This is Part II in KHOL’s series: The Unfenced West. You can read the first story here.
Kevlar gloves. Eyewear. First aid kit and bear spray. Those are the non-negotiables for a volunteer pulling fence with the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation.
On a rainy spring Saturday, Cody Pitz, the foundation’s habitat program manager, runs through the necessary safety gear with around a dozen volunteers.
From May to October, Pitz leads a biweekly group of stewards in rolling up barbed wire and wrestling fence posts with rusty staples around western Wyoming.
“I shape [the strands] into a circle, and I have my four tails sticking out,” Pitz said as he trained a recent cohort of new volunteers. “Once it starts to get unwieldy, I’ll use one of the tails and do another wrap.”
Today, Pitz and his volunteers are clearing the way for safer wildlife migrations at the Broken Arrow Ranch, a few miles south of Hoback.
“All the wire will be fully pulled,” Pitz said of a fence that borders the Bridger-Teton National Forest. “All the posts are just going to rot out instead of spending the energy to pull them out.”
Each spring, American antelope on the so-called Path of the Pronghorn follow the green up of trees and plants after a long winter. Elk and mule deer travel similar routes along the melting snow line between Wyoming’s Red Desert and Jackson Hole.
But the region’s legacy of livestock ranching has left behind deadly obstructions that often intersect their route.
A lethal legacy
A 2005 study found that for every 2.5 miles of fence, an ungulate dies each year. In 2023, thousands of pronghorn died after record snow and fences blocked more typical migration routes.
The Wildlife Foundation has organized volunteer takedowns since 1996 to tackle the thousands of miles of fence around western Wyoming.
Much of it is considered derelict fence, meaning it is no longer maintained or serves a purpose. Since so much crosses private lands, the scale can be hard to quantify, according to Robb Sgroi, Teton Conservation District’s land resources specialist.
“Federal land managers have moderate quality inventories and maps,” Sgroi said. “On private lands, we definitely do not have countywide maps of type [and] location of fence.”
Though ranching has largely given way to other industries around Jackson, it is very much alive to the south in Sublette County. The migration route between the two counties is also the first federally designated migration corridor, making Wyoming a state leader in a national wildlife stewardship effort.
Since that area covers a significant portion of the Path of the Pronghorn, which continues into Teton County, there’s a substantial effort to remove and modify fences.
“Any fence would be difficult to call friendly, but some with certain characteristics are friendlier,” Sgroi said.
Alterations that make fences more visible or easier to cross can keep livestock contained while saving more ungulate lives. Those have smooth wood tops, deliberate spacing and fewer barbs. Some are lined with colorful PVC pipe or use “X” shapes, creating space to jump.
Teton County is unique in that it uses legal incentives to speed up a transition to more wildlife-friendly fencing.
Lone, local policies
At a minimum, fences in Teton County cannot surpass 38 inches, with an exception for an additional 4 inches for fences that hold livestock. There are also design and materials requirements.
As the Town of Jackson considers weighing stricter fence requirements as soon as this fall, the county’s Principal Long-Range Planner, Ryan Hostetter, considers a variety of perspectives. Public comment runs the gamut.
“We have comments from lots of citizens who are concerned about over-regulating private property on one end of the spectrum,” Hostetter said. “On the other, from people who are extremely concerned about the health and safety of all wildlife in town.”
The state has no such laws, though Wyoming Game and Fish started publishing a guide to better fencing in 2012.
So, volunteers are left to do much of the legwork.
Miles down, miles to go
The Broken Arrow Ranch is near an elk feedground and a native winter range. Its horses don’t graze up the hill to the property boundary, so the fence is only an obstacle. The landowner reached out, seeking the foundation’s help for its removal. The ranch provided the supplies, and Pitz brought the volunteers willing to brave slippery trails and thick foliage.
While one group of volunteers battled muddy trails and spooled a third of a mile of fence, another set up an electric fence, a friendlier alternative to post-and-wire, at the edge of the horse pasture.
“We felt like it met our conservation goals,” Pitz said of today’s project. “We wanted to remove this fence because we can clearly see how many elk are moving through this area.”
This summer marks 30 years for the Wildlife Foundation’s fence removal programs. In that time, volunteers have pulled more than 240 miles of fencing.
For two of those three decades, Gretchen Plender has been a volunteer.
“I can’t own my own land in Jackson Hole, so I pretend these are like my backyards,” said the travel agent of four decades. “I come out here, and I’m like, ‘Good, at least I can take out barbed wire and help wildlife.’”
Several volunteers attend nearly a dozen takedowns each season, including John Freeze, who grew up on a farm in Iowa.
“Prior to this volunteering, I had built a lot of fences, and I thought this would be a nice way for me to give back and undo some of the damage,” Freeze said.
Even with the help of volunteers, spooling up and packing out the state’s thousands of miles of wire will take some time. But after a century and a half of ranching, each pull goes a long way.
