Jim and Holly Akenson Interview, Part One Item Info
Topics:
Jack Kredell:Because your names are synonymous almost with Taylor Ranch at this point. If you could just introduce yourself and talk about your affiliation or connection to Taylor.
Jim Akenson:Okay. You would go first time.
Holly Akenson:I'm Holly Ackenson, and we first went to Taylor Ranch in 1982, and Jim and I got married in 1978. And the time we got married, we said, you know, we're probably going to live somewhere where we don't have electricity. So we told people not to buy us any wedding gifts that were electric related, and we didn't know where we might end up.
But that was sort of what helped lead us to to Taylor Ranch and University of Idaho.
Jim Akenson:Yeah, my name is Jim Akenson and would concur with Holly's assessment There and add to it that we had some pretty desirable professional opportunities in 1982. I was finishing my Master's degree and was working for the Bureau of Land Management as a wilderness planner, and there was some good opportunities looming. But the thing that pulled us to Taylor Ranch was a combined opportunity, for one thing, something for both of us, Holly's wildlife background.
And at that time I wilderness management interests and background. But it was an adventure. And that was the bottom line. And I think that was the main thing. During our mid-twenties, what pulled us back there in 1982.
Jack Kredell:Just to give you a heads up, if I like, have an awkward pause after you finish talking, it's just that there's enough space there to cut and.
Jim Akenson:Have to be, you know. Yeah. Okay.
Jack Kredell:So let's see. At that time, this was 82.
Jim Akenson:Yeah.
Jack Kredell:So was this a couple of years after the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness had been officially designated by Congress?
Jim Akenson:Well, it was in between two significant namings, basically, which was the river of No return wilderness is 1980. And then the Frank Church River No Return wilderness occurred in 1984, I believe. And so we were right in between those four year period. And I had it was transitioning to designated wilderness from being referred to as the Idaho primitive area.
And a lot of people, pilots and backcountry recreational this we're still referring to it as the primitive area. It was more commonly called that than the river of No return, and certainly not the Frank Church for no return at that time.
Jack Kredell:And what was what was Taylor's name? prior to that? But that name change from primitive to wilderness was.
Jim Akenson:Taylor Ranch, per say, well, under university ownership dating back to 1970, technically it was known as either Taylor Ranch Field Station, which was most of our time period there, or Taylor Ranch Research Station or Research Center. (indistinguishable).
Holly Akenson:I was thinking before, before Taylor was there was called the Lewis Place.
Jim Akenson:Yeah, in the thirties.
Holly Akenson:Lewis was the one that homesteaded. So the site is had different names but think still people often refer to it as Taylor Ranch. The university is more formalized in in name now with the research station part, but a lot of the local people still refer to it as Taylor Ranch.
Jim Akenson:Interestingly, it was referred to a lot as the ranch, and I know as our early years as manager. So we thought that needed a modification or something more specific.
Holly Akenson:Well, it was awkward because then we became the ranch managers, which we weren't really ranchers or managing a ranch. So that was a little confusing with the the management piece.
Jim Akenson:We cut for just a minute. I'm going to put both dogs in the house. Too distracting.
Dog disturbance. So one thing that I would say in those early years in, we had familiarity with the Hells Canyon Wilderness, the Eagle Camp Wilderness. And to me it just felt it seemed to be much more like an Alaskan wild place than either one of those wildernesses we were familiar with here. And a lot of that relates to the fact that it had a lot of aviation in it.
There's so many places that you could fly to and such a dependance for from a service perspective on the mail plane and that whole mail service. And to me, I really like that feel that it it was broader than just some ice glacier peak type wilderness or big canyon. It had a backcountry culture connected with it and that seemed very apparent right from the get go.
Holly Akenson:And the other thing is it it's such a large landscape that the wilderness itself in encompassed everything from alpine summer ranges for large mammals to the winter ranges, whereas most wilderness is only have part of the area that's used by large mammals. So that was really what I found fascinating. And, and we enjoyed living on Big Creek and working up and down the canyon, hiking and and knowing that what we saw was what was out there.
There were no other people disturbing animal movements or behaviors that was truly of large scale intact system.
Jack Kredell:Can you can you describe the geography of the site when you step out of the front door? What do you see?
Jim Akenson:Well, you're you're in the middle of a massive block of mountains, of Salmon River mountains, but you're also in a canyon environment. And to me, it just was so similar to Hells Canyon, except for obviously Big Creek, the side canyon in the middle for it, which is a side canyon to the Salmon River. I would say it's a river dominated landscape of riverine dominated landscapes.
Holly Akenson:And everything's uphill except when you go down Big Creek and often uphill in steep ways. So really provided with that quick relief of diversity of environments in a very short distance. Dave Lewis Peak was right behind Taylor Ranch and that was 9000.
Jim Akenson:350
Holly Akenson:Yeah, and Taylor Ranch was around 3700 feet.
Jim Akenson:3900? Yeah, almost close. Yeah. Yeah.
Holly Akenson:So lots of different elevation changes and the aspects were totally different. The drainage is the east west drainage and so the north facing slopes were forested primarily with Douglas fir, but also Ponderosa pine. The south facing slope for mostly open bunchgrass and some sagebrush. So again, tremendous diversity in environments in a very small scale area. And when your only mode of travel is hiking or riding a mule, you don't get very far away to to have this close environment.
That's one thing that's really different for us now here is just because you can get in a vehicle and drive in the area that's your local neighborhood is much bigger than a Taylor Ranch on Big Creek. We had a very small local neighborhood that we could access.
Jim Akenson:And I would say, again, stepping outside the cabin there. Taylor What do you feel? Well, one thing I would say is you feel that you are a small entity in a big environment in here. For instance, in this Wallowa valley, I don't get that feeling. It's like it's still even though there's great mountains like those behind us and a couple well, three wilderness areas nearby.
When I took in and helped Hells Canyon in the Eagle camp, I don't feel that. I feel that it's still kind of heavily influenced by man in the Frank Church. There's so much of that that is not influenced by man. So it's a different feel and it's a sensation, again, more like an Alaskan backcountry experience.
Jack Kredell:You guys missed that. That sensation.
Jim Akenson:yeah. There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about some aspect of Big Creek and Taylor Mountain, and I think that'll be the way it is for the rest of our lives. And I don't know, maybe you view it a little differently, but.
Holly Akenson:Yeah, I think that's one of the hardest things about leaving. They're leaving the backcountry in Idaho is that it's almost like a nature addiction that we just had such a strong desire to be in a natural environment, and that was difficult to leave that and being more of a rural environment, just the changing seasons and intimately knowing a small area in the wilderness and knowing what the seasons were going to be like and and what animals were there and what the plant phenology was going to be.
It was a very close connection to nature that is difficult to find in most environments.
Jim Akenson:And a close connection to the seasons. And seasons change, and that's something that I haven't felt as much here as we felt there. And, you know, I remember always looking forward to summer being over, even though from a job responsibility standpoint as manager scientists at Taylor Ranch, you know, that's where we did a lot a lot of what we did with students occurred in the summer, but it was just intensely hot.
Days were long and it was I don't know, there just wasn't as much peace and tranquility of mind as there was like, say, in the middle of winter or those shoulder seasons.
Holly Akenson:So I think that was part of the the fun of the diversity of seasons. It wasn't just the diverse seasons on the ground in nature, but also what our responsibilities were, whether it was our own research in the winter or intensive socializing in the summer with a lot of student programs going on each season, I think we look forward to for different reasons.
Jim Akenson:Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah.
Jack Kredell:So does that mean that you miss the days of removing ice from the water intake?
Jim Akenson:You know, that's just all part of the program. There was frustration associated with that day in and day out, rudimentary basics. But on the other hand, it also denoted self-reliance. That I think is sorely missed in today's culture that, yeah, well, we can fix that and go on with things. We've got other things to do. And you had to operate at a higher level of, again, self-reliance and capability to resolve situations.
And I do miss that. And it just was a little bit of a stepping back in time to Idaho Frontier Times, in a way. Although getting the mail flown in once a week sort of diminished that aspect. Then on the other hand, it was pretty nice too, because it kept us in touch and kept us supplied.
Holly Akenson:In those basic life chores just to make sure we had running water or our power really connected us with our backcountry community, which we really value to this day. Our backcountry community were other people who lived in similar places to Taylor Ranch, probably ten different backcountry ranches or facilities in the winter time expanded more to maybe 20 in the the summer time.
But we connected with those people and we helped each other. They helped us, we helped them. We maybe just talked to them on the radio, got advice, gave advice. But it was our connection with community because even though we were working for university of Idaho, our day to day relationships were with the people that were chopping the ice out of their water box.
The same day that we were. And so we may have had very different political views or educational backgrounds, but those were our friends and people that we really bonded with because we shared that lifestyle. And that was really special.
Jim Akenson:Yeah, whether it was forest fires and what the where they were going next or earthquakes. And did you feel that that was all communicated on this backcountry radio network and and that was the glue that pulled together our community and really our our culture and something that we're trying to capture now through possibly a book, at least an essay of people's backcountry radio experiences.
And we're communicating with several people who lived through a similar time period in the Idaho backcountry zones and and to tell some stories of interest from their backcountry radio events to capture that because it's it's it's already gone. It isn't what it used to be now that there's satellite Internet capability throughout the backcountry.
Holly Akenson:Yeah that that connection is missing. There are people on the main Salmon River still have it because they interact directly, but we were so far from our nearest winter neighbor was 21 miles away and they were actually on a different channel on the backcountry radio. So our relationships with people were totally tied with radio and not on the ground connections.
And the after the first period we were at Taylor Ranch, we did a big pack trip to leave Taylor rather than fly out with our stuff. We took our horses and mules and we made a 175 mile pack trip and we rode the whole backcountry and visited all these people, most of whom we'd never met. But we talked to them on the radio a lot, so we had relationships with them.
But we hadn't physically seen them or been to their places. So that was really a neat way to to leave the backcountry and connect with all of those people that had been an important part of our lives there.
Jim Akenson:And I guess to clarify on that, we had two tenures at Taylor Ranch. One was the first one was 1982 to 1990, and we were away from 1992 97. We went back in 97 and were there until 2010. So basically 21 years of full time residents there over 28 year period. And we saw a huge transition. In fact, that became, I guess, a fundamental theme in the book that we wrote titled 7003 Days in the Frank Church, where No Return Wilderness was the transition from the old ways of Idaho to basically the new ways which came about, I would say really distinctly in about the year 2000 coming forward.
So we, I would like to think had half of our time, maybe a hair more in old Idaho and then the other ten years were in what would be categorically New Idaho, which was I guess I won't say dominated by but influenced by electrification of Taylor Ranch Field Station and also Internet communication capability, which ultimately brought about kind of the demise of the backcountry Radio in that closeness of community, which we had felt during earlier times.
Holly Akenson:It also made it more difficult to focus students on the environment because they would have an opportunity to either be on the Internet or watch videos, whereas in our earlier tenure there was nothing to do but go fishing or read a book or go hiking. And so all of the extracurricular activities were still tied with getting out into the wilderness.
And so once we had that Internet access, we actually had to limit it to encourage students to continue to enjoy what was there in the in the wilderness and not focus on what they might be doing if they were in Moscow.
Jack Kredell:And talk about how that that old Idaho, in terms of the stuff, the backcountry community and backcountry knowledge helped enable a lot of the science that was done early on in Taylor.
Jim Akenson:Yeah, I guess in to get to the root of that, I think it's important to go to some of our initial contacts when we first went to Taylor Ranch in 1982, and then that being Maurice Hornocker and Ed Krumpe, who was our supervisor at the time, both those two felt it was important that we maintained horses and mules, for instance, to help facilitate the research and handle the logistics of the backcountry.
And the Maurice took it even deeper by suggesting that using those old ways helped with our acceptance in the backcountry that, you know, if we did things like pack mules and ultimately put up with a mule team, for instance, we were in we were we were part of that backcountry nucleus, which I think as time went on, we really not only embraced it, but saw the truth in it that that was really, I think, what gained us a lot of acceptance in the backcountry, not to mention the capability to put out fairly major wall tent camps to conduct wintertime cougar research and bobcat work and those sorts of things.
It it it was practical and it was philosophical. And it was also, I think, a testimony to living history. And in there, you know, and then Krumpe was very big in supporting that, you know, through the eighties with how we conducted how we did business there. And we built a barn, we put up hay with the mule team.
We brought in all our firewood with either mule power or human power in some cases. So it it was important. And I think that there still is that element there at Taylor Ranch in the Field Station, but it needs to be reinvigorated again. And it certainly can be. It's like your chairs falling.
Jack Kredell:And, you know, I love that scene in the book when you guys bring in a, quote, mule skinner.
Jim Akenson:yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah.
Jack Kredell:And outside consultant.
Jim Akenson:Right.
Holly Akenson:So yes.
Jim Akenson:Yeah. Important. Yeah, that was important in the early eighties.
Holly Akenson:And well, the other thing that I think is interesting is thinking back on when we were first there, how different the communication was because like Jim said, Ed Krumpe was our supervisor and I doubt we communicated with him more than once a month, either a.
Jim Akenson:Quick.
Holly Akenson:Letter on the backcountry radio or a letter sent out on the mail plane.
Jim Akenson:The backcountry Radio was totally public. So you didn't go into much specific business or personal detail. So it was pretty much by letter.
Holly Akenson:But there was a good trust between Ed Krumpe and us that he knew we were out there doing our job and we didn't really have that much communication back and forth. Now I just think about that and think of how unusual that would be to have somebody that's hired that you don't ever hear from that has such little contact.
Jim Akenson:And I think that there were some researchers that were involved that Taylor in those early eighties years, 82 to 85, that were important influences on us as well. Gary Koehler's bobcat research he did for his dissertation through Maurice Hornocker That was an important one because it carried on that tradition at Heritage of how you conduct winter research business in that environment, with the use of the stock wall, tents, food stored in garbage cans, all of that.
And then Frank Hardy's archeology anthropology work, looking at the subsistence lifestyle patterns of the tactics of the sheep or Indians on Big Creek, that was just like being in a National Geographic special where day in and day out we would have some contact or involvement with the crew that was doing the excavation just to half a mile downstream from Taylor Ranch to look at these house pits and what artifacts could be found there.
And also speculating how these people would have lived in that environment. So very major influences on us and how we viewed the type of learning experiences that could be conducted from that that site looking into the future.
Holly Akenson:And I think for me, one of the things that I really liked about being tied with a small field station is the opportunity to learn from everybody who's doing research or classes. There. And we definitely took advantage of that and went out with people on their field excursions or we had our students go with various researchers and and learn and experience the various aspects.
But it really brings together the connectedness of different research projects. And we saw that kind of collaboration with some of the research, particularly in the stream ecology side of things that geologists would collaborate with fish biologists and aquatic invertebrate biologists and people looking at stream morphology and coming together and spending time camping together and talking together about what everybody found and how does it interrelate.
And I really thought that was really a special opportunity to be tied with multiple research projects and learning about all the different facets.
Jim Akenson:So and I guess I would add to that the social site for that transfer of information in the eighties anyway, perhaps the late nineties was the barbecue pit, the same pit where Dave Lewis had entertained his clients in the 1920s and thirties and just Taylor in the fifties and sixties. That's where everybody would get together and transfer that information in.
And actually that's the same barbecue pit where the governor at that time, Governor Baldrige and Forrest's upper echelon and Dave Lewis got together and talked about the need for establishing the Idaho primitive area. And that would have been in the early to mid twenties. So that is a very significant site. And I think if you were going to have a you talked about using pins on places that are important, the barbecue pit, the Taylor Ranch is the hub of transfer of information that spans now greater than a century.
So a real significant point.
Jack Kredell:Yeah, it sounds like all the research done at Taylors and the disciplinary.
Jim Akenson:Really is and to me, I think that's its strength and will be not just in the past or now, but into the future, is that blending of scientific thinking and approach to environmental problems and solutions? Basically?
Jack Kredell:Yeah, that seems important now. Yeah, because in the foreword to your book, Maurice quotes Aldo Leopold to the effect that the landscape for the land is an organism. And you guys were at Taylor, I think the year that Idaho reintroduced Wolves not too far from Taylor. And I'm wondering if you can talk about the change to that organism that occurred, as a result of the reintroduction.
Holly Akenson:So we move back to Taylor Ranch Research Station in 19.
Jim Akenson:97.
Holly Akenson:Seven. So it was a couple of years after Wolves had been reintroduced in central Idaho. And that was actually one of the big reasons we wanted to go back as wildlife biologists. We wanted to study that relationship. So originally we thought we would start studying cougars because there had been three previous cougar research projects and we wanted to be prepared for when wolves moved into the cougar territories.cougars
As it turned out, the very year we started to do our research, the Wolves arrived on Big Creek and so we initiated a study of cougars and wolves, and we saw some fascinating changes, particularly those first few years after wolves populated the area. There were significant changes in the ungulate population, particularly elk. We were collecting information on the carcasses of the animals that were killed by cougars and wolves and found that that population of elk was quite old.
And so there were really a lot of older aged animals suddenly being killed by wolves. It was different than when cougars were the only the only big predator that was back there.cougars
Jim Akenson:We take a break for just the second. I've got to go to the bathroom and I'm going to get her to shut up.
Jack Kredell:Okay. So we were talking about changes to the landscape as as a result of the reintroduction of more light.
Jim Akenson:And I guess I would say in regards to that, I wouldn't really say the landscape as much as the occupants of the landscape, the other animals, and there was quite a bit of effect, particularly as the years went by, the wolves became, well, basically asserted their dominance and became more numerous. We had this phenomena which really complicated that assessment and our research in that at the same time wolves are gaining momentum and increasing in number.
We had this massive wildfire, so it was kind of hard to sort out is the effect of what's going on related to the fire or is it the wolves or is it a combination of the two and, you know, I guess our focal species that we were looking at to get at that question was cougars, wolves, mountain lions.
And they certainly were affected by both those entities. The fire, in terms of how it affected the prey base, the prey species, but they they were having a struggle and then you put wolves in on top of it and I just think it really affected cougars adversely. So now it'd be interesting to look at that same situation now that there's been an element of reduction in wolf numbers through hunting and cougars have had the opportunity to adapt to living with wolves.
It's it's it's dynamic. It's always in a state of change. And that situation we saw it out was certainly different than the situation of today.
Holly Akenson:Well, I think that that's really the big message that we learned personally and professionally is the dynamics of of a wild environment that is, you know, Maurice Hornocker quoted Aldo Leopold about the stability of an ecosystem and coming back to a stable state. But it's the dynamic aspect that really, I guess you could call it stable or you could call it not stable, but things change and different aspects influence other aspects and they may not come back to the same normal that there was in the past.
And we had one of our favorite data sets that we looked at was the long term change in ungulate populations over time. And we used a variety of sources for data and looked at relative abundance of deer and elk and bighorn sheep and moose and mountain goat. But we started with the dataset from the from the sheep beta Indians with information that was collected from the archeologists from these house pit sites of what the proportion of species in the bones that were found in these sites.
And early on and 2000 years ago, bighorn sheep were the predominant species in lower Big Creek, and that's what the Indians were eating, also some deer. And then we move forward in time and and use the diary from the Caswell brothers who had homesteaded on Cavin Creek around 1900. And they kept a daily diary of what they shot and what they ate and what they poisoned.
And so we got a good sense of what the relative species abundance was at that time. And at that time it was primarily deer with probably bighorn secondary and rare for elk.
Jim Akenson:And rare for wolves, which was rare.
Holly Akenson:For wolves. They would mention hearing wolves, but not really talking about packs of wolves. But they were very busy killing cougars with poison and sometimes killing their own dogs with their poison. And then coming forward in time, we had some Forest Service and Idaho Fish and Game game counts from the thirties and the forties in the fifties and we were able to then plot that and then Maurice Hornocker's research data from the sixties and seventies and Idaho Fish and Game and our own research into the future and from there and we saw that there was a dramatic change in the relative species abundance between the different species and there were several things that probably drove
them. Some of them were human affected related to hunting, and some of them were natural changes in the environment. So that that whole story of the dynamic equilibrium is it was just fascinating to see in the wilderness when you can actually look at large ungulate populations over time like that.
Jack Kredell:That's quite a dataset.
Jim Akenson:Yeah, Yeah.
Holly Akenson:It's a very unusual. But you know, the, the pieces kind of fit together and I think they're reasonably accurate about what was actually happening on the ground. But yeah, so different different sources.
Jack Kredell:Yeah. And it seems like Taylor is essential to maintaining continuity between these extremely diverse datasets that, you know, maybe a modern research institution can't really accomplish.
Holly Akenson:Yeah, right.
Jim Akenson:Well, it sort of epitomizes a natural history baseline and with a lot of emphasis on both nature and history. And that is extremely unique. And it could be that Taylor will reach its own prominence that that role that probably deserves from either terrestrial environment as time goes on. And climatological data, you know, we maintained a weather station for all the years we were there spanning again that 28 year time period.
And now it's done in an automated, automated manner. But it's all really valuable as we look at things like the effect of climate change.
- Title:
- Jim and Holly Akenson Interview, Part One
- Creator:
- Jack Kredell
- Date Created:
- June 09, 2022
- Description:
- Jack Kredell interviewing Jim and Holly Akenson, researchers who first went to the Taylor Wilderness Research Station in 1982. In part one, they discuss talk what attracted them to the research station in 1982, the transitional period between the Idaho Primitive Area to the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, living at the Taylor Ranch. In part two they discuss the impact of the '00 wildfire on the research station, how that fire season changed their views.
- Subjects:
- wilderness ecology wildlife research
- Location:
- Enterprise, Oregon
- Latitude:
- 45.4263
- Longitude:
- -117.2788
- Source:
- Voices of Taylor - Jack Kredell Interview Project funded by the U of I Library and the College of Natural Resources
- Type:
- Image;MovingImage
- Format:
- video/mp4
- Preferred Citation:
- "Jim and Holly Akenson Interview, Part One", Taylor Wilderness Research Station Archive, University of Idaho Library Digital Initiatives
- Reference Link:
- https://www.lib.uidaho.edu/digital/taylor-archive/items/akenson_1.html
- Rights:
- In Copyright. Educational Use only. Educational use includes non-commercial use of text and images in materials for teaching and research purposes. Digital reproduction permissions assigned by University of Idaho Library. For more information, please contact University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives Department at libspec@uidaho.edu.