Columnist Susan Snyder: A land of untouched beauty

Monday, May 19, 2003 | 8:23 a.m.

A persistent flock of wild turkeys and the region's game warden are pretty much Keith and Mary Brose's only other neighbors at the Overton Wildlife Management Area.

And even Tyler Turnipseed isn't around much for company. His area of responsibility spans way beyond the 17,000-acre area Brose supervises about 80 miles north of Las Vegas.

Turnipseed's jurisdiction stretches south and west to Lake Mead and the Arizona Strip, and reaches about 90 miles north and east to Caliente and the Mormon Range mountains.

Yes, we were here last Monday too. But as Brose pointed out on my daylong visit in late April, the average visitor never sees more than half the management area. So, we're going to poke around that other 60 percent.

"The biggest part of the management area is on this side of the mesa," Brose said.

His state-issue pickup truck teetered and crawled up a steep dirt road that started at the north edge of Overton the town and looked to end somewhere near the earth's outer atmosphere.

OK, I'm exaggerating. A little. But the angle of the pitch ahead and the drop-off on one side wrestled for my attention. And I struggled to retain the bacon cheeseburger I'd finished less than 30 minutes earlier at Sugar's Home Plate cafe.

"There's some die-hard duck hunters who come over here," Brose said. "And I'm one of them."

Atop Mormon Mesa we bumped along a comparatively flat dirt road while Brose talked about a harrier he and Turnipseed launched last year. The bird, electronically tagged by biologists in another state, disappeared somewhere in this part of the refuge.

"It's still putting out a signal," Brose said. "Next time Tyler and I have a day off, we're going to come out and see if we can find it."

You had to be standing where Brose was standing to appreciate the scope of such a journey. Wind pounded us with dust as we looked out over a vast landscape of infinite borders.

The signal showed the bird, or at least its tag, ended up in or along the Virgin River. The men spent five months searching last year, coming within half a mile of it on both river banks.

"We couldn't get within 100 yards of it because of the vegetation," Brose said. "We had two trucks, a canoe and a four-wheeler. But Tyler had to leave the canoe and hike out because the water level went down to about half an inch, then into the brush."

The road down the other side of Mormon Mesa and into the Overton area's outback is primitive but less harrowing than it once was, largely because of illegal blazing efforts of a local cattle rancher, whose cows Brose constantly chases off -- when he can get to them.

There was less land to police four or five years ago, when Lake Mead covered more of it. We stopped on a high spot so Brose could show how much a 62-foot drop in water level could expose.

Below and far away, the bandit cows contently grazed on that which the lake left behind. Brose sighed. They were really far away. Like much of the land around them, the cows were visible but untouchable.

And coming from a city where people can have whatever they want whenever they want it, it's nice to know there are places nearby where desires follow different rules and neighbors are far between.