Angry Snowy Range Ranchers Cut Off From Longtime Summer Grazing Pastures

For six generations, Leisl Carpenter’s family has run a cattle ranch at the base of Sheep Mountain west of Laramie, and every summer they’ve moved cattle to another section of property they own just across the Colorado state line.

But maybe not this year.

The family’s primary access to its summer cattle range is along Boswell Road at the southern end of the Snowy Range Mountains.

And since that roughly 11-mile-road was recently closed at both ends, the Carpenters aren’t sure when, or even if, they’ll be able to move their cattle.

“We have no legal access to our property right now,” she told Cowboy State Daily.

‘It’s A Terrible, Terrible Road’

The closures have also left retirees Rick and Karen Allison in a similar a pickle. They’re trying to build a permanent home on a parcel of land they own along Boswell Road.

And with Boswell Road perhaps cut off from them, Rick Allison told Cowboy State Daily that U.S. Forest Service officials have advised them to try using another road that comes in from the south.

But that road — Forest Service Road 200, commonly called the Roach Road — is little more than an ATV trail, he said.

“It’s a terrible, terrible road. I won’t try to get an RV up it. It would be impossible. Just impossible,” he said.

The couple currently lives in Colorado, but would like to stay in an RV on their property while their home is being built.

“We also have semitrailers of building materials that have to come in, and there’s no way to do that,” Allison said.

The Forest Service is trying to get special use permits for private property owners like the Allisons to use Boswell Road, Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest spokesman Aaron Voos stated in an email to Cowboy State Daily.

Meanwhile, the road remains closed to the general public.

Whose Road Is It?

The confusion and frustration over Boswell Road stems from the fact that nobody’s really sure who has jurisdiction over it. It’s long been considered a public route and treated as such. The Forest Service and Albany County both maintained it in years past.

But neither agency claims full jurisdiction over it. And the road also passes though sections private property, Wyoming state lands and Bureau of Land Management parcels.

The Albany County Commission last year opted to abandon efforts to have it officially declared a county road. And the Forest Service also stopped maintaining it, deciding that people using the road could be ticketed for illegal “off-road” travel because it’s no longer an officially recognized route.

Fencing Out Matt Mead’s Cows

Gary Williams owns the first parcel of private property on the west end of the Bowell Road, roughly a half-mile from the road’s intersection with Highway 230 in the tiny community of WyColo right on the state line.

He lived there year-round for decades. But now that he and his wife are well into their 70s, they spend their winters in Texas “because I really don’t like the snow anymore,” he told Cowboy State Daily.

There’s a gate blocking the road at Willams’ property line. He’s generally kept it locked during the winter “because I don’t want people coming into my yard” when he’s not around.

However, he’s usually been willing to keep the gate unlocked during the warmer months, asking only that people close it after they pass through.

Wyoming is a “fence-out” state, meaning landowners are responsible for fencing out their neighbors’ livestock.

And Williams has been happy to do that, because of some of his neighbors — including former Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead — run cattle in the area.

“My wife finally got tired of Matt Mead’s cows eating her flowers,” he said light-heartedly, noting that he and Mead have always gotten along well.

Mead and his wife, Carol, own the historic Boswell Ranch at the other end of the road just off Highway 10. He recently told Cowboy State Daily that they’ve put up “private road, no trespassing” signs at their property line, but haven’t gated the road.

‘I Begged For 39 Years’

Traffic on Boswell Road used to be relatively light; it would generally get busiest during fall big game hunting seasons.

But as the Snowy Range Mountains have grown ever more popular, it’s started to become a headache.

“That road goes right through my front yard, it’s maybe 50 feet from my house,” Williams said. “Now, during the summers, the side-by-side traffic is constant going through my yard, day and night.”

He said he’s also frequently had rigs pulling camper trailers backed up from his gate “all the way out to the highway.”

“Ninety percent of the people are great, they don’t mind coming through and closing the gate behind them,” Williams said. “I have gotten yelled at and cussed at a couple of times.”

As he sees it, a simple fix would be to re-route the road around the property. The county and the Forest Service seemed ready to do that about three years ago, but those plans fell through, he said.

“I begged for 39 years to have the road moved to just south of my fence,” Williams said. “The county says that’s a Forest Service problem. The Forest Service says that’s a county problem. They’ve been pointing fingers back and forth for years.”

Willams is assistant chief of the WyColo volunteer fire department. With the legal access to the road apparently in a sketchy limbo at present, “I don’t know what we can do, if we can even legally take our firetrucks down that road anymore.”

He said he plans to get a special use permit to access his property, but he isn’t sure how long the application process will take.

“It’s just a mess. Nobody wants to fix it. That’s what gets me,” he said.

Just Risk The Ticket

Voos stated that it’s not likely that private property owners will get ticketed by the Forest Service for using the road.

“While we are working through the process of private landowners obtaining permits from the Forest Service, if those landowners stay on the existing road and have permission from the landowner through whose property they must pass, then the Forest Service will not issue citations,” he stated in the email.

“Please note that this is for private landowners only and that they may not travel off road on forest at any time. Citations would be issued for off road violations,” he added.

Allison said that at least for now, he can’t get building materials up Boswell Road because parts of it “are still basically a mud-bog.”

But once the road dries out, he plans on sending workers in.

“They can give them a ticket if they want to, and we’ll just have to fight it out in court,” Allison said. “The Forest Service is legally obligated to give me reasonable access to my property. And the reasonable access to that location is Boswell Road.”

‘We Need To Get Up There Now’

For generations, Carpenter’s family had cattle drives up Highway 230, and then Highway 10, to their summer range along Boswell Road.

Their summer range includes about 1,000 acres of private property, plus some adjoining BLM and Forest Service leases.

But traffic on Highway 230 eventually got too thick for traditional cattle drives.

“The last time we did that was in 2006, and we had to have a state trooper escort up the highway,” she said.

So, the family started trucking livestock to the summer range in cattle trailers pulled by pickups.

Since the county and Forest Service stopped maintaining Boswell Road, getting the pickups up there has turned into a white-knuckle drive because of how badly the road is rutted in places, Carpenter said.

If special use permits for the road are forthcoming, the family needs them soon, she said. They’re already late getting up there for yearly springtime fence maintenance.

And they want to have 135 cow-calf pairs moved and grazing on the summer range by June 1.

“We need to get up there now,” Carpenter said. “Our only other option would be to start turning those cattle loose on our hay fields down that the ranch, which would mean they’d be eating their winter supply of hay.”

Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.