Ranching On the Deepest Lake.

The weird, pulsing vibration was something you could feel in your boots. It wasn’t an earthquake, per se, but I wondered if it could bring one on. The contraption pulsed its way up and down our broad mountain valley on the main roads, piloted by one or two bored looking guys who likely were grad students, earning their PhD in geology. 

My girls called it the “Thumper.” The operators thumped for about a week or two, I think. My curiosity didn’t get the best of me; I never stopped to talk to them to find out what the heck they were doing. We were too busy. We were trying to survive–giving it our best shot–ranching. The neighbor gave us an answer when we didn’t even ask for it. 

“See them guys on the machine?” Jimmie Lea Dowton, my neighbor asked me as I was struggling in the wind moving a 4 inch by 40 foot sprinkler pipe. His 7.3 diesel was idling loudly. He was yelling out his window. I would have to yell back, because I knew from experience that he wouldn’t shut it off (after 10 years or so, he did start shutting it off. We became friends). 

Jimmie was a sort of Baron or Bully of the valley at the time. It all had to do with how he saw you. We struggled and had some tussles at first. Nothing physical, but certainly verbal, and more than a little psychological. He knew some things about how to get what he wanted. I was ignorant to some of his antics at that time, but others, not so much. We had words, on occasion.

“Yep. Sure have been watching them. Wondering what’s going on,” I said. 

“Seismic surveys.” It’s all he said. He put F350 in gear and drove off, black smoke of unburned diesel marking territory. 

I put it in my mental file, pushed the folder down, and shut the cabinet. That was it. It wasn’t until 20 years later that I cracked it open again, and found that we beat Baikal. The lake, that is. The deepest one. 

Until now. 

Our valley is the Pahsimeroi. Never heard of it? Neither did I before I set foot in it. There’s only 300 people here, and you’ll probably know why when you drive up from the Pahsimeroi river’s confluence with the Salmon River. It surprises you. When you wander through the gentle bends in the road in the lowest reaches of the valley, it looks like a bucolic ranching community with a scattering of homes, barns and corrals surrounded by green fields. Then, when you pass the Hatch Ranch, you see the real character of the valley. It rolls out in front of you so fast that after coming up that first straightaway, it fairly takes your breath away. 

It still does mine. I’ve been up it literally a thousand times. Suddenly, a big valley that resembles the high pre-Himalayan plains of Tibet stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s desert, and there are little to no trees up the valley floor. Then, each side of the wide and austere valley suddenly gives rise to massive jagged peaks, often crusted with snow and ice, marching off into the distance until the curve of the earth steals them from view.

That view–the one I just described–can be so unsettling for first time visitors that the discomfort, or perhaps the loneliness, or the exposure makes them push through every now and again, but the consideration of living there is categorically unthinkable. 

That’s how I felt. I took Caryl through the valley once in 1985. We were both awestruck about the scale and feel of the valley. We both agreed we could never live there. Nope. Never.

Yet now we do. And we’ve been living here for 21 years.

After 21 years, the valley still is austere. But the coarse fabric of it starts getting interwoven with things like family, memories and beauty. And now, it’s home. So much that my adult kids don’t want to leave. There’s no place like it to them; their hearts become joined to it; some of their blood and sweat inevitably gets spread on the ground and the valley never forgets. The girls have sense of place that few others have. Sometimes, it’s a love and hate sense. It’s a place of extremes: we barely survive the 40 below zero with wind driven graupel snow, and then thrive in the luxuriant cool and deep green grass that the winter staged for us, just 4 months later.

But now, there is something else. Below us. I have a sense of it now.

Lake Baikal is located in Siberia, Russia. It is thought to be the world’s oldest and deepest lake. Three hundred rivers and streams feed it. It is home to 20% of the world’s freshwater, roughly the equal to the combined volume of all 5 of the Great Lakes bordering US and Canada. 

Lake Baikal’s depth is 1700 meters at the deepest point. 

The May Grange hall is an old building, but not that old. It’s likely just shy of 100 years old. The plate over the main door, facing the street says “Est 1931.” I’m not sure if that was the date of the founding of the May Grange as an organization or when the building was constructed. 

It is old enough that the floor creaks when you dance on it. 

The hall is where we usually have our Pahsimeroi Water District meetings. Jimmie Lea Dowton, and his wife, Maria, presided over those meetings for years. I went to nearly every one. Jimmie’s gruff nature, as well as Maria’s, was a performance to behold. I still miss those meetings. 

Now that Jimmie and Maria have left this Earth, George Miller presides over the water meetings. George is also the Fire Chief, so now, we meet in the Firehall. There’s a table in front of the 4 fire engines that are parked there, doors open, keys in, ready for action. 

There were several of us valley ranchers in attendance; I was in the middle of the age range. George, Jim Martiny and Ted O’Neal held position of the older operators in the valley. Jim and Ted were 4th generation right here in May, Idaho.

Then, there was a new face. He knew the previously mentioned men–in fact, they all went to school together–right here in the Valley. He was Bob Whittier, or actually, Dr. Robert Whittier, now, of Hawaii, as of most recently. 

It turns out that Dr. Whittier left ranching as a young man to become a submariner for the Navy. I think he told us that he was in a sub for 19 years, and then earned a PhD in geomorphology or perhaps hydro-geomorphology. He studied ground water and ground water movement right here in the Pahsimeroi. 

Anyway, when I finally opened my file cabinet and put two and two together, I realized that he was the one responsible for conducting the seismic surveys those 20 years prior with the Thumper.

And then, he pushed over his results to me. There was a map of the valley, and I recognized the features and few roads and easily oriented myself. 

“What is this grey blob on the map, Dr. Whittier?” I asked. 

He simply said: “That’s water. Ground water. Two kilometers deep.”

It took a second for that to sink in. “So we’re sitting right here on a lake of ground water in this desert valley that is 2000 meters deep?”

He quietly nodded. 

That was deeper than Lake Baikal in Russia by 300 meters. It was all fresh. When the lake fills, which is pretty much every year after snowmelt sinks into the ground, our springs flow, and flow into the Pahsimeroi River. All of a sudden it all made sense. 

Fact: the Pahsimeroi River has very few surface waters that fill it. I can think of 2 creeks out of the many that occasionally make it from the snowy mountains to the river. What happens instead is that the snow melts, and when it hits the valley, it sinks through literally hundreds of meters of gravel, and fills the lake. Sometimes, even with big creeks, it takes all summer for those waters to reach the lake, and then the river. It’s why our river’s high water is often in the fall. 

It’s exciting stuff. We didn’t know until now that we have high desert, lakefront property. Or that Alderspring is a floating cattle ranch. 

I’ll just venture it is safe to say this: Alderspring is the world’s only Certified Organic Floating Cattle Ranch. 

Yes. Things get more interesting every day. 

Happy Trails.