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Compactly fit at 56, Kent loses neither footing nor enthusiasm as he hikes through a steep area of shrub steppe overlooking Lind Coulee. Along the way, he points out various species of native sagebrush, rabbitbrush, and wheatgrass that dominate the land on about half the wildlife areas he managed.

Compared to the dramatic cliffs of the Quincy Unit to the west, the flocks of sandhill cranes that make raucous stopovers, or the walleye that bite in Potholes Reservoir, this inconspicuous hillside is no tourist attraction. The path we follow through the sage is far more familiar to cottontail rabbits and mule deer than humans.

Yet this spot illustrates, better than most, what much of the basin looked like before ranchers and farmers arrived in numbers a century ago-and especially before one of the nation's largest federal irrigation projects transformed a grayish brown land into the vibrant greens and yellows that now color some of the world's best farmland.

When ranchers ruled, livestock grazed across this hill, mowing the tender grasses while leaving the woody sagebrush in their wake. As a result, even 50-plus years later the long-lived sagebrush covers most of the ground, with sprigs of grass coming up on perhaps a third. The ratio should be reversed, with sagebrush growing on just 30 percent of the land and grasses carpeting the rest, says Kent, citing the research of late Washington State University botany professor Rexford Daubenmire.

"We still have a very disturbed site, even though it's good for the Columbia Basin," says Kent, who spent much of his career trying to preserve the very types of extremely wet or especially arid lands that others consider worthless.

"The shrub steppe habitat wasn't really recognized as important by our agency leaders until after I had recognized it here," says Kent, who grew up in similar country. "Shrub steppe is kind of like old-growth forest. It's something you can lose and not get back."

He kneels beside a big sage with branches that are beginning to buckle and decay. As the bushes age and crowd one another, some will die. It could take decades more, but gaps will form between the sage, grasses will fill those spaces, and the shrub steppe will be restored.

"Daubenmire will be correct," Kent says. He rises to his feet and scans out across the sagebrush.

"People who are interested in commercial [uses] might call this wasteland," he says, turning back toward the car, "but wildlife like it."

Water, water everywhere

When most homesteaders settled the Columbia Basin in the early 1900s, it was a hardscrabble land where fewer than 10 inches of rain fell each year.

The soil was rich and the growing season long, but the country was so parched, farmers had to leave their fields fallow every other year to save up enough moisture for a single wheat crop.

"There was hardly any agriculture, really," says John Kugler, a WSU Extension educator for Grant and Adams counties. "There were wheat growers, but that was about it."

Ranchers grazed cattle and sheep, but there was so little forage, it took huge holdings to turn a profit. After spring green-up, ranchers needed hay to get their livestock through the year.

Then along came the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Columbia Basin Project.

The agency, then the fledgling Reclamation Service, set its sights on the basin a hundred years ago, at about the same time dry-land farming grabbed hold. However, it took half a century to work through the political process, the acquisition of private lands, the engineering challenges, the multimillion-dollar costs, and the difficult construction of Grand Coulee Dam. World War II elevated the nation's need for inexpensive electricity, and Grand Coulee would soon become the largest federal hydroelectric plant.

In 1952, a decade after the major construction of Grand Coulee Dam was complete and a year after installation of the last electricity generators and power pumps, the first irrigation water diverted from the dam to Banks Lake started flowing southward. That year, the water reached about 66,000 acres of farmland in the basin.

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Continued

Locals occasionally use the word “wasteland” to describe sagebrush-studded lands that biologists prefer to call native shrub steppe. It’s impossible to take such a harsh view when Robert Kent is your guide.