I went on a 3 day hiking trip in the Weminuche Wilderness, part of the San Juan National Forest. Specifically, we did a lollipop loop in the Three Forks Trail System with a short stint along the Continental Divide Trail.

It was an amazing trip and the scenery was gorgeous, EXCEPT FOR ALL THE COWS!!

There were cow patties EVERYWHERE. The cattle's hooves messed up the trails really bad. Fortunately my brother's water filter came with a drop bottle of chlorine otherwise I would be worried about cow poo in the water sources too. Man... it kinda sucked.

And I did not expect that at all. I had no idea livestock were allowed to range on our national forests.

Our first day, we drove all day to the trail head and then set up camp real close to the trail head. When we found a good site, I saw all the cow patties and I was really puzzled. I didn't know what to think, like, where did they come from? There's no cows allowed here right?? My brother insisted we stay put. We caught some trout and fried them up and right after I ate the last bite, I looked up the hill and there's this friggin cow just staring at me! Then I saw a few more. We started a fire to get them to go away but they didn't mind the smoke I guess. There was 2 juveniles, 3 adults and one bull with big horns.

This may sound silly to some, but we were actually really freaked out by the cows. I have no experience with cattle, except for watching youtube videos of dumb kids getting chased by cows, probably as a result of "cow tipping" attempts. But there was this one cow that would not stop staring at us. And it kept getting closer and closer. We were freaking out big time lol, but we decided we had to get out of there. We frantically packed up all our gear and got out of there as soon a possible and found a new site to camp right after the sun set. Rather stressful way to start a backpacking trip.

As soon as we got to Blue Lake the cows were well behind us, no cows along the CDT trail either, but once got on the Middle Fork trail the cows were back and we had to contend with them all the way back to the trail head. I think on the way back I remember chatting with another hiker and he said the rancher had around 300 head of cattle. Quite a lot.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

COWS ARE EVIL!! Do not eat beef. You cannot call yourself an environmentalist and eat meat. From this day on (ok, maybe tomorrow), I'm going vegetarian. Ok I'm not giving up fish or cheese but I will be happy to never eat a hamberger for the rest of my days. It's a COWSPIRACY! lol, but seriously... http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/ ... cows are evil.

Here's the damn cows grazing next to our tents



Matt thought about smacking them with the frying pan but decided that animal cruelty was not a good idea



And heres the one evil cow that wouldn't stop staring at us, freaking me out man



These photos were from the first day before we started down the trail. The next day my camera was destroyed from rain (brought an old point and shoot that I didn't care much about, hence the low quality photos) so I wasn't able to get anymore photo evidence, but the cows really tore up the trail and spread poo everywhere.

I watched the Cowspiracy documentary last night (silly name but a really great film) and it said that cows poop waaaay more than humans, and theres like 3 times as much livestock as humans, and their waste isn't treated like our sewage is. All that poo releases methane and other green house gasses that are way worse than CO2.

They literally destroy the land as well as the air. They eat all the grass which causes erosion, trample up the ground really well which causes more erosion, and shit all over everything. So now that I've seen the devastation first hand, I'm pretty much determined that cows suck!

National Forests and BLM lands are managed for multiple-use, that includes grazing permits. The cows probably are there with a late-season grazing permit. The location of the permits is public information- just ask the FS and you can avoid these areas.

There are plenty of hiking areas that do not allow cows. Just use this trip as a lesson learned. Check on grazing next time. The cows where you were happened to have just as much a right to be there as you. In fact, the grazing permit costs $$ and probably is a reason that we backpackers get to hike for free in a lot of areas.

Cows are curious creatures,so that's about as freaky as having a poodle looking at you in a city park. My experience is mostly dairy cattle, but I've worked with range cattle and had many encounters in the Sierra. The most dangerous thing about them is mountain lions take down the sick and the calves. You don't want to come upon a fresh kill. Had that happen in the Inyos, it was very, very scary. Cows can do damage, as they have in the Golden Trout Wilderness in the southern end of the Sierra. It was first believed the erosion and siltation caused the streams and the pure strain Goldens to be displaced, later it was found to make them spawn more successfully and stunted them via overpopulation! Next time, clank the pan and yell Big Mac with fries!

My proverbial ox is gored every time I backpack into Emigrant Wilderness (California) and see they're still grazing the high country. The damage is considerable and long-lasting; the grazing fee is a literally laughable leftover from the nineteenth century, and they won't allow conservation groups to bid for them when they come up for renewal; reserving them for Actual Cattle Grazers.

If there's one thing I've learned about the American West, we're still willing to sell off our resources, cheap.

That's a great post!!!

The real reason those cows were so close to you, and staring at you, is you set up your camp right on top of their dinner table!

I'm pretty sure you never saw a bull there, and steers aren't aggressive, so you didn't really have anything to worry about. If you would have waved your arms and yelled and ran towards them they would've ran off. Not very far, but they would've moved away a little.

It's worth noting that the grassy field you were camping on is only grassy because those cows are there to graze. It'd be a thicket if it weren't for them. I'm with Wondering Daisy on this, those ranchers pay to graze their cattle there, and those I've known were good stewards of the land they own and lease.

I don't eat as much beef as I used to, but I still love it. The best beef I've ever had I raised myself. Those white ones look like Charolais. I raised one of those when I was a teen. They're an awesome beef cow. Now I'm getting cravings just thinking about it!

Pitching tents out in a meadow is not exactly "leave no trace," either. As mentioned, you set up camp on their dinner table. There is plenty of National Forest land where there is no livestock; why not go there if you dislike cattle so much? Your photos of lush tall grass certainly refute your claim of overgrazing!

Yes camping in that location was a big mistake, but we were hiking nubes in an area where we have never been and we were bound to make a lot of mistakes. Camping there was just the first (maybe second) mistake we made that trip.

I figured if I yelled and ran at them then they would move but my brother, who was more nervous about them then I was, told me not to, just in case.

Either way, I'm not a fan of the cows.

To smooth any rustled feathers/fur, camping in a meadow in which cattle graze is no kind of backcountry sin--one steer does orders of magnitude damage that a tent pitched there for the evening. And looking at your photos, the runoff into that lake will have a lovely fecal coliform component to it. Nice.

With that said, cohabitating with thousand-pound critters is always an opportunity for misadventure. It's a learning experience, finding campsites. The woods at the edge of a meadow can often be a nice compromise.

Cheers,

It might be well to point out a few things about the Wilderness Act. When it was passed, existing grazing permits in wilderness areas were grandfathered in--part of the price for getting the act through Congress. However, once a grazing permit is vacated, it cannot be reissued, so by now well over half of the wilderness grazing permits are defunct.

Another issue is that ranchers depend on summer grazing on public land for their cattle, because their privately owned acreage is used to grow hay to get the cattle through the winter. Without summer grazing, they'll have to get out of ranching. You might think this is a good thing. The result, though, is that their land, generally extensive enough to allow coexistence with wildlife, is subdivided into two- to ten-acre lots with a McMansion on each. The resulting density can be disastrous to wildlife, as they lose much of their winter range. I've seen this happen in many cases where ranchers have chosen to get out. We are also seeing a lot of taxpayer money being spent to protect said McMansions from wildfire.

I am not exactly a fan of cattle, either. While I try to avoid hiking in cattle country, sometimes I have to pass through it on the way to higher elevations. I can put up with them for a night or two--generally I ignore them. They stare for a while (so do deer and elk!) and then go about their business. I am, of course, very careful to watch where I'm walking or sitting while in cattle country!

Since it's not quite my bedtime, I'll leave this. An "AUM" is one head for one month, or one cow and her calf. That buck sixty-nine per month for 2015 works out to a nickel per day, and how they extrapolated it from the base rate of a buck twenty-three in 1966 is math the likes of which I never learned. Pretty sure that means a new car should cost three grand. (We can get to Mr. Bundy's non-payment of that nickel/day in another forum.)

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of cattle grazing in wilderness, but I understand how and why it is allowed. The main damage cows do is in riparian areas, not in grasslands anyway.

As for working ranches getting turned into vacation homes for the very wealthy, I prefer a working ranch under good ownership. All those big new homes do is put a further drain on water resources and animal habitat in dryland areas. The root problem behind it all is the increased pressure put on every living thing caused by an ever-growing human population. Meat-eating is just a sideshow issue compared to the bigger issue of resource depletion.

Exactly. And don't for get that John Muir first discovered Tuolumne Meadows when he worked as a shepherd and took a huge flock of sheep to graze there...

It is also interesting to note that the major beef producing states such as Texas, Nebraska and Kansas have virtually no federally subsidized grazing land. Almost all beef from these states is produced on private land. California is also a major producer but with a relatively small proportion of beef coming from public land cow-calf operations. Also, public land grazing is decreasing in California.

Many other western states which rely hugely on public grazing produce relatively little beef. Idaho for example, heavily reliant on public grazing, produces about 2.5% of the nations beef behind such states as Oklahoma, Missouri, South Dakota and Wisconsin which rely on private pasture. States that pride themselves on their "cowboy" culture such as Wyoming, Arizona and New Mexico, are all reliant on subsidized public grazing and rank at, or near the bottom half of states in beef production. Nevada ranks 37 on the list, just behind Utah and just ahead of West Virginia.
In my opinion, all public lands could be closed to grazing with relatively little other than short-term effect on the nation's beef supply. Sure it would make a major disruption to the western cattle industry and would destroy an established way of life for many. I sure don't recommend closing lands. But. I thought my notes above might add a bit of perspective to what can be a truly contentious issue.

Hmmm, very interesting. Seems to me that free-range cattle is not sustainable. They need more land than is available on this planet, and IMO putting the cows in our National Forests is not the right answer. Right now, as we debate this, the Amazon rain forest is being cut down and 91% is for cattle grazing and growing of cattle feed. Also, not the right answer to this problem. The only thing we can do is to stop having all these cows.



Too true



Yeah but us hikers practice LNT, the cows do not!

from the front page of the Food and Water Watch website...

The cattle have been on these lands since long before the USFS was in charge. This is a case of grandfathered usage, not a new land use development in the national forests.

You got me curious, so I looked it up and found this from the California Cattlemen's Association.



To sum up, a third of the state is considered range and pasture, of which half is federal.

I support retiring grazing permits for alpine and subalpine zones. This won't happen as the politics are a-gin' it, but restoration of this abused habitat for enhancement of native wildlife in preference to commercial use is what I envision. Short of that, the federal grazing fee should be set based on the prevailing commercial rate (which is several times as much).

Leaving politics at the door would be a good idea.

To the OP, we better ban termites too then. I understand they produce quite a bit of methane gas too. Found this, but you'd have to read other sites too. You have more worries than cows out there in the woods. Bears, lions.

http://www.ghgonline.org/methanetermite.htm

Duane

I found the steady stream of horse manure from Yosemite Valley up to the high camps to be much more irritating. I was in Canyonlands where there is evidence of of damage by cattle and "cowboys" from 100 years ago which is still very evident. Basically in any area where grazing is calculated in acres per cow instead of cows per acre should not be used for grazing.

Obviously this is a hot topic. Hey, why not add to the fire.
There are several places that I go backpacking that are heavily used by cattle. One place I like to go because it is close to home (think less than 2 miles) and very few people. It is private land that is owned by a co-op of many people. I have talked to a few of them for permission (in case you were wondering). Pretty much every time I go there, I run into a large herd. They also seem to like my favorite place to camp. One time we came to our favorite spot, and there was a large herd. They scootched over a tad and let us set up camp. Then they bedded down for the night right next to us. Very early in the morning they got up and left. This is all private land, not BLM or NF. Because it is private, it gets very little people disturbance. So far, the cow disturbance is not as bad as the human disturbance.
I do think that we need to change the way we manage cattle in this country. I have been listening/following Joel Salatin recently, trying to understand his method. He believes in trying to mimic nature with regard to herbivores. That means "mobing/mowing/moving". You have to keep them in tight groups (mobing), then let them eat a specific spot of grass enough (mowing), and then move them to a new area and don't let them touch that same spot again for another year (moving). This keeps the grass healthy, builds soil, increases the amount of water that the soil can hold (less soil runoff), decreases disease, and a bunch of other stuff. His method would be difficult to do on National Forest or BLM land, because it is labor intensive.

To add to that, I would say that your website saying cows are evil is a little misleading. You could use the same logic and say that crops are evil because it takes a lot of fuel to grow them and that gives off greenhouse gases, plus crops have GMO's in them, and the use of pesticide and herbicide is destroying our environment and the natural population of animals in the area. So, now you can't eat meat or vegetables. Cows aren't the problem, it is how we raise them that is.

The politics of grazing permits is directly related to backpacking, and this post, so it's not off limits. As a policy we agreed to discuss unrelated political issues in the "Off Topic: All-in-One" forum and to keep it respectful there.

Honestly, I've not seen any serious damage caused by grazing cattle in the Sierras. That's not to say there has been none, but over the years that I spent camping, hiking, and backpacking there I saw cows, but never an overcrowding of them, and never what looked to me like lasting damage to an area. I also saw sheep, and never saw a problem with them either.

That was between 25-40 years ago, and permits have been retired since. I never felt it was out of balance back then, so I can't see how it's much of a problem now.

I dunno, I guess I'm different, but I honestly always liked seeing those cows there. They couldn't have been happier and it made me feel good that they got to spend their time there. I feel the same when I see cows grazing here. For a cow, being raised here or there is a pretty good life while it lasts. I'd like that stay as it is.

In the late 70's I worked for the USFS and spent 2 seasons in spike camps building fences and repairing damage from BLM cattle leases that abutted USFS land in the eastern Sierra. Places like Big and Little Whitney Meadows saw a lot of damage, as did many of the smaller meadows from Mammoth south. In fact the cattle ate enough in the more arid zones in the Inyos and Whites (the eastern side of the Owens Valley) that the Desert Big Horns became endangered. This led to lots of fencing off of the BLM lands and the start of capturing wild horses and burros that also decimated the same short grasses. Am I anti-cattle? Nope, not in the least. I am against overgrazing and putting cattle where they can do lots of harm. There are far more beefers and dairy cows where I live than people, I actually prefer it that way.

Hi Bill,

For whatever it's worth, grazing occurs today in the high Sierra, along with commercial packing...a whole other can 'o worms. Amending my notes from yesterday, evaluation of mountain meadow health and restoration is becoming a relevant topic for the water supply so there's hope it will receive long-warranted attention. It turns out healthy meadows increase capture of runoff, both protecting watersheds and helping extend runoff into summer and fall. As the snowpack lessens with time, such water capture and gradual release becomes critical in maintaining the water supply infrastructure.

Found a technical paper on evaluating meadow health and options for restoration. In the interest of tl;dr, some excerpts:

Main Stressors--
Overgrazing
Recreational Use [specifically, pack animals]
Roads and Trails
Residential and Commercial Development
Altered fire regime
Climate change
Invasive Species

States of Degradation--

Level 1: The insulting stressor no longer exists, and the system will eventually recover to its pre-stressor functioning level within a human timescale (e.g., roughly 25 yrs) without intervention. At this first level, no state transition occurs because the system (meadow) is able to resist a change in processes and/or is able to recover its processes to within the natural range of variability of the original state (e.g., the system is “resilient” to the effects of the stressor).

i.e., If the stress ends, the meadow will eventually revert to its original state.

Level 2: The stressor remains active and must be removed or “neutralized” in order for the system to recover to its pre-stressor condition. In this case, continued stress would push the control processes and/or conditions of a meadow across a threshold so that the meadow would then have a different set of potential vegetation types, aka be in a different state.

i.e., In transition to not recoverable without active restoration efforts.

Level 3: The system has already crossed a state threshold and entered a positive feed back loop that no longer requires the presence of the original stressor(s). In this case, degradation will continue unless actions are taken to re-direct system processes.

i.e., Time to call the CCC.