half the year or not. If you own property in Montana it’s a condition of the land and not a commodity on your land.”
That fight is one for the halls of the legislature and community meetings with the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks administration, which Schaaf is likely to undertake. But the refuge's barbed-wire battle is one he is winning, and one that looks close to completion. Yet Schaaf is still eyeing more projects for Haxby Point.
After one fence was out and the crew was preparing to tackle the second section of the day, Schaaf joked with Johnson.
“What I’m going to pester him [about], after all this is done, is going back through and replacing some of that bad fence with good fence,” Schaaf said about turning existing six-strand fences into pronghorn friendly lines.
“That will not happen while I’m here,” Johnson quipped back.
Each year a group of conservationists gather on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge to clear needless barbed-wire fences
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Randall Williams snips barbed wire on a fence he helped take out of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in late August.
Scott Heidebrink rolls recently cut barbed wire on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in late August.
Justin Schaaf pulls a fence post on the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in late August.
Torrin Schaaf, 7, cuts wire on a fence he, his father, and a group of conservationists were removing from the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in late August.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service station manager Aaron Johnson, right, shows Scott Heidebrink a fence off in the distance before he and a group of conservationists removed it on a late August Saturday.
Randall Williams, with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, takes a long walk across the prairie to access remote fencing he and a group of conservationists were removing from the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.
Justin Schaaf and his son Torrin ride in the bed of a truck while picking up barbed wire and fence posts left behind after a group of conservationists removed fencing on the southern range of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.
FWS assistant station manager Shay Peidalue, at right, ferries Justin Schaaf in the middle and Patrick Sievert on the left via side-by-side to a remote fence they will be removing from the CMR refuge in northeast Montana.
Scott Heidebrink, with American Prairie, pulls fence on the southern range of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.
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