Ed Krumpe
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Ed Krumpe: So Taylor Ranch is a private inholding in almost the middle of the Frank Church River of No Return wilderness. And so it was you know, it was a homesteaded piece. And so when that area became Wilderness with the Central Idaho Wilderness Act in 1980, there were quite a few of these ranches or outfitting places that were privately owned.
And so they remained so. So it's a privately owned 64 acres within the wilderness. But to put that in perspective, the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness is 2.43 million acres. Now, what's that mean? Well, that's over 3,600 square miles of land without a road. So the only access is by the Middle Fork of the Salmon or the Main Salmon or hiking in.
But for trail access someone used to drive to McCall and then 87 miles of gravel to get to the Big Creek Ranger Station and then about 30 mile hike down to Taylor Ranch. And when it's one, it's the most remote, continually inhabited place in the lower 48 United States. Now, Yellowstone will claim that their Beckley Ranger station is the most remote.
But they don't have people there year round. And what makes us even more remote is you have trail access and a 30 mile hike in, but only for three months or so of the year, because then the snows come and high mountain passes get closed. And so those roads are closed. And so about seven or eight months of the year, you're about 100 miles from the nearest drivable road.
So that's remote. And that's part of what makes this place so special for an educational opportunity is that wilderness is so large. 3600 square miles. But then right above it, to the north of it is the Gospel Hump Wilderness. And almost attached to it is the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness, which is 1.2 million acres. And then surrounding that are roadless acres that the Forest Service by law cannot log or change or build roads in.
And without doing a complete EIS this takes an act of Congress. And so you have roadless land that makes like 6 million acres of practically pristine land. It's so large with this research station in the center of the wilderness. And that area is so large that there are big game herds that go through a migratory pattern and never step foot outside of the wilderness.
So that that just gives a unique research and educational opportunity that doesn't exist anywhere else and anywhere in the world, actually. It's just amazing. So the university operates it. They have year round a manager and caretaker that takes care of the place. They have classes that come in. Student interns come in for different periods. And then in the fall Semester in the Wild, in which usually about a dozen students sign up and they're in there taking about 14 to 17 hours of college credit.
And the faculty come and go, but they're in the wilderness living in log cabins. Well, actually in canvas wall tents, but for the whole semester. So that's a pretty unique opportunity and experience. And then, of course, there's other just full time science projects and scientists that are in there. Idaho Fish and Game fro,m our property, has a fish trap that about nine months of a year or more they, they trap out-migrating steelhead and salmon smolt. They anesthetize them.
They put a pit tag in their nose and then they take half of them upstream and other half they let go so that they have a capture recapture estimate. And they do this to 7 to 9000 fish every year. And those go all the way to the ocean. And every dam they go through there, the tag triggers a counter, there's a number in the tag.
And those that come back, you can track that. So it's it's a pretty amazing place, an opportunity for doing research, for doing research in natural areas that are not affected by logging, factories, smog, you know, power lines, or mining that's just miles from you. So it's a it's a wonderful comparison. I mean, we still need to do research on our national forests and national parks and stuff and rangelands outside.
But here we have a comparison with how natural ecosystems are functioning and processing and fish and wildlife are coming and going in an area like that. So that's that gives you a real value, the real value to it, the unique educational value.
Jack Kredell: Yeah. And you mentioned how how this educational value extends beyond just scientific research. I'm wondering if you can talk more about this, what it's in the sense of what what can Taylor teach us that might apply outside of Taylor?
Ed Krumpe: Well, so for one thing, I mean, we get to see how these these wildlife populations, how they interact, how the streams interact with -- We've had major, major forest fires come through that area and we've seen Big Creek run black with charcoal. And you would think it would kill everything even the fish. We now know they just go down and they find out where there are springs coming in.
And after about four or five days or a week or so, the water starts to clear and they're right there. We get to see for, I believe, about 27 years, they had different scientists, had cougar radio collared. And the amazing thing is these big toms established territories and Honaker documented this and then subsequent researchers documented them. And their territories are inviolate.
If the if one of those toms crosses into another's territory, there's a fight. When they brought in and released wolves in the Frank, they released the same number of wolves as they did in Yellowstone on the same day. What we were able to document and some of those wolves were radio collared, was that the wolves would move through and those big toms would just get up and leave their territory to get out of the way and go into another territory.
And there was no fight. And then them wolves would move through and they'd go back and that Tom would be wary and get up and go into another territory. And so that hasn't been documented anywhere. You can't even document that in Yellowstone. So that was something unique to see how they moved out the same with the different predators, they'd hear them coming.
Wolves are pretty vocal. They run the ridges and yap back and forth and critters move out of the way and come in behind them. So there's things like that that can only be seen in such a pristine setting. And then another one, Dr. Brian Kennedy, you know, he was in the fisheries department researching the the salmon and steelhead, and he was able to determine that the the water is unique.
And there's like seven different drainages in Big Creek where there's different isotopes, and the fish actually pick that up as they're growing there. And the odolith is a bone in the ear and it grows in layers just like an onion. And so grad students would come in and they'd hike Big Creek and they would document every rotting carcass after spawning of these salmon.
And they dig out that odolith and take it back for analysis. And they could find what section of Big Creek that fish was born in and raised in. And he was able to document that there's a certain percentage of strays. So the Walt Disney image of salmon is that they come back to the same stream and the same tiny little rivulet and, you know, nested at exactly the same place.
But if that really happened like that, well, pretty soon the species would disappear because they'd become so inbred. So there is straying. And this was like, you can't document that in anywhere but a place like it, like a wilderness research station and the access to that. So, yeah, there's things like that. We're still discovering that you couldn't, you couldn't document that anywhere else.
And these fish, by the way, when they swim under the Forest Service trail bridge on the property. And when those fish come under that, there's a wire buried under the stream with an antenna to sense the pit tagged fish that return. But I mean, they have swum upstream through all those dams and made it about 750 miles from the ocean when they go past us and then they keep going, they go another 30, 40 miles up into smaller streams to breedf, too.
So that's part of what makes it a pretty special place too. I want to mention something, though, that's hard to document, but I'll tell you, everybody that has taught in there can verify this. The students have an amazing experience and I tell them, here's the secret about Taylor Wilderness Research Station: when working in the wilderness like that you never come all the way out!
You never come all the way out. Well just not too long ago, I heard from somebody that had been in there 30 years ago, and they said it affected their career choice. It affected the grad school they went to, and they still can recall that they kind of learned that they can do anything in a wild place like that.
They learned to appreciate wild nature like nowhere else. It's not, I don't like to use this term because it's almost cliche, but it is a transformative experience. I mean, for the researchers of course, but especially for the students that come in and spend a semester. Idaho Public TV wanted to come in and, you know, film some of this and document it.
And they said, well, what do you call this? Besides, back then we called it Taylor Ranch, and now it's Taylor Wilderness Research Station. But I said, Well, it's America's wildest classroom, and it really is. It's America's wildest classroom. And well I mean, that classroom has natural lighting, it has abundance of free flowing water. It has trails -- not too many projectors or PowerPoint presentations, but it's America's wildest classroom.
And they liked that. They did an Outdoor Idaho show or something with it. And then the university actually trademarked that term, America's wild classroom. But that pretty much says it all. It's America's wildest classroom. I don't know if I should say this, but, you know, we've struggled to live up to its potential, through everything. So the university has funded it, but only funded the maintenance of it.
It's their property. They don't want it to degrade. So we've had a very spartan maintenance budget. So for everything else, it's faculty writing grants, competing for for funds, trying to figure out what can be done or how research data collected there could compare with, say, Glacier or Yellowstone or something. And then trying to put together a team or hire the right grad students and so forth.
So it's been a struggle to have both the students and the research going on and it's just such a valuable place. I mean, I guess if I could go back in history, maybe what I would do at the beginning is start trying to raise some kind of endowment. I don't know how to do that. But they, you know, they need a source that's independent and dependable.
But so it's it's always been a struggle to try to live up to its potential.
Jack Kredell: I was going to ask you what what kind of a future do you want to see for Taylor?
Ed Krumpe: I believe in the internship program. They get amazing experience. Typically, those interns come in and they work on an ongoing research project. Some years we actually I mean, we do have some funding for that. And so some years they actually write proposals like, I want to look at the sage grouse or something. And so they'll do their own, you know, senior senior research.
Others work on ongoing research projects. So that's important that we keep that going because that's impactful and it's a great training and it looks good on their resumes. I mean, around here in Idaho, the Forest Service and the BLM when a student applies for a job and they see somebody working in at Taylor, they go, okay, they know how to handle themselves so they can be independent.
I really hope to see the semester-long program continue in some form. It's kind of difficult to do it for a whole semester, but full class experiences either in hydrology or water or vegetation or fire ecology or whatever, it should continue to be used for that. The thing I'd like to add in the future is I think that something like I used to call Elder Hostel where you could have one or two sessions where just regular people that were interested could sign up and they'd go in and they'd camp in the cabin tents, and then they'd meet these researchers and students and learn about the history.
We did that just a couple of times, and I've had people stop me on the street at Farmers Market, and they said, you know, 30 years ago we went in with Jim Peek and some others. When are you going to do that again? And I think that would be an incredible thing to do. For many years, we have had a high school group come in, so we've had a high school science classroom, environmental science class from Nampa come in.
We've had students from McCall several times. And I think there's room for that, too. The off the use of the acility is limited. How many people we can have. We've got several cabins. We have some tent platforms, we've got plenty of access to water. But, so how we do stuff is always a problem. You have to fly food in and fly trash out.
We don't burn trash. So it's it's difficult, but it has a lot of potential. I'd like to see it keep going that way.