Phones turn Idaho cowboys into 'voice on the mountain'

SILVER CITY, Idaho — The craggy gullies where Idaho cowboy Paul Nettleton runs 1,200 head of cattle around this living Owyhee County ghost town are often precious minutes from reliable cell phone coverage.

It's a place where sudden summertime windstorms howl in from the broiling lava fields of eastern Oregon, bringing with them dry lightning that can ignite fast-moving wildfires on sage-and-juniper hillsides. Unchecked, they could quickly turn Silver City's historic wooden buildings to ash.

This spring, Nettleton and six other Owyhee County ranchers who make their livelihoods in some of America's most remote backcountry, began carrying satellite telephones provided by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security.

It's an effort to turn men whose ranching families have been wedded to this land for more than a century into a high-tech advance guard against wildfires that just a year ago devastated millions of acres in Idaho.

"Minutes count in that country," a mustachioed Nettleton told The Associated Press one recent morning after parking his four-wheeler outside the town's 145-year-old Idaho Hotel. "Right now, it's pretty quiet. But it'll come."

The BLM says Owyhee County — the name comes from South Pacific explorer Captain Cook's spelling of Hawaii and honors Hawaiian trappers who disappeared in the uncharted region in 1818 — is the first place the agency has armed cowboys with satellite phones.

Residents who call Silver City home during the summer feel a little safer, knowing Nettleton is always connected to one of 66 satellites from Iridium Satellite LLC, based in Bethesda, Md., hurtling through space, not just the earthbound cell tower on nearby War Eagle Mountain that's often blocked by the region's terrain.

"He's kind of our voice on the mountain," said Jim Hyslop, who helps run the local Silver City Fire and Rescue and has family roots here dating to 1916.

After nearly eight years of uninterrupted drought, ample snowfall and spring rains in 2008 left much of Owyhee County's high country greener than normal this year, meaning fire danger has been limited. Those typical summer storms with dry lightning and sudden gales haven't materialized, either; the ranchers have yet to use their new phones.

A year ago, however, 3,000 square miles of Idaho — an area three times the size of Rhode Island — were torched by blazes. The biggest was the Murphy complex of fires, a lightning-caused inferno that burned for three weeks and became the largest single fire ever fought by the Idaho BLM at nearly 1,000 square miles. It left behind dead wildlife and livestock, scorched grazing ground and charred habitat for seasons to come for sensitive species such as sage grouse.