The remoteness of Central Idaho’s Salmon River Valley seems to nurture a certain sense of creativity, self-reliance, and wonder at the natural world. As SVS remains committed to the symbiotic relationship between community and environment, we'll feature an ongoing array of some of the big personalities who inspire us to be better stewards of the land and our resources.
Dan & Lisa Mudd - Salmon Valley Honey
For years, I had ovserved the tidy white boxes Dan and Lisa Mudd tended in local hay fields and I delighted in purchasing Salmon Valley Honey at Nature's Pantry. Therefore, I had a keen understanding that the bees made honey in the box and the Mudds somehow squeezed the honey into plastic bear shapes.
A beekeeper for more than 30 years, Dan Mudd is modestly encyclopedic about bees. He is a charming combination of botanist landlord, and researcher.
The bees alert him when drought has left a farmer's field too dry or when someone subdivides their ranch. He knows what is blooming on any give day up the Lemhi, Salmon, and Pahsimeroi River drainages. He can tell you what plants the bees perefer by the smell and taste of the nectar they carry with them, or the color of the pollen they wear like cookie crumbs on the faces of guilty children.
Wild honeybee numbers are at around 5 percent of their historic populations and everyone from almond growers in California to Idaho potato farmers are desperate for their crops to be pollinated. But the Mudds, satisfied with their sweet life in the Salmon River Valley, are bucking the trend to travel around the country with their bees. Long ago, they decided they would not take their bees and 5 children on the road, migrating between the north and the south. Staying in one of the West's great centers of isolation has had its own payback. The insidious parasite known as the varroa mite that has reduced the nation's bee populations has not taken the dramatic toll on the Mudds' bees that it has elsewhere. The eerie "colony collapse disorder" that has wiped out hive after hive throughout the nation is a malaise Dan reads about in the newspaper.
Excerpted from "The Sweet Life" by Gina Knudson, Big Sky Journal, Summer 2007
Bonnie & Stan Jensen
Several years ago, Bonnie and Stan Jensen had to face reality: the family cattle ranch wasn't paying the bills. At the beauty shop, Bonnie ran across an article in an old magazine about a Colorado woman who was using goats to control weeds. The Jensens sold off the cattle and invested in 500 goats.
The transition wasn't easy. "I think I bawled for about two-and-a-half weeks," Bonnie said of her initiation into goat grazing. "I didn't know what I was doing. There was very little information on how to do this."
But the day I spent with Bonnie, she looked confident in the saddle as her herd nibbled its way through a scenic valley near the Continental Divide.
Federal agencies and private landowners are catching on to the goats' insatiable appetite for weeds such as spotted knapweed and leafy spurge that plague the West's rangeland. With endangered chinook salmon in the creeks and rivers, some can't or won't use spray to kill the weeds for fear of harming the fish.
At the same time, an emerging market for goat meat has created a steady flow of buyers. For a growing population of immigrants from Latin America, the Middle East and the Caribbean, goat meat is a delicacy and a staple for celebrations.
Bonnie says goat herding is "her kind of woman's work." Although the hours are long and the horseback riding and walking is physically demanding, she says goat herding doesn't require as much brute strength as cattle ranching. The Boer goat stock that makes up much of Jensen's herd might weigh in at 200 pounds versus more than 1,000 pounds for a steer.
She mostly hires women to help herd goats during her busy spring and summer seasons because women are more patient. "Men tend to want to push the goats through an area too fast."
Excerpted from "Getting Their Goats" by Gina Knudson, Idaho Falls Post-Register
Photo: Ilona McCarty
Photo: Dan Hyde
Ken Thacker - The Weed Guy
The Salmon Valley attracts people like Ken Thacker. Ken and his wife Bonnie moved here a few years ago after Ken retired from the BLM. Clean air, clean water, and a host of outdoors opportunities attracted them and since moving here, Ken has worked diligently to preserve this special place. He is a founding member of the Salmon River Recyclers, he was a valuable citizen member of the Salmon BLM Travel Plan Working Group, and he works tirelessly as "the Weed Guy" spraying noxious weeds.
Ken's most recent venture is promoting alternative transportation in the form of reviving a community bike ride called "The Lemhi Valley Century", a 100-mile bike ride on Highway 28.
