Cows Up To Their Necks In Loam On The Range Cattle Sink Into Boggy Morass

More feared than asteroids, pockets of quicksand southwest of Spokane are swallowing cows faster than you can say “extinction.”

Several farmers and livestock experts say that unsuspecting herds are drifting into the sinking soup of sand, where thawing range land saturated by a long, wet winter has begun to collapse into a merciless morass.

The heavy mud quickly encases the 1,100-pound beef bearers like dinosaurs in a tar pit.

“They know the mud is out there and they’re scared to death of it,” says Benge, Wash., rancher Roy Clinesmith, who used a Caterpillar tractor last week to rescue six cows that broke through frozen topsoil into the muck below. One cow had mud covering everything but her head.

Ranchers say they haven’t seen this much quicksand since the early 1970s, when an exceptionally wet winter turned the range into a bog of sandy Jell-O that could not support the weight of livestock or pickup trucks.

“The cow goes right down and can’t get out,” says Joan Harder, who operates a cattle ranch near Ritzville. Harder’s farmhands earlier this week nearly lost a tractor pulling three cows from a quagmire. A fourth died in the process and remains entombed in the wet earth.

“You can’t dig them out because if you get too close, you go down, too,” Harder says. “You have to harness horses with pulleys and bring in tractors and lay down timbers to pull them out. It’s unreal.”

Clinesmith says he has moved his herd to higher ground until the ground hardens.

While the quicksand may kill just a few cows, it is another worry for ranchers during calving season, says Tom Platt, livestock specialist for Washington State Cooperative Extension in Davenport.

“Any loss is serious to them,” he said. “They lose all the profit on the cow for the year and there’s not much profit this year, anyway.”

, DataTimes