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6 Ranch Podcast
6 Ranch Podcast
Hardcore Investigative Journalism with Keely Covello
Keely has investigated murders in the cartel controlled areas of northern California and many instances where government agencies seem to be trying to run ranchers off their properties. She has the purest form of courage and investigates wherever the truth leads her. In this jaw dropping episodes we dig into these stories. You can learn more about what she does at America Unwon.
Fair warnning, these aren't stories that are going to make you feel good, but they are 100% stories that you need to hear.
these are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with calloused hands. I'm james nash and this is the six ranch podcast Keely what is Unwon.
Speaker 2:Unwon is a word that I did not know was a word, but I came up with it to describe the project that I want to do. Essentially, I want to write about the American West. I started doing that back in 2012. And to me it sort of typified two things One, the idea that there's still a lot of opportunity out there for young people who may have been told that the American dream is dead, so sit in a cubicle because that's your only option.
Speaker 2:Growing up the way I did, I know that's not true. I know there's a lot of Americans still living a very you know, they're marching to the beat of their own drum in the American West, and I wanted to highlight those folks, especially for younger generations, who don't fit in the mold that they're told they need to fit into today. But as this project has grown, I think it started to embody the other meaning of the word, which is that the American West truly isn't one. We face a lot of obstacles here, and I do think we face again, not to sound conspiratorial, but there's a lot of folks who don't like the freedom that this part of the country embodies and typifies, and I think we're seeing sort of an attack on the Western way of life, and so that's a lot of what I've come to write about at Unwant since I started. How's that?
Speaker 1:I think it's great. Longer answer. Your writing is special. I was going through your website and it is so crisp and clear. I haven't encountered anything like it in a very long time, and everything from your photography to your prose to the speed that you move through topics is so concise. There's something really, really special just about your skill and what you're going after. But the actual substance of it, of course, is very important to me, and I've talked a lot about how hard it is to be a rancher, how hard it is to be a farmer, how important it is that this. You know, one to 2% of our population continues to produce food for the other 98%, and some people might be sick of hearing from me about it, and that is too bad for them, because I'm not going to stop. Why is this important to you? What's your background that made you realize that this is a big deal, that it is important and that you need to take your skills and shed light on it?
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for saying that, james. That means a lot coming from you, truly. I think you know I grew up in a very small town in Northern California. My dad is a ranch vet, my mom is too, but she had eight kids, so that became her focus and it was just a different way of growing up. And Northern California, I think, is a bit of a forgotten part of the country. We're about three hours North of San Francisco and even when I tell other Californians where I live, they think I'm in Oregon by then. We got another four hours to go until we hit the Oregon border. So that part of California truly is the wild west.
Speaker 2:My childhood I didn't realize how wild and wooly it was until I went to North LA County for college and had the biggest culture shock of my life and I really saw how disconnected my generation was from their food, exactly like you're saying but also just from their fellow Americans.
Speaker 2:There was this very negative attitude toward America that was in vogue when I was in college and I think that's changing a little bit. But when I was a kid it just kind of shocked me because you know, you hear this idea of the ugly American, the backward American. That's not what I grew up with. All my heroes are people you've never heard of, who are just authentic and self-reliant and good neighbors with amazing stories and incredible skill sets. They're building their own life, they're building their American dream, and I just had this desire to let my classmates, my peers even in college, know about those Americans, that other half of America that I think has been forgotten for so long and I think it's only gone on to fuel a lot of the change we're seeing in our country, a lot of the conversations we've had in our country since then.
Speaker 1:I think and I've told people this before that Northern California has more in common with Eastern Kentucky than it does with what people think of when they think of California. It is a very, very wild place and oftentimes fairly lawless.
Speaker 2:Wow, I love that you said that. I've never heard anyone else say that, but when I went home last year for a short doc I did on a murder that happened out there, I just had this thought that it really reminds me of almost like Appalachia. It's like these little hollows that sort of lends itself to outlaws and yeah, it's a wild place, and I haven't heard anyone else make that comparison. So I love that you said that. I totally agree.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I don't mean it in a negative way at all Love Kentucky, love people from Kentucky. They're awesome. Absolutely, and the same thing with Northern California and you touched on it, but if you hit the Oregon-California border and drive south for five hours, you're still in Northern California. This is a big chunk of ground, yeah. State of Jefferson.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Long live Jefferson. Yeah, we're not very well represented but we're a yeah, we're kind of a rowdy bunch and I love it. I mean, it's part of that character has to do with the cannabis industry, the black market cannabis. That's been part of the culture and the Emerald for the last what? 50 years, but it goes back, I think, even before that California is just a boom and bust mentality since the gold rush.
Speaker 2:You know you've got people who come there for these huge opportunities. It's kind of the most insane Americans who made it all the way to the coast till they ran out of land. And it's just there's some of that spirit still there. Whether you have Silicon Valley or Hollywood or even the Emerald Triangle, where there's this black market cannabis industry, there's definitely a boom and bust mentality, very outlaw spirit. So I love Northern California. I think it's beautiful. It's just it's very ignored by Sacramento and it gets maligned with the rest of our state fairly for the politics. But yeah, you got a lot of ag people in California. It sounds like you've been there, you get it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I've got friends from there, fantastic people.
Speaker 1:The first time I fought fire there was when I was in college and I was really naive about what Northern California was and we were fighting fire in like the Feather River country and then a little bit out of Chico and into the Mendocino and stuff like that. I was on a helicopter repel crew, so we're flying into all these fires and as we're flying over the towns, it's the middle of summer, it's scorching hot. And I said to one of the older guys on the fire crew I was like why does everybody have a Christmas tree in their backyard? And he's like oh you, hee-haw, bumpkin, those aren't Christmas trees, you idiot. And I was like, oh really.
Speaker 1:So as we continued to fight fire there, we started to run into these grow operations and sometimes, flying into the fires, you'd see guys on the ground running around with assault rifles, with AK-47s and stuff like that. We knew that there was booby traps around some of these places, so I could be way out in the wilderness someplace and then suddenly run into like a drip irrigation system and then, no matter what was going on with the fire, you needed to back out of that spot.
Speaker 1:And it was just mind blowing to me that that kind of stuff was going on. You know I was naive to all of it, but it has been going on there for a long time. With the legalization of cannabis, how did that change the way those illegal grow operations were conducted?
Speaker 2:Oh man, that's the money question right now, because everybody has a different opinion. When I shot this doc, I spoke with some guys who are longtime cannabis growers, old back to the landers, some of the second generation of that group, and you'll hear different things but the prevailing belief is they don't like legalization because California rolled it out the way they roll everything out. They overregulated it. So it kicked some of the you know, maybe more honest brokers or the little guys out and it emboldened the bad actors who never cared about regulation in the first place Some of the folks you're talking about.
Speaker 2:So when I was growing up, my dad's a vet. He's a mobile vet, so he's got his pickup truck and he would drive two, three hours in any given direction for work, and so I think I had a unique experience as a kid because I would go on these grow operations and they'd welcome us. But we were probably some of the looking back, you know, like some of the only outsiders they would really let on the property because they're the vet. You know, you've got a sick animal, you're going to call the vet, you're not going to bring them into town. So I remember, you know, going up places like Spyrock Road and some of the more outlaw corners and pockets and we'd pull up to a gate and some guys with AK-47s they'd boil out of the woods. They'd open the gate for you, nod at you, keep on going. They'd always pay in cash. They'd always give a big tip. They were nice guys but they were outlaws, absolutely living on the edge and I don't know that legalization really erased that part of the market.
Speaker 2:I think it erased. You know, the guy with a little Christmas tree in his backyard or some of the more tame players. I think the big guys. I don't think they're phased much and I've heard that. You know we did a lot of investigating into this topic when we were shooting our doc and the sheriff's told us there's been studies done in dispensaries and a lot of the product that you buy in a legal dispensary is still coming from the black market. So it's not like the supply chain has really changed and the cartels have gotten really, really, really bad in Northern California, like that's the prevalent issue.
Speaker 2:More than anything, I would say You've still got outlaw growers. You've got those back-to-the-landers who, for better or worse, a lot of them are just farmers or hippies who wanted to live off-grid and grew a plant in the backyard while they were at it. That's really where this all stemmed from. But that infrastructure and then the culture of silence around it, because all of us got used to not talking about this and keeping your mouth shut. I think that's when we created like this, you know, welcoming environment for truly bad people, like Bulgarian Chinese cartel, you know, and then the, the whole, you know, south America Mexican cartels. There's just a huge presence up there and most people do not believe me when I say that. So the fact that you've seen it, it's just like this undertold, ignored piece of reality right now in the US.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a lot of the fires that we were dealing with were fires that were from the cartels, so they were burning each other's operations. There were some cartel wars going on, so they would just slip out and burn somebody else's product, and then they didn't care if that turned into a giant forest fire in July in Northern California. Okay, Wow so yeah, it was pretty wild. Who killed Dick drury?
Speaker 2:well, you're trying to get me in trouble. I can't, apparently legally I can't say what I think, but the documentary we did, I think pretty compelling evidence anyway in my opinion, that it was a black market grower. That's my opinion.
Speaker 1:The article you wrote is fascinating. Can you tell me the story?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the story of Dick Drury? Yeah Well, he's a soul timer, Wonderful guy. His family's been ranching up on Bell Springs Road, which is another one of those hot pockets in the Emerald, since the 1860s or so. They've been on the same piece of land and he was just a soft-spoken, wonderful guy who worked for the county. He had cows, he had two adopted sons, his wife Phyllis, who was sick, and he took care of her full time. And one day, January 21st literally yesterday, four years ago, in 2021, he was found dead on Bell Springs road with a gunshot wound to the head. His Ford Explorer was still running and that case has been unsolved.
Speaker 2:So when I first heard about it, I was working with my dad, I was home visiting and I just, you know, on a work call with my dad and we were up at this remote ranch called Lone Pine, which is way out in the boonies, and the Cowboys were talking about this murder that happened and I think it was funny doing the documentary because nobody really wanted to tell us they were scared or that they feel uncomfortable, because you can't really allow yourself that thought and still work where these guys work. They just don't, they don't allow themselves to think about it. They're just daily life for them, it's just part of what they have to deal with. But you could just tell that there was a little more uncertainty than usual because I think we always told ourselves the ranching community will stay to ourselves, We'll do our work, and the outlaw growers, the cartels, whoever else is out there in the woods, they're going to do their thing, but we are going to leave each other alone and we'll coexist like that.
Speaker 2:And when Dick Drury was murdered, the natural thought was that this was a cartel hit. That's what it looked like, that's what it felt like and that's kind of what his neighborhood would suggest. So that's what it looked like, that's what it felt like and that's kind of what his neighborhood would suggest. So that's what we all believed. And there were a lot of rumors. The rumor I heard most commonly I remember first hearing it at Lone Pine was that he was probably shot by a Bulgarian cartel boss Bulgarian crime boss, whatever whose dog got into his cows and Dick shot his dog and this crime boss put a hit on his life, which is the thing we see a lot, because these guys, these illegal operators, they'll they'll have these big dogs that guard their grows and then at the end of harvest they'll often just let them loose. So it's exactly like you're describing, James, where they don't really care what happens in the forest and they don't really care what happens to their neighbors. These dogs aren't their problem anymore. And so up in Covolo, which is a native reservation town it's a tribal community we'd have these like packs of wild dogs that would find each other and run around and terrorize people. Up at Lone Pine the cowboy told me all his horses had torn ears from these wild dogs from the cartel grows. So we know that these dogs are out there, we know that they cause all this trouble and it kind of made sense that you know something like that would have happened. And then Dick would have protected his cattle and shot the wrong dog, wrong person's dog. So that's what we believed.
Speaker 2:But there was no progress on the case for about four years. Until well, there still isn't any progress on the case. It's unsolved, no arrests have been made. But thinking about my dad back home driving around doing his job in the mountains, knowing that something had shifted, that our worlds had collided, so to speak, was just so disturbing to me, and I got the opportunity to do a documentary, a short doc, and this was a big story to bite off for a 20-minute doc but felt like a good excuse to go look into it. We had some funding to make that happen and so went home and tried to piece together what might have happened and in the end I thought it was the cartel and not to give it away. But I believe it had more to do with the original outlaw cannabis community than the cartel. That's my opinion after what I saw and spoke to and some of what you see in the doc.
Speaker 1:Did you uncover any evidence that you were able to hand over to law enforcement that could help inform the case?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I found some interesting documentation on social media, actually from potentially a daughter of the perpetrator, potentially alleged whatever legal term I'm supposed to throw in there. But I, you know, we shared all that with the police. I have to say the police have gotten a lot of heat for this case, but they were very helpful to us. They really wanted to be involved. They gave us a lot of their time and access. What I've heard is that the DA is the one who doesn't want to take the case, doesn't think there's enough evidence. Personally, I think there's a lot of stuff to go off of already, but it's in the hands of the DA at this point. But yeah, they have everything we found, everything we saw.
Speaker 1:Man, where do you get the courage to take stuff like this on? Like I know you're tough, but like are you? Like let's take on. You know outlaw murderer cartel groups tough.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe I'm just not very smart. Like, what's going on I have to read. After we got a little deeper into this case, I was pretty relieved that it wasn't heading down a cartel route, because I don't know if we had found that out I mean even our producers in DC. I told them like, if we, you know we're mean even our producers in DC. I told them like if we, you know we're, we're shooting, we have, however much time to shoot, we're going to find out what we find out, but we may not be able to use it depending on what we find out, cause my parents still live here and, um, you know I'm, I, I just some things are not worth the risk, um, and it is a little risky for sure, but I think I don't know. James, it's like nobody has done anything for my community in so long and I've seen people just live in fear good people for so long. It's just, it's frustrating. And if I'm going to be frustrated and not do something about it, you know I don't really have a leg to stand on. Where I have the opportunity and I think journalism, if that's the field that you want to go into, you have to go where the truth leads you, you know, to the best of your ability. So this seemed like an important story.
Speaker 2:I had a lot of respect for Dick Drury's family. I didn't know him. I was close with his sister-in-law, billy Drury, who was this like 80-year-old cowgirl who was just like my hero. She was amazing. She's like riding horses through her 80s and I just loved that family and I was close with his nephew and his best friend's family and he was just one of these forgotten people that no one cared about and no one knew his name and I just it was so wrong for an 85 year old man to be killed like that on his almost next to his ranch where he was just a good neighbor his whole life and nobody did anything about it. It just kind of made me sick and you hear about, you know the so much in the news is so frivolous and his life was totally ignored and my neighbors were scared, People were scared, so yeah, I'm sure they still are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I'm sure they still are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So what has to change to bring security back to this community?
Speaker 2:I mean one of the sheriffs I spoke with, matt Kendall, who's incredible, just such a great person. We grew up in Kovalev, local guy done his best to get the word out on this just salt of the earth. He feels that we need legalization at the federal level. That's kind of his opinion, because sort of the local legalization is still creating this black market that the crime thrives off of. I'm not sure if that's where I'm at or not. I don't. I don't love the whole culture around. Uh, what I saw growing up. To be completely honest with you, though, that wasn't the stance I was coming into to make the stock. I wasn't trying to make like an anti-cannabis film or something. Um, maybe legalization is the answer, better education around the risks or in the production of it, you know, because there's a lot of environmental damage. You probably saw that out in the forest covering these fires.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a pretty gnarly thing to grow the way that they grow it anyway. So, and there's a lot of pesticides in the product. We're having this kind of like health resurgence, but a lot of weed has just nasty stuff in it because cartels don't really care about regenerative agriculture. So, you know, I think there's an argument to that. But in general, in my community specifically, I think it would help if Gavin Newsom gave a shit. I think that would be helpful to start with. You know, the sheriffs say that he has never answered their phone calls.
Speaker 2:I've become friends with this guy who's on Joe Rogan's show, john Norris. He's incredible. He started the marijuana enforcement team back in the day and he's done amazing work on this. He wrote two books on this topic. If people want to dive into it, he's a true expert and he's amazing Branching background Gabe Morgan in California, who just stumbled into this and wanted to do something about it, and he had a task force with funding from the Trump administration and they were really making some progress on getting the cartels out of the forest in Northern California. And then I believe Gavin Newsom was the one who came in and cut off cooperation between the state and the feds. So I do think there's a lot of just typical California politics at play here. You know they could do something, but is there the willpower? For for some reason it doesn't seem like it.
Speaker 1:Well, uh, president Trump just declared the cartels as terrorist organizations and uh, that's going to help. I hope so. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I sure hope so.
Speaker 1:You've taken on some other very interesting stories. Yeah, I sure hope so. You've taken on some other very interesting stories. One of them that is developing right now that I'd like to get into to the extent that you're able to is what's going on at Point Reyes, and I feel pretty confident that 99% of this audience doesn't even know anything square one about that.
Speaker 2:So take us through it kind of from the beginning and tell us what's happening. Sure, so this is a brand new situation to me. It kind of came out about a week and a half ago. Someone made me aware of it, but have you ever been out to Point Reyes? I was curious out in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Okay, it's right out of San Francisco.
Speaker 2:actually it's, it's uh, yeah, it's right out of San Francisco Actually, it's like shockingly close, but it's really desolate and beautiful right on the little peninsula there. Um, and since I think before California was a state, point Reyes has had ranching on it, sold Spanish land grant for land. Um, some wealthy attorneys during the gold rush bought it and they divided it up into these ranch properties from A to Z and they had Azorean and Swiss immigrants working on these dairies and beef ranches. Eventually a lot of those immigrants bought the land. So it's just this little isolated community of agriculture. They're in Marin County, kind of in the heart of the beast, right next to San Francisco, and they've been there forever, right next to San Francisco, and they've been there forever.
Speaker 2:And in the 50s and 60s-ish I think they got some development pressure. They were feeling that their community was threatened by these outside developers and so Marin County kind of got together with these ranchers and decided to sell the property to the federal government, to the Park Service, as a national seashore, which is not a national park but similar in most ways, and it would always have agriculture as part of the seashore. It would be part of the culture there, it would be written into the way that the land was sort of zoned and deeded and so they sold to the government fair market value, with the agreement to have these long-term leases where they'd be able to continue their operations but they'd be protecting the peninsula from development. So this was always a project between the agricultural community in Marin and the National Park Service and I think they saw what was coming. They saw the development happening and creeping up and they wanted to protect their heritage and the local food there. So that's what they did and at the time the environmental groups were all for it. They were very pro, the whole arrangement, anti-development, pro-farmer, rancher, whatever.
Speaker 2:And as you know better than anyone, that has totally changed the environmental groups. For the most part they don't feel that way anymore. They feel that the ranchers are a threat to this pastoral, beautiful place that should be rewilded and overrun with tule elk and that's all they want and that's how they see it. So there's been an ongoing battle for these guys to get their leases renewed. And Obama's Secretary of the Interior, ken Salazar he approved the leases. They should have got their leases renewed. And Obama's Secretary of the Interior, ken Salazar, he approved the leases. They should have got their leases. They should have got 25-year leases but that didn't happen for whatever reason, and these environmental groups have sued the Park Service time and again over the ranchers.
Speaker 2:The ranchers have not been allowed to make improvements to their barns and their homes and their pastures. They've been harassed incessantly, subjected to all of that. These ranchers are all going to leave forever. They're going to be quote unquote bought out, um, for whatever price. That is undisclosed, uh, and they're going to leave the peninsula forever, all 12 ranching families, and it's going to get turned over to one of these environmental groups who's going to run the leases. So, um, since I heard about this, I've just been trying to dig a little bit more and get to the bottom of what's going on here. Um, the farmers can't talk to me, they're gagged. But there's a great video from a town hall that happened last week, with a rancher named kevin lenny who speaks pretty eloquently and I think it's just. I don't know if you saw that, but to me his pain is pretty obvious. How he truly feels about this situation is pretty obvious in what he says.
Speaker 1:No, it's brutal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:One of those conservation organizations is the Nature Conservancy.
Speaker 2:That's right, yep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it sounds like there was some type of easement that was put on this, and that was what was preventing people from making any types of improvements to their infrastructure.
Speaker 2:I think that was and this is where I get into my opinion. Right, I can't exactly prove this, but from what I've heard from a lot of folks and my conclusion although I'm still investigating this I think the park service doesn't want ranchers there. I don't think they've wanted ranchers there for a long time and I think they haven't been allowing these improvements and so on, because I don't think they welcome ranchers at all. I would bet that they're working with these environmental groups. Again, just my opinion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the tule elk were there already right.
Speaker 2:Some people say they're native. They weren't there for a while decades they were reintroduced at some point. But one rancher has to pay like $100,000 a year to feed them. They've got these fences up all over the peninsula to keep the elk away from the cattle, all over the peninsula to keep the elk away from the cattle. Um, and you know there's a that that was a short-lived thing, because the environmental groups have been and I do know about this because this has been in the news a lot, they've been trying to get those fences down. They'll talk about how the elk are kidnapped and imprisoned. With these fences they should be able to run all over the ranch land and so on. So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:As of 2021, the Nature Conservancy owns 119 million acres of land worldwide.
Speaker 2:Isn't that wild.
Speaker 1:Gnarly, and as a nonprofit they get to do some interesting stuff with money. It here in in our local ranching communities where they'll do stuff like uh like buy a ranch and allow somebody to live on it for the rest of their life, but they can't sell it, they can't pass it off to the next generation. So it's like, okay, you get to ranch for however long until you die, and then you're done, and then it's just going to become Nature Conservancy after that. And I've heard stuff like they want to eventually own like a third of the planet and like it's wild. The Nature Conservancy does some good, but man, they are a land-hungry organization.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, no, it does seem that way. I mean, if you hear some of the ranchers talk well, to be honest, I background here. They, the ranchers and farmers, cannot say anything negative about the Nature Conservancy. That's part of the agreement, right, and their NDA part of the settlement. But the original three groups that sued them were Western Watersheds and I have to look this up Center for Biological Diversity, and another one that has the initials RRI and I cannot remember Resource Renewal or something like that. They keep blowing me up on Instagram every time I post anything. So I should know it. But really aggressive groups, right? So they're the ones who sued the park over these ranchers.
Speaker 2:The Nature Conservancy stepped in like this generous angel and decided to broker the settlement between the ranchers and the environmental groups, because the ranchers eventually entered the lawsuit because their livelihoods are at stake. So all these parties the Nature Conservancy comes in. Kind of interesting what you're saying. They seem like a good guy. They bought out the ranch but they're letting the ranchers stay there. But what's happening is all these ranchers are gone and the settlement again not disclosed. But most sources I've spoken with not the ranchers, but other sources I've spoken with have just suggested that it's not nearly enough to relocate these ranches and farms. But yeah, the Nature Conservancy is left with the lease and they get to do whatever they want, which apparently entails bringing in a grazing contractor. So you won't hear the farmers say anything negative about Nature Conservancy. Maybe they mean it, maybe they're grateful to be done and to have somebody willing to give them a buyout. But yeah, it's a little interesting to me, at least as an outside observer, to watch this all go down.
Speaker 1:I think you know if some of these folks have been there for many generations. If you're talking about ranching history that goes back to before California was a state. Those aren't people who want to give up. Those aren't people who want to be done, who want to be bought out. That's just not the case.
Speaker 2:They're just left without an option, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah exactly Okay, this isn't the most heartwarming podcast I've ever done.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, I'm such a depressing guest.
Speaker 1:Let's keep going with it.
Speaker 2:Tell me about Charles and Heather. Heather maude. Oh man, another really cheerful story. Yeah, well, they're. Uh, james, you make me sound like the most unpleasant person, like all these stories are so dark.
Speaker 1:You're fun, you're fighting the fight and you're in the mud. Okay, like, like it's, it's not. I wish I could cover half of your stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you. Yeah, sometimes, sometimes after work, I feel like I got hit by a truck or something. Yeah, so the mods are another one there in South Dakota which you'd think would be a little, a little safer. But this little sweet family there in South Dakota They've got a fence that's been there since 1950, I believe Charles' ancestor. These are also gag folks. They can't talk to me at all, they can't say anything at all. This is all from other sources, right, but Charles, 39 years old, has got this generational ranch. They've got a fence on their grazing lease with the National Forest.
Speaker 2:Some hunter allegedly asked the Forest Service to remove a no hunting sign from a fence post, which I think is interesting because that hunter's never come forward. There's no real documentation of this hunter but for whatever reason, they want them to take this no hunting sign off. So the mods complied. Then, long story short, forest Service shows up at their house we need to check out this fence. This might not be in the right area. We need to resurvey the land. Mods are totally fine with that. Then they show up. They say, well, let's take a year. Within a year we'll resurvey this land. Five days later they show up with a survey team.
Speaker 1:Five days later.
Speaker 2:Five days later yeah, yeah, gave them absolutely no time, and I want to say it was like a month or two after that they came back with indictments and just the works terrorizing this family. Both Charles and Heather are separately charged, this husband and wife ranching couple separately charged. They both face 10 years in prison, huge fines. They have to retain their own legal counsel to defend themselves All over this fence that the Forest Service alleges was in the wrong spot, even though it's been there since 1950. The family says in previous statements or through their attorney or whatever, that they've had this ongoing grazing agreement with the Forest Service for 60 years and that, you know, every time their grazing lease is renewed, the Forest Service has acknowledged where the fence is at. And so, yeah, I think they just got a trial date.
Speaker 2:I was trying to look that up. I think it's in April. But, yeah, man, just kind of a theme right. Just these little independent guys who aren't, you know, bill Gates with his massive amount of farmland, not the Nature Conservancy. It's always these little guys that are kind of easy pickings that get faced with this stuff.
Speaker 1:So these aren't rare stories and I'm sure that you're going to continue to cover more of these. But, you know, are you familiar with the story?
Speaker 2:from Burns, oregon, from a couple years ago. Tell me more about. You're talking about the Bundys or the Hammonds, or the Hammonds, yeah, the. Hammonds. Okay, yeah, tell me about that one again. It's been a minute.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll get most of these details wrong, so forgive me because I'm just doing it from memory, but basically the Hammonds had at some point lit a backfire on their own property that burned into some BLM in order to keep a larger fire from burning up their whole place. It burned up 160 acres of BLM like sagebrush country right Land that only God in the BLM could love and they ended up getting thrown in jail Like an old man and his son ended up actually serving prison time. And prior to the sentencing there was a huge backlash from the community and people that came in from Nevada and of course, some of these were certifiably crazy people like sure enough crazy people. And at one point, while a vehicle, including some of these people who had showed up was traveling through a Forest Service road, they hit a roadblock and the driver ended up getting shot yeah, shot and killed by I don't know if it was state police or the FBI, but they had a helicopter over the top of him. There's a lot of conspiracy and controversy about whether they were getting shot at from the helicopter, shot at on the ground, the guy on the ground there's video of him when he did get shot and he was acting really aggressively, like he didn't just pull over and say, all right, yeah, let's talk about it. But yeah, really, really sad deal, and it all stemmed from just nothing.
Speaker 1:Right, like, okay, you lit a backfire that burned up a little bit of sagebrush. That could be a fine. That could honestly probably just be a conversation, be like look, this is a problem, but they ended up charging them with domestic terrorism and that's not what it is. That's not what it is at all. But that's a case where you've got a small generational ranching family going up against a large federal government organization and it's not a winning fight. Wow, now, some of the stuff that you're talking about with these lawsuits that groups like the Center for Biological Diversity make all their money on. They use EJA, the Equal Access to Justice Act. Have you gotten into that at all?
Speaker 2:Just a little bit. Tell me more about that. How do they use that?
Speaker 1:Okay. So this came up during the Carter administration and it basically it came from a good place and they wanted people to be able to fight the government without going bankrupt, because the government can outspend all of us. And what happens and this happens with wildlife stuff, it happens with logging projects, all kinds of things A preservation group will file a lawsuit and then they can use the Equal Access to Justice Act to pay for that lawsuit with taxpayer dollars and they can use their own staff attorneys and charge exorbitant legal fees. So they're getting money from their supporters and from their donors, but then they get tax money as well every time they file a lawsuit and they use this EASIA and it happens in wildlife and hunting all the time and they just make vast amounts of money off of it Drives me crazy.
Speaker 2:Wow. Okay, that's really interesting because, diving into this whole point race thing, I've talked to a family that went through this and they're kind of anonymous right now anyway, but their opinion was that the park service has been doing this for a long time, working with these environmental groups, and their mechanism is just, yeah, enabling these environmental groups to sue. I didn't realize that was the mechanism, that was EJA to that they were able to fund this. I know they cause they make settlements too right, when they win these cases they also get taxpayer money from from that on top of that, and then they have all their donors. It's pretty, it's pretty gross and and this is what this family told me and I did find some pretty interesting stuff to back up what they said so one of the national parks in California now is the Channel Islands, but it used to be a lot of ranching out there and the guy who ran the Channel Islands at the time, the superintendent's name, was Tim Setnicka, and I'm going to butcher this because I'm just reading about it. I haven't written it yet, but I found this old article in Outside Magazine from 97 called this is the Park Service.
Speaker 2:Come out with your hands up, people can look it up and this little family on Santa Cruz Island was given the government just wasn't selling as quick as the government wanted. They had these historic Adobe buildings. The government wanted it for their park center. It was the last piece of privately owned property on the Channel Islands. So five years go by. They're not settling fast enough. The patriarch of the family is, I believe, 82. And he said in this article he said you know, I'm willing to sell, I just haven't been offered a good price.
Speaker 2:The government decides this family has actually been robbing Chumash Indian burial grounds. So they raid the family in tactical gear, black ski masks. There's a little 15-year-old girl at the ranch house. She's shackled. She said she was on the floor in shackles for two hours. She didn't even know who these people were. They didn't announce who they were. It's just terrorizing. Raid all over this crime of Indian burial robbery, which was very convenient for the park service to come up with, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:And then there were other families that were also forced off and they used all kinds of different things. On Santa Rosa Island apparently they decided that the tule elk there were non-native, so they wanted all non-native species off the island, including elk, deer, cattle and horses. Some reports they ended up machine gunning elk from a helicopter once they finally got the ranchers off. So that was their environmental restoration, I guess, was just killing all these wild pigs and elk, but anyway, at any rate, the superintendent of the Channel Islands at the time was Tim Setnicka.
Speaker 2:He was pretty complicit with all this and then he ended up going rogue on the Park Service. He wrote a three-part editorial that I'm trying to track down, but it was in this Santa Barbara paper that's now closed. But he laid out the whole playbook and he said the Park Service, they want something. They work with these environmental groups to get what they want, and they've done it time and time again.
Speaker 2:This is, you know, back in the early 2000s he did a speech I found in 2014 in Marin County and he told the Point Reyes ranchers you guys are next, they're coming for you. He said the National Park Service has no soul and he told them they want to end ranching and they're going to come for you. And all the ranchers at the time didn't want to believe him. And here we are, you know, 13 years later, all those ranchers are gone and it's in a voluntary agreement with these environmental groups. The Park Service is just watching over all of it. Their hands are clean. You know they didn't have anything to do with it. Pretty suspicious, right? It just starts to look like a pattern.
Speaker 1:Well, this happened in Hell's Canyon, which is right next to me, in the 70s, again during the Carter administration. My granddad had a generational homestead down there. There's lots of families up and down the river who had homesteads and were running cattle and running sheep. My granddad had a little outfitting operation. We have the correspondence between him and the Forest Service just talking about how many people were coming down to go hunting and fishing, that he was letting through there or that he was hosting himself. And then they ended up using eminent domain to take the entire canyon and kick everybody out, all the settlers and you know this is not long ago, this is in the 1970s. They gave them a third of market value and the options were you can take this price or you can go to jail and we'll take it anyways. And they kicked out all the homesteaders and all the livestock and made it a national recreation area Right. So that was the first step was to make it a national recreation area, right. So that was the first step was to make it a national recreation area. And then they tried to put an additional dam in so that they could have more hydropower, and that was going to be a private company, the. The jet boaters actually fought and stopped that from occurring. So now you have to have all summer long. You have to have a permit to access the river, Um. You have to apply for in a lottery program to get a permit to even go down there, Um, in the. In the off season you don't. You don't have to like you can go down there, but in the summertime you need a permit, Um. And then they tried to turn it into a national park fairly recently. So it was a step like first let's get the ranchers out and then we'll make it a national recreation area and then we're going to try and make it a national park.
Speaker 1:There's also some different language. Like you talked about the national seashore, Some other language that gets used now is a national monument, and President Obama tried to create all these national monuments where they were going to again use eminent domain to kick everybody out. It just scares the hell out of me and people here are still very, very hurt by this. You know there's still folks living in this community who grew up down there and had their homes taken from the government and now the bulk of who gets to use it are recreational rafters and whitewater outfitters and then all those homesteads are just fading into dust. It's heartbreaking and it's not in good shape.
Speaker 1:So, since the livestock has moved out of the canyon, the wildlife has diminished rapidly, so noxious weeds have taken over and now the elk population is crashing, the bighorn sheep population is crashing, the mule deer are almost non-existent. It's just. It's a tragedy. It's an absolute tragedy, and I think it does come from people who their heart is in the right place, right? They, they have this idea about wilderness that, uh, it could be so pristine if we just didn't have people there, and that we need to have this and and then we can. It can be public where everybody can go there, but that's just not what actually happens In the end, time and time again, it's not the reality of it.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah, they don't realize. We're so disconnected, we don't realize how ranching families like yours are the reason these places are pristine and beautiful. They're not in the way it's a product of generational stewardship Like in Point Reyes. I've had a lot of people reach out since I started sharing this stuff and this one wonderful little person named Billie. She reached out to me. She's like a traveling, she's like a hundred sheep or goats or something and she travels around in her camper and is grazing for hire and she's out there on Point Reyes and just south of that in Bolinas, and she's like I saw these beautiful farms and they're all abandoned, they're all just in total disrepair, these beautiful old barns and houses, and I tried to understand what's going on. Can I winter here at least, if these people don't live here anymore? She found out it was all parkland and she saw this one house. These people don't live here anymore.
Speaker 2:She found out it was all parkland and she saw this one house. She sent me a video of this beautiful, old, quintessential Northern California dairy barn and house and it's just in total disrepair. The windows are boarded up. She says she sees Park Service vehicles there. There's Parks employees living in that house. Now she says it's totally trashed and this is someone's generational home, this is where people lived for generations. Now she says it's like, totally trashed and this is someone's generational home. You know, this is where people lived for generations. And she was telling me how the soil out there is the best that she's ever seen. It's this incredible topsoil from 150 years plus of grazing out on the peninsula and that's why that place is beautiful. She showed me contrast videos of grazed pastures that still have cattle on them and these barren, you know, overgrown pastures covered in scotch brush. This is what the that's the park's maintenance. That's their, you know, that's their management at work. So it's truly like it's just so. There's just a lot of hubris in it. Right, because it's it's like you forget that the reason these places look the way they do is because it's not wilderness, it's been stewarded.
Speaker 2:I did a documentary just quickly, a couple years ago with a conservation easement group here, ranch group called California Rangeland Trust, which is founded by Nita Vail, who's one of the daughters of the Vail and Vickers Ranch on Santa Rosa Island. So she watched her family lose their heritage and she's an amazing person and she ended up changing her whole career. She was working for the governor at the time. She left her career to really fight for other ranchers to not go through what she went through. Anyway, we did this documentary, kind of looking at some of the ranchers in California who have it rough because it's not a politically friendly place for agriculture.
Speaker 2:And there was one professor from UC Berkeley and she told us she was, you know, lynn Hunsinger, very pro grazing professor of rangeland science. Shockingly, at Berkeley she's just like a huge advocate for grazing. And she said she talked with this older Native American man who said you know, wilderness is a myth of the white man. Because we took care of this place, it's never been wilderness and that's always stuck with me because I think we're doing that now to ranching families where you just want to rewild but you don't know what you're talking about. The reason that you want that place, the reason that you want to preserve it, is because it's been stewarded by grazing and by maintenance, like your family, for so long. That's why the wildlife are thriving there and the watersheds and all of these things. So we've divorced it's an anti-human attitude really where we've divorced human beings from nature.
Speaker 1:I don't know what these folks think they're going to eat Right.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what are you going to wear Like? Imagine your world without glue. You know like you need us. You need us to be successful. Um, I don't know, maybe they'll find out. Okay, I got to lighten it up. Every kid I know who grew up with a large animal veterinarian who traveled around with that vet has some wild stories. Oh man, let's put your dad on the burner here for a second. You tell me a wild story that your dad got you into.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, there's so many really putting me on the spot here. You know, what's so funny is living in California. You get like, on the one hand, there's like flooding in my mind right now my dad needs to write a book. You're so right, it is the wildest way to grow up. You see the most eccentric human beings. Do you remember when Tiger King was a big deal in like 2020, whenever we were all locked up.
Speaker 2:We turned it on because I was home for the pandemic. We were all in lockdown in my well, not really, but you know, in a small town it's kind of like a normal day, but anyway we're watching this show. My dad was like turn this off. I these are my clients like I cannot watch these crazy people with these animals they shouldn't have, this is not entertaining. So he's got like these. You know, california is a mixed bag, so you've got some people who they're just eccentric and I don't exactly know why. They think they need to live in a rural community and own the animals that they've chosen to own, but they're on that trip. So for a while, when I was a kid and I do think that this is like a consistent thing about human nature there's like a fashionable animal Like right now we've got this whole homesteading thing going on and people really want those fuzzy cows. You know, like what are they? Highland?
Speaker 1:or something.
Speaker 2:There's always like a yeah, yeah, there's like a fashionable animal. So when I was a kid it was pot belly pigs, for whatever reason, I remember this phase People were keeping their houses and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so bizarre, that's right.
Speaker 2:That's right. So my dad had this one lady and she owned a bunch of pot belly pigs and she loved these pigs so much and they she had a new. You know, she had a bunch of little baby pigs. They needed cash trading and she didn't want to be there for the the scene, but she wanted them to be comfortable. So we show up and she goes Rich, I can't be here, I got to go, I can't hear this, but they're all in my bedroom and I just want you to castrate them in the bedroom because I want them to be comfortable. And my dad was like that is a terrible idea. He's like ma'am, please just don't do this to yourself, you don't want to do this.
Speaker 2:She's like no, no, no, I've thought about it, I've thought about it and this is what I want for my babies. They need to be comfortable. This is a traumatic experience. My dad begged this woman. He was like, seriously, you don't want to do this. Yeah, so we did our best, I mean we tried. She left the house. All her little pigs are in her room. Oh my God, it was like a war zone. It was insane. We did our best. These things are like running around spraying blood all over the walls all over. It was traumatic and so, anyway, but it was done. We did what she wanted. Next time my dad talked to her, he she was like that really made a mess. Yeah, you think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's why we don't castrate pigs in the house, even pot belly pigs, even designer pigs, oh man no, I, I did a show years ago with a veterinarian friend of mine and it was during the tiger king days. Right and uh, he had a gal named carol. Fly to spokane, washington, and get three tigers and cram them into crates that were made for german shepherds on a hot day left them in a tarmac, and a couple of them died.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, yeah, wow, post-tiger King this wasn't the same lady, this wasn't Baskin, or whatever. We don't know, no comment, no comment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but her name was Carol, and this was during, like when everybody was watching Tiger King. In fact, we recorded the show in Hell's Canyon and this is another funny Forest Service thing they had shut down the boat ramps, like it was illegal to go to the boat ramp to launch a boat, to go into this river wilderness. But there was this little chunk of ground that the church owned that made it down to the river. First Amendment can't shut down religion and I'm going to say that jet boating is my religion, so I was able to launch my boat over the rocks into the river.
Speaker 1:Nice, nice yeah we really had the place to ourselves down there. It was awesome.
Speaker 2:That is awesome.
Speaker 1:Now veterinarians get into some crazy stuff. They should all write books because it's endlessly entertaining.
Speaker 2:It truly is you should. I mean, he'd be a better guest than me. He's got stories for days. If anybody wants a career that may not pay you as much as you should get paid as a doctor, but you will have the most wild days like no. Two days are like ever. You should be a large animal vet.
Speaker 1:Highly recommend yeah, there's another job that's kind of going away.
Speaker 2:Very few people are getting into it and huge, yeah, man not to throw women under the bus, but because I know plenty of great female large animal vets. But you know these schools accept mostly, mostly female students and most of them want to be small animal vets. So you know it's not always about grades. It's like these vet schools have a responsibility to divide up more. There's a huge shortage. There really are not very many large animal ranch you know dairy vets anymore, and it's partly a function of there's a lot of small animal vets and you do get paid more. It's a lot easier, You're in air conditioning, but I think it's less fun. I think your clients are less fun.
Speaker 1:Oh for sure, yeah, your designer cat clients are going to be less fun than your guy. That's like, this cow can't get up, I don't know. Please help, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if you have lots of little kids, my dad was always like, hmm, got to pull a kid, you know they're a goat. You got to get the kids in the family. With the smallest hands You're, you're up for the job. So if you have kids, I'll go to work with you and help you out. That's another nice hack of being a large animal vet no child labor laws. It seems whatsoever.
Speaker 1:Well, keely, where can people check out this tremendous work that you're doing with Unwon, watch these documentaries and, honestly, reading these articles, I mean it's incredible stuff. It's truly incredible what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Thank you, james. That means a lot coming from you again. Truly, um, I really appreciate it. Uh, you can check it all out America on one. Uh, u N W O Ncom. Um, that's across the board. Instagram X all that good stuff, uh. But, thank you, james, I truly appreciate it. I feel that, uh, you're doing really important work. I love that you profile the people with calluses. I think that, man, you guys have the best stories. So, thank you for what you do. Huge fans, it's an honor to be with you today.
Speaker 1:Likewise, keep up the good work and please reach out if there's ever something I can do to help.
Speaker 2:I will do that Same to you.
Speaker 1:Okay, bye everybody. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time out of their busy lives to write a review for the show and share it with their friends. I'm extremely proud of how intelligent, engaged and adventurous this audience is. Original music for the Six Ranch Podcast is written and performed by Justin Hay. Art for the Six Ranch Podcast was created by John Chatelain and digitized by Celia Harlander. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again next week.