[footsteps on dirt] I'll show you.

They were here last night.

[footsteps on dirt] Its comin straight here.

Its not cattle.

Its not anything else but elk.

Thats elk.

[four-wheeler on dirt] Elk are gonna come through here whether we like it or not.

They've been coming through for centuries.

But what can we do to help maybe keep them from banging up the fences?

We kind of came up with this elk migration agreement.

Here, right here.

This is what happens right here.

[car door clicks] So the fence is broken in a couple places.

I got two strands broken here.

I'm fixing this every single year.

Six or eight can do this, or three or four.

can probably do this.

I've seen groups of up to 80 out in here.

I've got video of I've got video, six, seven, eight, 900, 1000?

And so after a while, you start thinking, “There's gotta be a better way.” It's called an elk migration agreement.

We get paid to rotate our grazing and put in wildlife friendly fences.

It means we can afford to stay here.

The elk can come through here without getting hung up, and they have forage to eat.

And its part of the biotic world we live in right here.

We're part of this.

What else is different here than it was 200, 500 years ago?

Well, the fences are different they're kind of in the way.

So if we can do something to minimize their impact and facilitate this flow of wildlife, that's kind of what we're trying to do here, is replicate a little bit of what Mother Nature was doing 500 years ago before we showed up.

The high viz wire gives them a reference point to gauge their jump, because they're coming through here at night.

They're not coming through here in the day.

And if there's not anything they can see, they get hung up in this wire.

Oops.

There you go.

Right there.

Oh, antelope.

I mean, they get hung up too.

So we call this lay-down fencing for obvious reasons, I guess.

We lay it down.

That disturbance of their feet walking along the ground, whether it's our cattle or the elk yeah, stimulates does stimulate root growth and seeds getting back into the ground.

We do ranch tours where we talk about our ecosystem here at the ranch, and we just talk about the land.

Having the opportunity now to be able to be a part of this ranch, and then therefore the ecosystem, has really been a gift.

It's harmony between the land and the landowner.

if both of them can win out of the deal, that's conservation.

This ranch has been going for 150 years.

We can't mess it up.

We got to do it right, too, so love to see my neighbors get on board, so we can open up the whole Tarryall Valley with something like this where the elk can come back and forth, without getting hung up in these fences.

We're only here for a blink of an eye in the, in the grand scheme of things, so our goal is to leave it in good shape when it's our turn to pass it on.

And so our goal is not to do too much messing around, but to enhance things.