Hunter gathers support for Bodie Hills
Stewardship weekend kicks off Saturday.
East Coast native Jeff Hunter, always wanted to come west. He knew this area; he had walked the John Muir Trail twice, resupplying at Vons and camping at the June Lake Campground. So when his name came up to run the Bodie Hills Conservation Partnership he thought, “an opportunity like this doesn’t happen very often.”
“For twenty years I’ve been coming out West to backpack and flyfish. It had been calling my name for awhile,” he said. “I’d always been looking. There comes a point in life where you get windows of opportunity to really make a change in life.”
Hunter was hired by the Durango, Colorado based Conservation Lands Foundation (CLF) and he moved to June Lake with his wife last August. “The CLF was started by Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt under President Clinton,” Hunter said. “The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has a system of lands called the national conservation land of 28 million acres. The CLF charter is to establish friends groups for all these special landscapes that the BLM manages, the Bodie Hills being one of them.”
Bodie Hills. Photo courtesy: Wick.
The CLF has a three-year investment in the Bodie Hills Conservation Partnership, which consists of 15 members including Friends of the Inyo, Sierra Club, and the Mono Lake Committee. “The geographic area that I describe [as the Bodie Hills], and there is a lot of private land mixed into this area, is basically North of the road to Hawthorne (167), East of 395 and 182, and west of the Nevada border,” Hunter said. The vision of the Partnership is “for some designation to protect the values that are in Bodie Hills—a national monument or similar designation,” he said.
“When I talk about values, I’m talking about the cultural, archaeological and historical values as well as wildlife values,” Hunter continued. “Most people know the Bodie Hills from the ghost town but what people don’t generally know about is the federal lands surrounding it. The landscape is really special.”
Hunter, who has an environmental studies degree, has spent his first year in the Eastern Sierra understanding the new landscape and learning about the flora and fauna of the area. “There is a learning curve here,” he said. “I am still learning everyday.
And he meets with stakeholders and his conservation partners “listening to their concerns and trying to increase capacity for funding and volunteers,” he said. The Bodie Hills “are public lands so engaging the public in the stewardship of those public lands is important. It connects people to a landscape.”
Hunter worked for the Verizon Corporation for 20 years as a manager, until he decided to walk the Appalachian Trail in 2000. “I lasted about a year and half in the corporate world after that,” he said. “It’s kinda hard to go from sleeping outside in a tent every night for six months to fluorescent lighting and white noise.” After Verizon, Hunter worked with the American Hiking Society and Tennessee Wild Campaign before moving to June Lake to work for the Partnership.
Hunter plans on staying in the Eastern Sierra for awhile, working in the Bodie Hills and hiking. “It is beautiful,” Hunter said. “The hiking is arguably the best in the country and I hike a lot of places. Hiking is what brought me here.”
Hunter said the Bodie Hills Conservation Partnership has “a vision but it’s not complete. We have a vision for protection of those values, but what that looks like will be shaped by the stakeholders and the community to a greater extent.” He is often asked what he’s looking to change in the Bodie Hills and his answer is: “We really don’t want to change anything. We want to keep that place the way it is.”
His next project is a stewardship weekend in the Bodie Hills August 16-17. After meeting in Lee Vining at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning the group of volunteers will spend most of the day converting cattle fences to “wildlife friendly let down fences,” Hunter said. “At the end of the season when the cattle come off the range, they can just take out the nails and the fence drops down to the ground to allow [wildlife] to move across the landscape and it helps reduce sage-grouse mortality.”
After working on the fences, Hunter invites the volunteers to camp out in the Bodie Hills. “Folks want to come out and spend the night with us, I’ll feed them dinner and feed them breakfast,” he said. “After that we’ll take a walk near the summit of Bodie Mountain. It’s a great opportunity for people to see what are arguably some of the best views of the Eastern Sierra.”
There are currently a handful of volunteers signed up for the stewardship project, but Hunter hopes for around a dozen. “One of our funders is Patagonia, so people who come out and spend a whole day with us we’ll reward them with some schwag,” he said. “Plus people who go up for a day will never get to see the night sky. The night sky is not as nice here in Mammoth and even in June Lake there is artificial sources light. So you can’t quite see the night sky like you can out in that landscape.”
Contact Jeff Hunter for more information or to sign up for the event: info@bodiehills.org
