Is Collaboration a Lost Art?  or Common Grounds  or  Searching for the Lost Art

Draft 12.2
July 6, 2026

 

I have found Idahoans to be level-headed and pragmatic. Close to the land, they seem less interested in rigid ideology than in ideas that actually work. Neighbors helping neighbors, a live-and-let-live ethos.

Some of the West’s most impressive collaborations have come from Idaho, whether that’s the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, water rights agreements, the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness compromise, the White Clouds Wilderness, Henrys Fork collaboration, the Owyhee Canyonlands Initiative between cowboys and enviros.

People in Washington, D.C., have wondered aloud what the “special sauce” is that allows Idaho to get things accomplished while other states have struggled.

The Outdoor Idaho crew reported on several exceptional collaborations through the years. We may like to think we were on the ground floor of a few of them as they unfolded. The truth, of course, is that our shows usually documented collaborations long after the hard work had been done.

One of the first collaborations that Outdoor Idaho explored occurred in eastern Idaho in 1993 with the formation of Henrys Fork Watershed Council. 

To many anglers, Henrys is nothing short of sacred: Mecca, Valhalla, the Holy Grail, all rolled into one. The prestigious Trout Unlimited magazine once ranked it number one among the nation’s 100 favorite streams.

But reverence and fame was not enough to save Henrys. That would require a change of heart—by irrigators, environmentalists, and anglers alike.

As is usually the case, this collaboration did not arise from goodwill. It took a catastrophe. In 1992 the Bureau of Reclamation and the Idaho Fish & Game Department drew down the Island Park Reservoir to eliminate trash fish, like suckers and chubs.

The historically low drawdown flushed more than 50,000 tons of mud and silt downstream, turning the river into a muddy ruin.  Insects and trout died, as silt wiped out spawning beds. The tragedy meant that anglers and tourists stayed away, and nearby small towns felt severe economic pain.

It was obvious that irrigators, anglers, and the agencies with jurisdiction over the once magical river were barely talking to each other.

That’s when Jan Brown, executive director of the nonprofit Henrys Fork Foundation, decided it was time to talk to the enemy. Since its founding in 1984, the Foundation had achieved some real successes, but its militant approach had alienated the irrigators who controlled the water.
 
“We joked that the irrigators would all be rednecks, and they thought we'd all have ponytails,” said Jan in one of our early shows on the famous river. “I mean, everyone had stereotypes.”

Dale Swenson, executive director of the Fremont-Madison Irrigation District, was the other one key figure willing to step forward.

 “What we had to do as irrigators is let down our guard and realize that the Henrys Fork Foundation and other groups like them were looking out for the good of the river,” he told us in an interview. “At least we had to trust that’s what they were there for.”

The conflict had its roots a century earlier, when farmers and ranchers realized how lush the Henrys Fork watershed was. They then built dams and began de-watering the river.

Not long afterward rich anglers, many of them from the Salt Lake area, discovered the remarkable fishery, built lodges and began advertising the river.

The complexity of Henry had always intrigued us. In fact, Outdoor Idaho devoted several entire programs to the river and nearby Henrys Lake. A shallow lake gives birth to the river, but just ten miles downstream a miraculous spring bubbles from the ground, its cold crystal-clear water draining the Yellowstone plateau.

Big Springs, the true headwaters of the river, is among the largest natural springs in the United States. The water is a constant 52 degrees, delivering roughly 120 million gallons a day, making it ideal habitat for large trout.

One of life’s quiet joys is standing on the nearby historic railroad bridge, watching huge trout swim lazily by. No fish ever had it so good. No human could avoid falling in love with Henrys.

That affection shone through in our 1990 “Henrys Fork” and again in 1996’s “On the Henrys Fork.”

“We weren’t talking to each other,” said Jan, “so everyone gathered at Elk Creek Ranch and had kind of a soul-searching session. We knew we had to start doing business differently. The same characters and same players, and no one needed to change their missions. But we needed to have some vehicle, some entity, some forum that we could come together and talk with one another on a regular basis.”

And so, out of a sense of frustration, distrust, and even fear, the Henrys Fork Watershed Council was born, thanks in large part to Jan and Dale. The council pushed for a comprehensive conservation package and even engaged in team-building exercises to foster trust.

“Once we got acquainted, we found maybe 80 percent of all the issues we could agree on,” said Jan. Few gave the council more than a year. A century of bad blood is hard to overcome. Yet the Watershed Council endured and is now widely regarded as the moral authority of the region.

In time it became a model for collaborations throughout the West.
                                                      ***

Before he became Chief Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, Idaho native Jim Jones served two terms as the state’s Attorney General.

"During my two terms as Attorney General in the 1980s, those of us in state government took it as an article of faith that we should work across the aisle to advance the public good,” said Justice Jones.

“Both of the governors with whom I served—John Evans and Cecil Andrus—were of opposite parties from me. They were Democrats and I was a Republican. While we had dustups at times, that did not impede public business.”

In one of the most pivotal battles, fought largely behind closed doors, Jim and Governor John Evans worked hand-in-glove on the Swan Falls water-rights fight, one of the hottest issues of the day.

“Our cooperation was largely behind the scenes,” said Jim, “but we were both committed to keeping Idaho Power Company from controlling the Snake River flow.”

Jim handled the legal work and blasted the power company in the press. Governor Evans wielded veto power over legislation favored by Idaho Power. “We prevailed,” said Jim, “but it could not have been done separately.

“And there were any number of issues that Governor Andrus and I worked on together. Sometimes I had more problems from legislators in my own party."

                                                        ***

                            

 

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Timber Wars,” a term used to describe the fierce conflict between the environmental community and the timber industry in the late 1980s and 1990s. People chained themselves to trees to save them from the chainsaw. Fights broke out. People landed in jail and sometimes in the hospital.

The battleground was primarily in the Pacific Northwest, but the fight did spill into the St. Joe and Clearwater national forests in northern Idaho.

The symbol of the conflict became the northern spotted owl. Few of the creatures live in Idaho, and the ones who do face more danger from the encroaching barred owl than from a logger’s chainsaw.

It was a stalemate of ideas, each side believing they had the better arguments. Eventually, in 2006, Governor Jim Risch engineered a unique local collaboration with wildland users, conservation groups and the timber industry to solve the riddle of what to do with Idaho’s 9.3 million acres of public roadless land. It took two years of tough negotiating, but that collaborative effort is still holding, while other similar efforts have failed.

Tom Tidwell, then Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, was one of those around the proverbial table, attending innumerable meetings, attempting to reach consensus about old growth, building roads, large-scale wildfires, and other issues that had divided westerners for years.

Tidwell didn’t expect much to come of those meetings, he told us for our 2022 program “The Next Chapter.” In fact, he expected it to be a waste of time.

“But what I saw was something that is still probably one of the more meaningful experiences I've had in the agency,” he said, “about how you were able to bring people together and really allow them to share their thinking.

“You didn’t challenge a person’s values. You listened to them. And what came out of that was an agreement where the Administration could buy off on it, the governors bought off on it, and the communities bought off on it.

“I’m still somewhat in amazement that we were able to do that.”

 

Collaboratives sprang up in virtually every forest in Idaho. We featured one of those initial collaborative efforts in our 2011 show “The People’s Land.” 

“There’s been a stalemate,” forester Bill Higgins told us. “The conservation groups are not seeing the protections that they want to see on wild land deserving of protection.  The forest industry is not seeing the level of forest management that we would like to see.”

That’s why Bill joined the Clearwater Basin Stewardship Collaborative, a group of politically diverse folks attempting a new method of managing federal lands. 

“You can get so much more done in a collaborative way,” Bill said.  “I’ve been amazed by it, to be honest with you. Now when I have a problem, I have the Idaho Conservation League, Wilderness Society, Trout Unlimited, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers all going to bat for me.”

Someone who usually found himself disagreeing with Higgins agreed. “It’s true,” said John McCarthy of the Wilderness Society. “We’ve learned that it’s not just good enough to say, your thing is your thing and good luck.

“If we’re going to work together, Bill Higgins’ sustainable timber logging interests have to be our interests. We have to follow all the way through and help em out,” said John.

Former F.S. Chief Tom Tidwell noticed the difference. “I used to be sued probably more than anyone,” he told us. “But now there’s much less litigation than there used to be.”

                                                                                              ***

 

“A thousand cups of coffee.” That was the unconventional strategy adopted to protect the Owyhee Canyonlands. And we’re not talkin’ white chocolate mochas here. We’re talkin’ real cowboy coffee.

Of all the collaborations we followed, this one is my favorite.

“I often suspected that folks in Owyhee County treated coffee like they did their sourdough,” Craig Gehrke, former leader of Idaho’s Wilderness Society told me one day. “They never made new coffee. They just kept adding to the coffee grounds and kept refilling the water. I’m pretty sure our 1,000 cups of coffee strategy took years of functioning off my poor kidneys!”

 

If you’re looking for directions to Canyonland country, try the place on the map where Idaho joins up with Nevada and Oregon. Most would call it desolate country: no cell service or Golden Arches. It’s where gumbo is not something you eat, it’s the mud you find your truck stuck in when it starts to rain. Plan to be there a while.

They say it takes a common enemy to bring opposing sides together, especially when the path seems long and even hopeless. In the case of the Owyhee Canyonlands, the status quo, I would argue, was the common enemy.

The status quo was not working for environmentalists. Their goal had been to provide permanent protection for the best parts of the Owyhee Canyonlands. They had hoped to convince the Clinton administration to issue a proclamation declaring much of Owyhee County a national monument.

It’s a deceptively simple process for a president to create a national monument. A president merely issues an executive order, and the deed is done.  President Teddy Roosevelt created the first national monument, Devils Tower in Wyoming, using the Antiquities Act of 1906 as his justification. Since then, 18 presidents have created or modified more than 150 national monuments. President Bill Clinton, however, was not convinced there was enough local support for a national monument.

The status quo was not working for ranchers and the commissioners, either. It left them vulnerable to another national monument campaign, once a Democrat retook the White House.

Just that threat of a national monument imposed on them by a Democrat from Chicago who had never set foot in Owyhee County and who didn’t understand their culture was an exceedingly strong motivator for them to figure out a solution.

There was one thing, however, that both sides DID agree upon: the desire to keep the Owyhee canyonlands just as they were.

To conservationists, the only other way to protect key parts of Owyhee County was with Congressionally mandated Wilderness.

But just the mention of wilderness in the town of Bruneau could get you thrown out of Cowboys Pastime Bar and Grill.  “Not in our backyard” was the cry. Ranchers were offended by wilderness, seeing its restrictions on cattle grazing as a direct threat to their traditional way of life.

Luckily, both sides had the good sense to realize time was running out on them. One hundred miles away, Boise recreationists had “discovered” the beauty of the Owyhees. The weekend four-by-fours, side-by-sides, and the dreaded “razors” were already advancing toward the ranchers’ fragile homeland.

Maybe it was better just to roll the dice on collaboration, even if it meant having to talk with those pernicious enviros.                                                                                                                                                                             

I was late to the party when it came to the desert. Having lived among towering ponderosa pine trees for so long, the mysteries of sagebrush country had eluded me.

During a particularly muddy spring in the mountains, the Outdoor Idaho crew realized we had not given the desert a fair shot. We set about correcting that error with full-length programs like “High Desert Country,” “Desert Chronicles” and “Desert Hideaways.”

 

For me personally, a safari into the depths of the Bruneau River canyon convinced me of the other-worldliness of something I once considered dreary flatland.  

 

You don’t see the desert canyons until you’ve driven dozens of dirt miles and are almost upon them. That’s when you see the canyon architect, the Bruneau River, carving through walls of lava rock.

 

The water comes from Nevada’s Jarbidge Mountains. Each spring there are usually a handful of weeks, sometimes only days, when the flow is perfect for rafting. Too much water, and you’re sharing the raging river with uprooted trees. Not enough water and forget about it. No one wants to pull 1,000 pounds over slippery rocks.

In May of 1993 we found the sweet spot.

                                                   

 

After helping others set up the catarafts at the put in, I settled into a small inflatable kayak for a journey of 40 miles over the next several days.

We immediately slipped into a different world. In places the river runs wall to wall, and the brown water nudges one along the towering 800-foot rhyolite and basalt walls highlighted with colors that would send even Bob Ross scurrying to the paint store to expand his easel.

Nuanced shades of red, brown, and black shimmered in the light of the sun. The glaze of yellows and greens, and those volcanic hues have a way of entering one’s soul, sealed by the hush of the big quiet.

As we entered what some have called the “Grand Canyon of Southwest Idaho,” I declared to no one in particular that this stunning scene ranked among the top experiences in all of Idaho.

Sliding my hand along the walls of the canyon, I felt awe, joy, surprise, and a touch of claustrophobia. Even if I had wanted to escape the narrow corridor, there was no easy way out. Besides, who would want to escape this journey through 12-million-year-old exposed rhyolite and basalt.                                

What made our trip especially memorable was the company of two accomplished river runners, Dr. Keith Taylor and Alan Hamilton, floating quietly through a canyon they had helped reveal to the world.

Keith figured he and his late colleague Walt Blackadar had been the first party to kayak the entire length of the Bruneau. “When we started running back in the 1970’s, we were doing it self-supported, carrying our own gear, stuffing it in the front and back of our kayaks.

“The maps back then were fairly general, with no mention of river miles,” he told us, in an interview conducted along the banks of the Bruneau.  “It was an interesting experience trying to run something when you didn’t know where you were.” The complexity and length of some of the rapids was quite a surprise to them.

On our trip, Keith would be a passenger in a cataraft, compliment of AIRE Raft Company founder Alan Hamilton. That meant Keith would be able to enjoy a hearty meal, instead of the granola bars he carried on his 1970 trip. 

Around the campfire, the group of experienced river runners discussed many things. No one mentioned this landscape being one day protected by something called the “Bruneau-Jarbidge Rivers Wilderness.” We assumed the six-foot-tall poison ivy and the choppy, continuous class-4 Five Mile Rapid near the end of the trip would deter all but the most adventurous.                                               

A lot, however, can change in 20 years. The Owyhee County commissioners decided there was a need for action, and they reached out to Fred Grant, a prominent attorney and property rights activist.

“We started with the idea that Owyhee County had to solicit various groups to reach some kind of agreement to resolve the conflicts over land use in the county,” Fred explained to us in our 2010 program “Canyonlands Calling.” He believed that if all sides began to communicate and see each other as human beings, “they just couldn't be icy all the time.”

 

Personally, I think the biggest factor that improved the chances of success was the decision by key environmental groups to adopt a different strategy going forward.

“There are many law schools that teach about litigation, and we know how to file lawsuits. It’s in our toolkit. We’re good at it,” said Craig Gehrke. “But there aren’t many law schools that teach how to collaborate.”

 

Craig explained the new approach his Wilderness Society and the Idaho Conservation League planned to adopt: “To go meet with people who don’t like you much but will have a cup of coffee with you and see if you can find some common ground.”

“The trouble with that,” said Craig, “was I had listened to ranchers at different wilderness hearings over many years, and they all said, ‘Hell no, no more! We won’t support that!’ I frankly didn’t expect much difference this time.”

Despite his skepticism, Craig knew his team was running out of options. “What did we have to lose?” Craig remarked to me. “But turns out, listening worked to the point where I was kind of embarrassed that we hadn’t done more of it!”

After nine years of meetings, no significant agreements had been reached. At least on the surface, progress seemed elusive. Then, one day, Idaho Conservation League staff member John McCarthy walked into an ICL meeting with some good news.

“I think we made some progress,” he announced. “I went with my bundle of maps under my arm and showed up at the ranch house to discuss potential wilderness areas. And they had baked me a pie!”

 

Everyone in the room considered the pastry offering a breakthrough moment. It wasn’t a phone call or a threat or an emotional letter. It was John driving to someone’s home, just to talk.

The rancher probably figured, hey, this guy’s persistent, and he’s not going away. Maybe we do have to talk with him. 

Someone who embraced the concept of collaboration early on was rancher Chris Black. For our 2010 “Wilderness in the 21st Century” program, Chris said, “I think in any collaborative process, where you wind up is more toward the middle. In any situation, you’re not going to get everything you want. From a ranching perspective, we had more to lose than most other people, or more to gain. So, it was a big incentive for us to try to work through that process.”

Attorney Fred Grant had proposed an idea known as the Owyhee Initiative Collaborative Committee, an agreement forged by those sitting around the negotiating table, to try to hammer out a plan for the unique landscape.

Around the table sat a diverse group of stakeholders: County Commissioners, Idaho Cattlemen’s Association, Idaho Conservation League, Wilderness Society, Nature Conservancy, Shoshone Paiute Tribe, Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association, People for the Owyhees, U.S. Air Force, Owyhee County Soil Conservation District, and Owyhee Borderlands Trust.

The Bureau of Land Management sent a representative. The BLM would oversee most of the 500,000 acres in question. The staff of U.S. Senator Mike Crapo was there. The senator would be the point person who could hopefully push the Initiative through Congress.

The group met for eight hours twice a month. With such an impressive collection of power players around that table, it’s perhaps understandable that a decade passed before something could be agreed on that would survive congressional scrutiny and gain a president’s approval.

Against all odds, the cowboy coffee strategy began paying off. After countless meetings over coffee, the group managed to save the most stunning and important landscapes in the region, while fulfilling some of the ranching community’s hopes for stability and certainty.

On an Idaho map you’ll see six small, separate wilderness areas comprising 517,000 acres in a much larger landscape of five million acres. Each wilderness has a name. Collectively, they’re known as the Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness Area, a remote area of eastern Oregon, southwestern Idaho, and northern Nevada. Also protected were 316 miles of rivers.

I have had the good fortune to visit some of these wilderness areas, like Big Jacks Creek and Little Jacks Creek, which you can peer into with relatively little effort. Others require a commitment of several days. One of my favorite wilderness study areas begins in tiny Rome, Oregon, which could easily have been built in a day. Lower Owyhee River is a Wild and Scenic River, a journey of 67 miles that takes rafters and kayakers past Pruitt’s Castle, Chalk Basin, and the vertical rock walls of Iron Point Canyon to the take-out at Leslie Gulch.

After the bill became law, we interviewed Senator Mike Crapo for our “Wilderness in the 21^st Century” program. Sometimes you just know when a political person is telling you what he figures he needs to say, but it was obvious to me that the senator was speaking from the heart.

“I don’t think that there are words to describe how happy I am at the outcome here,” the senator told us, “Not only because we now have in place a plan to move forward that will help everybody enjoy this incredible part of Idaho in a better way and will preserve it for the future.

“This has become recognized nationally as a model,” said the senator, who had convinced his D.C. colleagues to support the collaboration.  “Across most of the country, we still have a conflict mode of approaching land-management decisions. But here is a model that showed how we can get past the conflict and actually build consensus.”

                                               ***

 

When I retired and decided to put some memories together, I reflected on what Outdoor Idaho did well and where it fell short. A regret of mine is that Outdoor Idaho didn’t use its voice more often to honor and amplify collaborations occurring all around us. An entire hour-long program on adversaries working together might not have changed the world, but maybe it could have encouraged more cooperation, or at least reassured Idahoans that something hopeful was taking place around them.

Idaho had indeed become a national leader in successful collaborations. I wanted more information about that “secret sauce,” so I set up a coffee date with two individuals who had experienced successful collaborations as well as multi-year failures.

John Robison from the Idaho Conservation League emphasized patience and the need for open dialogue. “You have to have people willing to listen to the other side and act in good faith. And don’t try to convert them.

“It also helps to have an existential threat that is putting everyone in a corner. If the status quo is going well, why would you want to take a risk and collaborate? Uncertainty draws people together.”

Craig Gehrke with the Wilderness Society told me, “You have to be willing to lose some friends if they are being too quarrelsome. Sometime you have to tell them that they need to be in a group, just not this one! Sometimes you’ll even lose donors who believe you’re giving away too much to the enemy. You have to accept that possibility. It’s part of collaboration.”

John warned about potential saboteurs: “They will try to make you fail. Get them to the table where the bigger issues can be resolved. Sometimes that works; sometimes it doesn’t. It helps to remember that more collaborations fail than succeed.”

Other cautions came fast and furious as the coffee flowed. “All it takes sometimes is for one person to be swapped out from one of the interest groups. If people haven’t come to trust each other, the tone of that one person can sink years of work.”

 

“Who opposes what you’re doing is sometimes as important as who supports what you’re doing. It’s important to know how much to chew off. How big a bite do you take? It has to be enough so that each stakeholder has something to gain and a reason to put in the hours. But if the collaboration tries to solve too much, it can collapse under its own weight. Knowing what not to take on can be as important as knowing what to take on.”

“There’s always going to be a leap of faith involved,” said John. “That’s what it took to think we could make wilderness work in the desert of Owyhee County.”

 

Craig Gehrke remembered the times he needed to gather together a smaller group of like-minded people to solve a problem that had suddenly arisen in the larger group.  “I told them we needed a code word to gather. It would be ‘The owl flies at midnight.’ I would type that into the subject line of the email, which meant we needed to get together that evening.

“The BLM was not a fan of wilderness in the early years. They tried every way to make us fail. But once things started moving forward, and it was clear it was going to succeed, they jumped on board and became a big help.”

 

“And, frankly, the stars have to align,” John Robison reminded me. “Not only do you have to have the right people at the table, but you need some degree of momentum and support from the county level up to the federal level. Otherwise, things can stall out quickly. In the end, we all need to own this thing. Their problems become our problems. A deal is a deal, and you’ve got to honor that.”

                                                       

When John would travel to Washington, D.C. to confer with lawmakers, the county commissioners never missed an opportunity to join them. “We always welcomed the county commissioners, especially when we were going to testify. Having them show up as their true authentic selves really made quite the impression that this was indeed a collaborative effort.... We were always late because of their giant belt buckles and the metal detectors. Besides, they couldn’t walk fast. They were tripping all over themselves in their cowboy boots. One time the agent even took away someone’s mustache wax.

“I remember the time we all arrived at Senator Larry Craig’s office at the same time and almost caused a heart attack,” said John. “The poor staffer thought he had made a horrible scheduling mistake. He had assumed we were mortal enemies. We told him, no, we’re all here for the same thing.”
                                     

Craig Gehrke recounted a discussion he had with Frank Bachmann after the wilderness legislation sailed through Congress and landed on the president’s desk for his signature. Frank had been the primary representative for Owyhee County. “I never really understood this ‘wilderness’ thing,” he told Craig. “But looking at all the ATVs coming up the road this year, we got this thing done just in time!”

As Craig commented to me recently, “a lot of the collaboration progress for the Owyhees occurred under the radar and out of the public eye, so who knows what’s really going on around the state.  Perhaps just having coffee with folks and talking one on one is still the way to go.” 

Surprisingly, many who have experienced both failures and successes argue that collaboration may be one of the few strategies robust enough to withstand today’s turbulent political landscape.

That’s because collaborations are not crafted in the halls of Congress. They are often born in coffee shops, with people talking face-to-face, and sometimes taking a decade before anything materializes. It can take a long time to believe the guy across the table from you has your back.

Think about your own lives. How often can we say to someone, “I know you have my back, and I’ve got your back”? It’s pretty rare. That level of trust requires time and effort.
And sometimes it requires a thousand cups of coffee.  -30-