True grit

It’s Jon Marvel, AB’72, vs. cattlemen in a fight over public lands.

Steve Kaiser's home, which he calls Big Lost Ranch, is a complex of cabins in the Pioneer Mountains. The oldest was an 1880s trading post and, later, an outlaw hideout. Now it's a bar for the Kaisers' bed-and-breakfast.

Jon Marvel's environmental organization, Western Watersheds Project, is headquartered in Hailey, Idaho, 15 miles outside the Sun Valley ski resort.

Often, cows eat grass down to the dirt.

Idaho ranchers Charles Lyons (left) and Eric Davis explain how grasses eaten down in the fall will grow back by spring.

One of the buildings on Eric Davis's ranch is a one-room cabin built in the 1800s by a Norwegian farmer who scythed hay by hand and kept a small herd of cattle, enduring long winters alone on the range.