“WELL, I NEVER THOUGHT I’d ride up this wash and not see a burro.”
Travis Holyoak squints into the gully from beneath the shade of his straw hat. Despite the midday glare, the rancher can see plenty from horseback. The craggy mesas of Arizona’s Black Mountains stretch ahead of us, spring green-up just starting to recede from the slopes. At a distance, the land looks almost lush. Up close, there’s no mistaking it for the desert it is. Our horses pick their way past spiky yucca, catclaw, and gobs of dried burro dung.
The only thing burros are good for, a fellow rancher once told Holyoak, is making trails. A trail or two is welcome in this country, where my saddle horse occasionally stumbles on loose rock before recovering his feet. Dozens of trails, crisscrossing these foothills like the creases of an old man’s neck, are not.
Just the week before, Holyoak says, the Bureau of Land Management gathered roughly 400 wild burros from this grazing allotment to put up for adoption. A gather—removing burros or wild horses from public lands—is how land managers protect the health of overpopulated animals and the land itself.
And this particular public ground has withered under far too many burros for too many years. So have his cows. Holyoak is permitted to run 105 head on some 60,000 acres in the Black Mountains. As the burros have gotten thicker, he’s cut that to just 60 cows. With hundreds of burros grazing the same sections—especially during such prolonged drought—there hasn’t been enough food to go around.
The soft-spoken rancher started sending letters to the Bureau of Land Management a decade ago, asking for help. The burros, he wrote, were stripping vegetation, eroding soil, hogging water, and costing him revenue. He mailed one letter a month. Once, frustrated by the rogue donkeys eating his hay and taking bites out of his salt blocks, Holyoak sent the BLM an itemized bill for a few thousand dollars. He never heard back.
Still, Holyoak has a good working relationship with his BLM district burro specialist. And