Cowboys packing satellite phones to give early warning on wildfires

SILVER CITY, Idaho – The craggy gullies where cowboy Paul Nettleton runs 1,200 head of cattle around this living Owyhee County ghost town are often precious minutes from reliable cell phone coverage.

It’s a place where sudden summertime windstorms howl in from the broiling lava fields of eastern Oregon, bringing with them dry lightning that can ignite fast-moving wildfires on sage and juniper hillsides. Unchecked, they could quickly turn Silver City’s historic wooden buildings to ash.

This spring, Nettleton and six other Owyhee County ranchers who make their livelihoods in some of America’s most remote backcountry began carrying satellite telephones provided by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security.

It’s an effort to turn men whose ranching families have been wedded to this land for more than a century into a high-tech advance guard against wildfires that just a year ago devastated millions of acres in Idaho.

“Minutes count in that country,” a mustachioed Nettleton said last week after parking his four-wheeler outside the 145-year-old Idaho Hotel. “Right now it’s pretty quiet. But it’ll come.”

The BLM says Owyhee County is the first place the agency has armed cowboys with satellite phones.

Residents who call Silver City home during the summer feel a little safer, knowing Nettleton is always connected to one of Bethesda, Md.-based Iridium Satellite LLC’s 66 satellites hurtling through space, not just the earthbound cell tower on nearby War Eagle Mountain that’s often blocked by the region’s terrain.

“He’s kind of our voice on the mountain,” said Jim Hyslop, who helps run Silver City Fire and Rescue and has family roots here dating to 1916.

After nearly eight years of uninterrupted drought, ample snowfall and spring rains left much of Owyhee County’s high country greener than normal this year, meaning fire danger has been limited. Those typical summer storms with dry lightning and sudden gales haven’t materialized, either; the ranchers have yet to use their new phones.

A year ago, however, 3,000 square miles of Idaho – an area three times the size of Rhode Island – was torched by blazes.

The biggest was the Murphy complex of fires, a lightning-caused inferno that burned for three weeks and became the largest single fire fought in Idaho by the BLM at nearly 1,000 square miles. It left behind dead wildlife and livestock, scorched grazing ground and charred habitat for seasons to come for sensitive species such as sage grouse.

BLM managers and ranchers last fall began discussions about improving communication before the next conflagration.

For an initial agency investment of $10,000, the seven Iridium satellite phones seemed a reasonable bargain, said Janet Peterson, the BLM’s safety manager in Boise – especially considering the Murphy complex alone cost more than $13 million to fight and will likely set taxpayers back $34 million to restore the blackened landscape.

“The ranchers are a pretty key partner,” she said. “They know the country.”