Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

🐮 Cheatgrass Chronicles

“Today the honey-colored hills that flank the northwestern mountains derive their hue not from the rich and useful bunchgrass and wheatgrass which once covered them, but from the inferior cheat which has replaced these native grasses. … The cause of the substitution is overgrazing. When the too-great herds and flocks chewed and trampled the hide off the foothills, something had to cover the raw eroding earth. Cheat did.”—Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

For a couple years when I was a teenager, my dad lived in a house near Lebanon, a tiny settlement about ten miles north of Cortez, Colorado. The front porch afforded an expansive view of much of the Montezuma Valley, a quilt of pastures and hayfields and residential development amid patches of sagebrush and piñon-juniper set against the backdrop of Ute Mountain and Mesa Verde. 

On hot, dry summer afternoons I liked to sit on the porch and gaze upon the valley, waiting for the inevitable plume of smoke. It always started as a white-gray wisp wafting into the cloudless blue sky, and sometimes would quickly die down. More often than not, however, the wisp grew into a thick, billowing, dark cloud with glowing orange flames at its base. And then, maybe ten minutes later, the faint sound of sirens would ring out as the volunteer fire fighters raced to the scene hoping to save houses and barns from the expanding inferno. 

Almost every one of these fires was sparked intentionally — a landowner burning their fields against better judgment. And the target of the blaze was almost always the same, an innocent-looking species that is so nasty and pernicious that it can drive folks to risk burning down their own property to get rid of it: cheatgrass, aka Bromus tectorum, a Eurasian annual that invaded North America in the 1800s and has since become one of the continent’s most detested, ubiquitous, and stubborn invasive species. 

The news hook, unfortunately, is not the discovery of a foolproof method to eradicate cheatgrass (burning it doesn’t work, by the way). Rather it’s a new paper on cheatgrass that compiles a collection of scientific studies into a comprehensive, extensive yet digestible, volume: “Cheatgrass invasions: History, causes, consequences, and solutions,” by Erik M. Molvar et al. and put out by the Western Watersheds Project.

Cheatgrass’s invasion of North America echoed Euro-American settler-colonization. The first continent’s earliest record of the grass was made in Pennsylvania in 1790. It popped up in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming in the 1800s, in the wake of mining rushes and subsequent influxes of cattle and sheep to feed the burgeoning settler population. Cheatgrass was carried westward by wagons and railroads where it quickly took over land disturbed by farming and, especially, livestock grazing. Sometimes livestock operators would burn sagebrush and then encourage cheatgrass to replace it since in early spring the green grass makes for nutritious forage. By early summer, though, it’s unpalatable, and the dry seeds drive folks to arson.

By the 1930s cheatgrass, aided by a massive ground invasion of livestock grazing, had invaded much of the West. And further land disturbance in later decades facilitated the spread of the invasive species, which competes with and often displaces native bunch-grasses. In what’s known as the livestock-cheatgrass-fire cycle, grazing facilitates an initial cheatgrass invasion. The flammable grass then burns, taking out native shrubs such as sagebrush, leaving a cheatgrass mono-crop in their place. This destroys the sagebrush ecosystem and harms all the species that depend upon it, making cheatgrass “one of the most significant ecological crises facing land managers in the arid West,” according to the paper. Climate change is expected to make it worse.

It’s all rather depressing, to be honest. And even worse is that there’s no easy way to rid the West of this malignant grass. Various methods have been tried, from burning the stuff to chemical herbicides to amending the soil to even hand-pulling it. None have been successful in the long-term. Some researchers have suggested inoculating cheatgrass with fungi and bacterium, such as black-fingers-of-death. But they could have dire unintended effects. 

Yet it’s not all hopeless. Reducing livestock grazing in areas that have yet to be overrun by cheatgrass has kept a full-invasion at bay, and ceasing grazing altogether in cheatgrass-dominant places has allowed native grasses to recover. Avoiding soil disturbance of any form and preserving the cryptobiotic crusts can help fend off new cheatgrass invasions. The authors of the paper sum it up nicely: 

“The key to combating weed invasions is to prevent the types of conditions and land uses that confer advantages to weed species over native plants, and to restore native plant associations that are resilient and resistant to future weed invasion.”

Dust, snow, and diminishing albedo, JONATHAN P. THOMPSON MAY 7, 2021

🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑 

Year-end real estate market reports are rolling in and, generally, it looks like more of the same: Homes are getting more expensive and further out of reach of the average income earner. And relatively high interest rates don’t seem to be dimming the trend, at least in most places. 

Take La Plata County in southwestern Colorado, home of Durango and of an alarming increase in home prices across the entirety of its 1,700 square miles over the last several years. In 2023, median sales prices shot up once again — by as much as 26.7% in one area — relative to 2022. The typical in-town Durango home will now cost you about $780,000, with the median priced condo/townhome selling for $529,000. The high high-end is even scarier: Homes in Purgatory resort area were selling for about $1.1 million in 2021; now they’re fetching $2.1 million. 

Perhaps most alarming is the way once-affordable areas have also become overpriced. As recently as 2018 the lowest priced house in the county sold for $48,000; last year it was three times that much. While the $150k or so sale would be within the price range of, say, a Durango school teacher, it is an outlier: I look at the listings constantly and rarely see anything under $200,000. The exception might be a trailer in a park, which is great, except that you need to add a $600-$1,200/month lot fee to the mortgage payment, which can easily push affordable housing into the unaffordable zone. 

Sigh… More stats here. 

🐐 Things that get my Goat 🐐

The once lofty institution known as National Geographic recently weighed in on the growing visitation to national parks issue by dispensing some advice to its 9.5 million readers: “National parks overcrowded?” asks the headline. “Visit a national forest.”  

Ugh.

Some national parks clearly are overflowing with visitors. And these crowds may diminish the experience for some of these visitors (others may be just fine with it). And the more people you have, presumably the more impacts they will bring. 

But shuffling them onto nearby public lands isn’t the answer. All that’s doing is moving the people from places that have infrastructure, roads, and rangers designed to handle the crowds and limit their impacts, to places that lack this sort of infrastructure. Instead of being confined to paved roads, paths, viewpoints, visitors centers, and bathrooms, the masses will scatter themselves across fragile terrain with no rangers to guide them back to the trails. 

I’m not saying folks shouldn’t go to the national forests or that they should be kept secret — as if that were even possible. It’s just that National Geographic should think about the potential impacts of these sorts of articles and who is benefiting from them. The parks won’t be better off, nor will the crowds be noticeably smaller. The forests won’t be better off. And probably the would-be national park visitor that headed to the forest to escape the crowds won’t benefit either. There is, after all, a reason so many people go to national parks (they have iconic landforms and infrastructure and interpretive signs and clean toilets and gift shops). They’d only be disappointed by the forests. So let them go to the parks — crowded or not — and leave the forests alone.

📖 Reading Room … 🧐

… or Listening Room in this case. If you liked Tuesday’s Messing with Maps dispatch, you’ll probably also like The Magic City’s podcast delving into the mysteries of Durango’s founding. Even those most versed in Colorado history will learn something and it’s a captivating listen, besides. Check it out on Spotify or at The Magic City. 

Parting Shot