Sheep trailing to summer range will go on

One of just a handful of large, range sheep operations still operating in southwest Idaho, Harry Soulen is feeling a little bit better than he was just a few weeks ago about trailing his four bands of sheep to summer range later this spring.

 Sometime towards the end of December, Soulen had received word that the Boise National Forest was thinking about putting a full closure on the Van Wyck Stock Driveway this spring, the route his sheep have taken to and from the Soulen Livestock grazing leases on the Payette National Forest for decades.

 Both private and public land in Idaho was hit hard by lightning caused fires last summer from mid-July well into the fall. Starting on the Boise NF on Sept. 2, the Lava Fire blew up on Sept. 8, taking an unexpected 13-mile northerly run onto the Payette NF. Before it was fully contained, the fire affected 98,000 acres of public and private lands, including across the Van Wyck.

 Soulen had arranged for a spot on the Washington County Commissioners agenda in mid-January, but by the time he sat down with the board he said he believed Boise NF officials were backing off of the closure stance.

 “I’ve visited on the phone extensively with Boise NF and come to find out, the people from the Boise NF didn’t really realize where the sheep trail runs,” he said. “They thought it ran a little different route.”

 Soulen said he and Payette NF officials had overlaid the Forest Service’s fire intensity map over a map showing the Van Wyck drive.

 “It’s red for the area that burned really hot, yellow for what was moderate, and blue where it was a pretty cool fire,” he said. “The blue line follows the stock drive identically.”

 In a telephone interview a couple of weeks later, the Payette’s Council/Weiser District Ranger Jeff Jones told the Signal American they had been working with the Boise NF and there are no issues with Soulen using the Van Wyck Driveway this year.

 “Grazing is still going to occur up through that area where they have typically camped and resided and different locations were lighter burned,” Jones said. “They were open, grassy areas, anyway. The fire burned through pretty quickly, and where it gets over onto the Payette it gets into an area where it starts to go out of the Lava Fire and into the (remnants) of the 2022 4 Corners Fire, so that area’s also recovered from the lack of vegetation. So, there’s not any issues with that use occurring this year.”

 Jones added that there will also be cattle drives in a portion of the area this year.

 “Some of the roads are closed, and as we get into the range season, when the permittees are authorized to get up there, they’re going to use the lower part of the Van Wyck to get up onto the forest to where some of the roads are open,” Jones said. “So there could be multiple uses up there this year.”