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Photo by Bob Pennell Rancher "Toby" Regula and his horse Missy stop for a drink before searching Fish Creek Valley for strays. Find strays, follow rules With less range but more regulations, rancher doesn't like how life is changing By Paul Fattig When Central Point rancher Dalton Straus looks over his saddle horn at the future of the open range high in the Southern Oregon mountains, he feels fenced in. Increased government regulations coupled with decreased availability of rangeland are closing in on traditional ranching practices, he laments. "We're kind of a dying breed," said Straus, 67, a fourth-generation Rogue Valley rancher whose family has been pasturing cattle high in the western Cascade Range each summer since around the turn of the century. Straus and employee Robert "Toby" Regula spent Friday looking for cattle that have slipped through the cowboys' fall roundup in the Rogue-Umpqua Divide region. The Strauses, who own a cabin with a bunkhouse near the divide, have a range permit to keep their cattle in the picturesque mountain meadows and forests. Friday was spent combing the Fish Creek Valley in the Umpqua National Forest, then dropping down over the pass to search in the upper Foster Creek drainage of the Rogue River National Forest. A portion of the range includes the Rogue-Umpqua Divide Wilderness. The goal was to get the roughly 300 cattle, including calves, rounded up by mid-October. Most of the open range herd has been rounded up and trucked to the Rogue Valley. But a dozen or so rogues still hide in the forest. Straus and Regula rounded up seven on Friday and four more on Saturday. They planned to be back in the saddle again today. "We're after the tough ones, the one that make you go after them," Straus said. The goal is to beat the winter storms that will soon arrive in the high country. Although Friday was largely sunny, a thin sheet of ice blanketed the pools in the mountains streams. Saturday brought cold rain with a hint of snow. "You gotta find them before the big snows," Regula explained. "They won't survive a hard winter. They could keg up in the valleys and die." The roundup is a family tradition for Straus, a 1948 graduate of Medford Senior High School who served in the Army before returning to ranching. He hails from pioneer stock. His maternal great-grandfather, James McDonough, built the white Methodist church that still stands in Jacksonville. Along with the church, his ancestors built a cattle empire. Shortly after the turn of the century, his family began driving cattle from Central Point into the mountains. In addition to operating a ranch, Dalton Straus and his wife, Ruth, who have two grown children, farm about 1,000 acres in the Rogue Valley. They lease much of that land to raise hay and alfalfa crops. "It's hard for me to get away to come up here when I'd like to," he said Friday, taking a break in the Fish Creek Valley. "I've got so much paperwork to do anymore to satisfy government regulations. "I wanted to come up here yesterday but I had to go around and get all my leases signed," he added. "All my leases were always sealed with a handshake. Now the government requires you to have all your leases signed." Like many ranchers, he shakes his head at the mention of Uncle Sam, to whom he pays about $2,000 a year for the right to run his cattle in the high country. "It's wonderful up here," he said. "But it was a lot more wonderful before the Forest Service started putting all its restriction on us." Those restrictions are necessary to protect the sensitive environment in the high mountains, explained Janet Valle, a Rogue River National Forest rangelands management specialist who oversees the open range where Straus keeps his cattle. "Dalton has been very cooperative -- he has worked hard," said Valle who walked a portion of the range Friday. "But it's true that business as usual is changing," she said. "We're concerned with over-utilization that can ruin those mountain meadows." Too much grazing can destroy native vegetation, erode streams and harm the fishery, all of which are protected under the Northwest Forest Plan, she said. "It's going to take a lot more labor-intensive management in the future," she said. "There are stricter policies that we need to abide by to protect the water quality." Valle has a degree in renewable natural resources, and has spent nearly a dozen years working on Western range management. "I know it's easier to do things the old way than change," she said, noting that the public has demanded change. "Some ranchers understand why we're doing it but they don't agree with it. It's an uphill battle to educate them." But Straus, who enjoys working with Valle, figures that education goes both ways. "We think we're doing a good job managing the land," he said. "Usually, when they (government officials) first come in they are really dubious of our motives. It's just a process of education. We try to accommodate them as best we can." Ranchers from the Rogue Valley need range land because of encroaching homes and a dwindling land base at the lower elevations. "We just don't have the land mass in the Rogue Valley anymore to sustain a viable operation," he said. "You've got to have enough acres to have a big enough operation to make it economically viable." It's hard to find grazing land to lease in the Rogue Valley, he said. "Without this range up here, we wouldn't have enough acres to survive." That leads him to the traditional fall roundup. Yet it's a far cry from his childhood days when the cattle were driven from the Rogue Valley to the mountain range. "We kids looked forward to that all winter," he said. "We really thought we were in high cotton when we were able to do that. It was a family affair. Everybody joined in." Growing motor traffic eventually stopped the annual cattle drives. Since the late 1940s, cattle have been trucked to and from summer range. Still, when Straus is in the saddle high in the mountains, he breathes deeply of a life he understands and loves. "I wish more people would have the opportunity to experience this," he said. "Then they would understand." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA