Wetlands project may force family off ranch — again

ROOSEVELT — Preston Young was 10 when he, his father and his grandfather were forced to abandon the family ranch so the federal government could build swamps there. Today, still struggling to overcome the West Nile virus that nearly killed him, the 28-year-old is living in the path of a new federal swamp-building project that would take the last ranch land his family has left.

"When they took that from granddad, it hurt," Young said from the living room of a home he helped build less than a year ago.

The history of the Young family's woes is the history of federal agencies undoing one another's work. One such project was the Duchesne River Area Canal Rehabilitation, in which the Natural Resources Conservation Service paid to replace 41 miles of ditches and canals with pipes or line them with concrete to stop valuable water from leaking into the ground.

The project was a good thing for individuals such as Young's grandfather, Dude, who'd made his living from a beef herd on a ranch east of Myton along the Duchesne River that had grown to more than 1,000 acres.

The trouble was, lining the canals stopped water from leaking into the ground, which caused nearby wetlands to dry up. That led to the creation of the Duchesne River Area Canal Rehabilitation Mitigation project. In 1989 the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation offered Dude Young what the family calls a lowball price for his ranch so it could be turned into a swamp and wetgrass area. He resisted and, according to his son, Ross Young, was told he could take the money or take nothing at all; either way the bureau would have his land.

With money from the forced sale, Dude Young tried to keep the family ranch alive, helping his son finance a 427-acre spread of which 300 acres was farmable. For the first time in his life, Ross Young had to take a job to support his chosen profession.

"I ended up selling it, and I still owed $350,000 on it," Ross Young said. "That showed how much we got out of 1,000 acres."

But with a multiyear lease on 260 acres of Ute tribal land, Ross Young has continued ranching along with his son, Preston, who bought six acres on the Myton Bench and built corrals. In 2006, Preston Young began building a home there. Meanwhile he and his wife, Hillary, and their two young sons moved in with Ross Young in a hilltop house overlooking the Duchesne River.

That's when Preston Young nearly died.

At first he thought it was flu, although it was August. For two weeks his body, head and bones ached, his stomach hurt. Then he started vomiting whenever he moved his head. He lost his strength and equilibrium. He couldn't stand up.