Dancing on the Dark Side: Range Magazine, Winter 2017
It is dusk at Point Reyes National
Seashore, the end of a fog-swept, chilly
afternoon. Most of the tourists have left
for the day out on the lighthouse road, which
winds through grassy hills and fingerlike sand
dunes past the alphabet ranches: A, B, C, D.
Dairy cattle lounge on hillsides; some are lining
up at pasture gates waiting to be milked.
As the light fades, the bachelor elk appear,
bugling away and moving from their sketchily
appropriated home on the D Ranch toward
the C Ranch fence. Half a dozen tourist vehicles
park in the middle of the road to admire
them and take pictures on their phones in the
fading light.
The bulls gaze longingly at the Historic C
Ranch organic pasture, only a dozen yards
away across a poorly maintained two-lane
strip of asphalt and a three-wire fence. Neither
will pose a problem.
Within a few hours, somewhere between
60 and 100 head will trot across the road,
jump this fence, and make themselves at
home on the newly rejuvenated grasses of the
Spaletta family’s organic dairy. They will eat
whatever $390-a-ton organic hay they can
steal, although the Spalettas have ceased feeding
hay on the ground to their milk cows and
now confine the hay to racks too narrow for
the antlered bulls, at least, to stick their heads
into. It saves money, but it’s not the best thing
for the milk cows, which would be better
served to scatter across their pasture for their
post-milking meal.
One hundred adult elk can consume a
ton of forage and drink 1,600 gallons
of water a day. These elk will stay
and feed all night, wandering off in the morning
to ruminate back on the D Ranch, which
according to wildlife biologist Dave Press
“isn’t in cattle grazing at the moment.” What
he doesn’t say, in his deflective way, is that the
Seashore cancelled the D Ranch’s long-standing
lease when the family’s matriarch was
killed in a car accident, effectively throwing
her kids off the place not long after the funeral.
Soon after that, radio-collared elk mysteriously
appeared on the D Ranch from the
Limantour Wilderness, on the other side of
Drake’s Estero.
Press explains that after they released 28
radio-collared elk into the wilderness area,
“On day two there were two females missing.
We knew they were alive, we just couldn’t
locate them. Three weeks later they turned up
at Drake’s Beach [bordering the D Ranch].
We don’t know whether they went around or
whether they swam the Estero, but there they
were. Then the rut rolls around, and suddenly
they were back over at Limantour. They came
back a few months later, and one of them
calved there at Drake’s Beach. They did this
little back and forth for a few years and then
in 2001 they came back over to Drake’s with a
male and another female, and they have
grown from there. We have been watching
that herd very, very closely since then and
they show no signs of moving back over to
Limantour.” And why would they? All that
swimming, when there’s organic hay right
across the road.
Ranchers who saw scarred and muddy elk
Dancing on the Dark Side
Park Service two-step at Point Reyes National Seashore.
By Carolyn Dufurrena
WINTER 2017/2018 • RANGE MAGAZINE • 81
wandering lost on the D Ranch the morning
after unmarked trucks and trailers showed up
after dark are more than skeptical of this fairy
tale. But it doesn’t matter now. The elk are
there, and despite the Point Reyes Seashore’s
own elk management plan, which says that
the park will remove those animals which
escape from the wilderness area onto ranchers’
pastures, the park staff are confining their
management to “watching that herd, very,
very closely.”
Occasionally a ranger will show up on the
Spaletta farm and drive around wildly, chasing
the elk back through the remains of the
three-wire fence and across the road in a ludicrous
burst of activity, where they will stay till
the ranger goes back to park headquarters.
Press says the park staff has been doing a fair
amount of that. “We call it ‘hazing’…when
we see that there’s a herd of 60 to 80 elk that
are consistently occupying one of those key
pastures, day in and day out, day in and day
out, we go in there and just kind of ‘walk
them out.’” He makes a “shooing” movement
with his hands. “We just walk them off the
pastures.”
Only park staff are allowed to “haze” the
elk off the Spaletta farm, not the Spalettas,
who certainly would be capable of such a
sophisticated strategy.
The Alphabet Ranches, although invisible
now on Point Reyes National Seashore maps,
were one of the main reasons the park came
into being. The small ranches have been
around since the 1860s. The first white rancher,
a San Franciscan named Randall, had
rounded up thousands of feral cattle left over
on Point Reyes from the Spanish mission
NPS Tule elk lower Pierce
Point ranch stockpond.
82 • RANGE MAGAZINE • WINTER 2017/2018
period, and added a passel of goats, dairy cattle
and sheep, planning to make a fortune in
the Gold-Rush era city. The too-rapid expansion
of Randall’s empire resulted in his losing
the rancho and being shot in the back by one
of his creditors. Predictably perhaps, his
lawyers, Shafter, Shafter, Park & Heydenfeldt,
ended up with the property.
The Shafters divided the peninsula into
30-some small ranches that could be leased
by individual operators. The naming of these
places was more than their imaginations
could handle, apparently, so the ranches were
named A through Z, plus a few at the south
end where the Shafters remained. They sold
the north end, Tomales Point, to Solomon
Pierce, who built a successful
dairy operation there.
By the time of the Great
Depression, diverse factors
including the proliferation of
invasive weeds, the advent of
refrigeration, the aftereffects
of the 1906 earthquake, and
the expansion of dairies
nearer San Francisco combined
to make Point Reyes a
nonprofit enterprise. Many
of the ranches were sold to
the families who leased
them, and their descendants
are on those places today.
Then, in 1937, the Golden
Gate Bridge opened and San
Francisco poured out to
West Marin, looking for
opportunity.
The first conservationists
on Point Reyes were the
ranchers themselves who
donated chunks of ranch
land for parks and public
spaces. By 1959, California
Congressman Clem Miller had introduced
unsuccessful legislation to create a national
seashore. Local county officials as well as
seashore ranchers were opposed, concerned
about losing local control and federal condemnation
of active grazing land. Perhaps
they were right to worry. Miller said at the
time: “It is necessary that we begin to take
some steps…to push this matter if the local
people are unable or unwilling to do it. At the
same time, I want to retain the concept of
local autonomy, particularly West Marin local
autonomy. We want to give the impression
that everything is emanating from there. I am
afraid, however, that McCarthy [the attorney
for the ranchers] sees through this.”
In 1961 a revised bill included the creation
of a “pastoral zone,” allowing dairy and
beef ranching operations to continue within
the park. It also provided for a land exchange
structure that would compensate folks if they
decided to leave the park, allowing them to
continue their operations elsewhere. It
included $14 million to purchase properties
from the ranchers and became law in 1962.
Congress upped the ante for land purchases
in 1970 to $57 million, and by 1975 the
Seashore had purchased all the rest of the
ranches, although the families remained as
leaseholders on the
working landscape. At
the same time, the
National Park Service
was struggling to
understand its mission
at Point Reyes. Hunting
was permitted,
ranching was encouraged,
recreation was
welcome. There was even an ill-fated development
scheme. There was a leadership vacuum.
And nature—and politics—abhor a
vacuum.
During this period, environmental organizations
thriving in the political climate of
1970s California introduced the idea of planting
tule elk on Point Reyes. According to
Ethan Lane’s excellent 2014 report on the history
of Point Reyes: “Impossible as it sounds,
on-going management discussions simultaneously
entertained both the need to control
overpopulated deer and the desire to introduce…
elk…into the already crowded and
conflicted recreation area/seashore/historical
site.”
The Seashore was in the throes of creating
a Natural Resources Management Plan and
Environmental Assessment, as well as a General
Management Plan (GMP), which they
did not finish until 1980. In the interim, political
pressure from environmental groups
resulted in 25,000 acres of Point
Reyes National Seashore being designated
wilderness, before the public
comment period required by NEPA
for the GMP ever rolled around. The
wilderness designation included all
of Tomales Point and the Pierce
Point Ranch.
Enter the tule elk, which a 1974
Memorandum of Understanding
(MOU) between Ray Arnett, director
of California Fish & Game and park
superintendent John Sansing documents
as being planned for transplant
to Tomales Point, which was
part of the pastoral zone, and at the
time being ranched by Merv
McDonald, whose family
had been at Point Reyes
since the 1880s and at
Pierce Point since 1966.
“When the fence is completed,”
the memo reads,
“we plan to provide Tule
elk from Tupman and
other available sources.”
With the
wilderness designation in
place, the Seashore made
McDonald’s life hell,
restricting use of motor
vehicles, terminating
electrical service, and
denying essential fence
repair. He ultimately
watched, as his calving
mother cows were
shipped to market, the release of 10 head of
tule elk into an enclosure on the ranch,
including a cow they named Margaret, who
arrived with and subsequently died of Johne’s
(YO-naze) disease, an intestinal bacteria that
manifests as a wasting disease. Quite a few
more would die in subsequent years, after
McDonald and his family were evicted in
1979.
The three-mile-long elk fence was in
place, and the 2,600-acre Tomales Point
reserve became home to what would become
over 540 head of elk, a population which
grew exponentially far past the carrying
capacity of 140 animals, predicted by Pete
Gogan of UC Berkeley. A 1992 Environmental
Assessment attempted to deal with the
burgeoning elk population. It included several
alternatives, including public hunting, relocation
to other areas within the park, and
“Relocate excess elk to areas outside the
Seashore,” which referenced the 1974 MOU
with Cal Fish & Game, noting that “this
MOU has expired.” The EA was withdrawn
before the approval process by the NPS. Still
the Seashore used this draft document, with
total disregard for the NEPA process, in its
1998 Elk Management Plan.
By 1998, elk hunting had disappeared as a
management alternative and the new EA was
published with a Finding of No Significant
Impact (FONSI), in spite of the acknowledged
impacts to ranching referred to in
other parts of the study. Thus the park proceeded
to “Manage Elk Using Relocation and
Scientific Techniques.” These included the use
of the contraceptive PZP, researching elk ecology,
and establishing an 18,000-acre elk
reserve on the Philip Burton Wilderness in
the Limantour area, which borders the Home
Ranch and is also well within the pastoral
zone. “There was a vision,” Dave Press says,
“to relieve the population pressure here (at
Tomales Point), but there was also a vision to
have free-ranging elk on the seashore like they
occurred historically. It’s very out of the ordinary
to have fenced in wildlife of any kind in
a national park service unit.”
Six months later in 1999, the D Ranch
family, squarely in the middle of the pastoral
zone and across the broad, watery expanse of
Drake’s Estero from the Wilderness, was
evicted. No explanation was given. There was
another vision, documented in the 2006 Park
Services Management Policy to “phase out
the commercial grazing of livestock whenever
possible.”
Point Reyes is not the only place where
this dark dance is happening. At the Channel
Islands National Park during the same time
period, the NPS looked hard for species that
they could point to, to regulate the local
ranchers of the Vail and Vickers Company, off
the place they’d owned for more than a century.
They could not provide facts or proof to
support any conclusion that cattle were damaging
species that could be protected by the
ESA; nonetheless, according to former park
superintendent Tim Setnicka, “the park used
the standard management model it uses to
deal with such situations; we ground [the
family ranch] down by calling in other agencies
to help us and in the end outspent them
with almost limitless federal money.”
NPS leaked information “out the back
door” to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, so
that its sister agency could raise the unwarranted
red flag with the Western snowy
plover, restricting cattle access to pastures
where the plover might be threatened at some
point in the future. Using the same tactic, the
regional water quality board was called in to
sue the park—not the Vails—for water quality
damage by the cattle. Later environmental
groups used the same tactic: getting back
door information from the park to sue the
park. Eventually the unlimited funding of the
federal government won out, and the Vails
were forced off the
island. For Setnicka, the
whole process not only
fomented bitterness
within the park itself, but
destroyed the public’s
faith.
“The National Park Service,”
said Tim Setnicka,
“has no soul.” Instead, he
argued, it’s comprised of
people maneuvering
through a bureaucracy
that has become increasingly
untrustworthy. It
sounds more and more like a faceless, headless
monster that will stop at nothing to get
what it wants. “The culture of the National
Park Service has changed, and I learned that
during a very contentious planning process”
at the Channel Islands National Park. “I
despise the lack of honesty that the park service
used in that process,” he said of the tactics
used to bring about the premature end of
ranching on Santa Rosa Island. Setnicka was
forced out as park superintendent after he
protested the handling of the landowners.
The last landowner on Santa Cruz Island,
an octogenarian attorney named Francis
Guerini, had agreed to sell to the park, but
had never received a decent offer. Instead, the
park service sent Blackhawk helicopters and
20 armed men to a hunting camp on his land
on a drizzly, cold January
morning. A 15-year-old girl was there on a
bow-hunting trip with her father. They
ambushed her in her bedroom at 5 a.m.—
equipped with semiautomatic pistols, body
armor, black ski masks, goggles and combat
boots. The girl was made to lie face down on
the muddy floor to be handcuffed, and
though the officers later contended that she
was restrained for no more than 30 minutes,
the young woman claims she was in shackles
for nearly two hours. “And they never even
identified themselves,” she says. No charged
were filed; no evidence of wrongdoing was
published.
Is this dark story relevant at Point Reyes?
Don Neubacher, former superintendent
of the Point Reyes National Seashore, who
was recently removed for sexual harassment
and toxic work environment
charges at Yosemite, told local
environmental advocate Phyllis
Faber years ago that NPS had a
“plan” to get rid of all
working ranches at the seashore.
Neubacher, Faber recounted in
an article for the Point Reyes
Light, indicated that the “plan
would start with closure of the
oyster farm in Drakes Estero.
Once it was gone, the park
would stand by as environmental
groups brought lawsuits against
the surrounding ranches, claiming
their operations were degrading
water quality. The ranchers, whose
means were modest, would have no
choice but to shut down, bringing an
end to the 150-year ranching tradition
at Point Reyes.”
Drakes Bay Oyster Farm was closed
in 2014 by then-Secretary of the Interior
Ken Salazar in spite of Congressional
proof that the Seashore had falsified its
own data relating to the species it claimed
were damaged by the oyster farm. The Center
for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds
Project and the Resource Renewal Institute
filed suit in 2016 against Point Reyes National
Seashore to try to force non-renewal of the
ranchers’ leases. The suit was settled in July
2017, allowing the ranchers to hope for five-year
renewable leases rather than the one-year
leases the plaintiffs were asking for, but as part
of the larger plan, it put a financial strain on
the small family operations. The pattern is
increasingly familiar.
Setnicka said that, in his opinion, those
who support ranching at Point Reyes should
appeal to congressional representatives,
involve the media and remain engaged with
the process. “If you don’t stand up, you will be
run over.” And Sen. Dianne Feinstein has
been a loyal friend, though the new Congressional
Representative Jared Huffman, a former
environmental lawyer for the Natural
Resources Defense Council, may be more
conflicted in his support. Although the words
come easily in support of ranchers, Huffman
has been shown to act at cross-purposes. His
real support remains to be seen.
It’s clear that the Point Reyes National
Seashore, in its passive-aggressive way, will
continue to pay lip service to the enabling legislation
which specifies that ranchers in the
pastoral zone may continue their operations,
while blithely ignoring the stipulations of
NEPA and catering to environmental interests
and its own real in-house plan. But consider
this: these park biologists don’t know
how to manage habitat. Even if every one of
the Alphabet Ranches were decommissioned
and the elk were allowed to range freely over
the entire peninsula, the Park’s elk non-management
policy will have Point Reyes looking
like the mustang sanctuary of Marin County
in 20 years. These people are biologists. They
study individual species. They demonstrably
do not understand how to sustain habitat,
and by his own admission, Dave Press
“doesn’t really know that much about elk,”
since he’s more of a snowy plover and elephant
seal guy.
So what’s happened to the habitat on
Tomales Point that the elk have occupied for
the last 18 years? Pastures are alternately
denuded, dug up, and choked with dead and
rank grasses. The pastures are riddled with
trails marked not just by the hoofprints of
hundreds of elk, but the treads of countless
thousands of expensive hiking shoes, as
hordes of environmentally sensitive tourists
come trekking along the path to what was the
lower Pierce Point Ranch to view the herds
and photograph the magnificent scenery. If
the Spalettas, the Lucchesis, and the rest of the
ranchers in the pastoral zone know what’s
good for them in this dark dance, they’ll start
building fences to keep the elk, and the
tourists, at bay, and start bugling their story to
the world.
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