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As a person born and raised in Nevada I would like to tell my true story that goes along with this Bundy issue.

I should start out by saying that this happened a long time ago, I was maybe 10 at the start of the story. My father was an avid hunter and fisherman and he got me started very early, I got my first shotgun when I was eight, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

It was the fishing. You may not know but Nevada had some great mountain stream fishing, much better and different than around here. Every summer Mom, Dad and I would fish the streams in northern Nevada. My father had a little place in Paradise Valley, Humboldt County, Nevada, that was our base camp. We were good friends with the local ranchers there and they would tell us where some good streams were. The stream sides of the Nevada mountains are a mass of willow and other brush. My father was a master at following the tip of his nine-foot fly rod through the mess, to drop a worm, into a small hole that might hold a fish. I got pretty good at it too but my desire was to be a fly fisherman, but there was no way to do that in these streams. One winter I went down into our basement, put a number eight hook into my father’s big vice and tied some pheasant feathers on it. It was very pretty, so I made a bunch more and could hardly wait to try them out in the creeks. That summer we drove a long way to a stream we had never been to, the South Fork of the Little Humboldt River.  It was like all the other streams, shaded and almost impenetrable by willow and other brush. We always used worms, but not one of us could catch a thing. I thought it would be a good time to use my pretty pheasant feather flies. I took my hook and sinker off and tied my fly on, dragged it through the rapids into the small hole a few times and nothing happened. I wasn’t about to give up, so I put a sinker back on and tried it again. Wham, I got a big cutthroat, bigger than anything I ever caught in a stream. I ran down stream to find my dad, “look what I caught,” he was impressed. “I caught it with this” I said as I held up my pheasant fly, I could see he didn’t believe me so I said “watch this” and tossed it in the hole he was fishing. Wham, I got another one even bigger. “Give me one of those,” he said. He started catching fish. We went and found my mother and set her up with one, she ended up catching the biggest one of the day, a 22-inch cutthroat in that small stream.

Why tell all this and how does it relate to Bundy? As an adult and after moving here I went back, in the late 70’s, just to see it again. As you can tell I had fond memories of the place. I was shocked to say the least, there wasn’t a bit of vegetation left along the stream and I wouldn’t even call it a stream, a muddy canal would describe it better. It was completely destroyed by cattle. The local ranchers said an outfit called Nevada Garvey had permission from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to run 10,000 head in the area, but the ranchers said the number was more like 40,000. This is what guys like Bundy want to do, they refuse to pay their grazing fees and destroy the public land at the same time. Maybe if the BLM could collect some of those fees they would have a little more money to enforce some of the rules. If the public lands were turned over to the states I doubt the enforcement would be any better. And after a bad fire year the state would be broke and have to raise taxes or sell the land to some corporation or to someone like Bundy, which is exactly what people like him want. Don’t be fooled by the people trying to take your public lands, when the state runs out of money and has to sell these lands, to whoever, our most beautiful areas will be over-run and ruined because they won’t want to pay to clean it up.

I would like to think that the possibility remains that just maybe some 10-year-old kid can catch a 20-inch cutthroat in one of our streams and have a very fond memory.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Rodd Gallaway,

Noxon