Photo by Bob Keefer.

Where the Bighorns and the Antelope Play

 A young manager in Oregon’s high desert stewards Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, protecting its sagebrush landscape

In the span of several days during March 2023, Josh Loew and his wife experienced a whirlwind of life-changing events: The New Jersey couple got engaged, got married, and organized a baby shower and gender reveal for their unborn son. Then, with barely a moment to catch their breath, they loaded up their pickup truck with as many belongings as they could fit and set off west to their new home — and, for Josh, a new job — at Oregon’s remote Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, leaving New Jersey in the dust.

The Loews knew they were headed for adventure. At 25, he was — and still is —  the youngest person to manage the 278,000-acre refuge, with its onsite staff of two. They didn’t count on beginning their parental leave right after working to fight a catastrophic wildfire that closed the entire refuge in August.

“You’d never think you’d move across the country, and then all of a sudden everything aligns,” Loew says. “We made a PowerPoint presentation for my family and said, ‘This is how life is going to go for a little bit.’”

It’s late June when a colleague and I from Eugene Weekly journey out to the refuge to learn more about the biodiversity of the land and animals, and to meet the acting manager who lives there and is in charge of protecting it. To get to Hart Mountain, we leave the Field Station near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (the other local refuge in southern Harney County) and coast 50 miles down Highway 205. We turn off at a gravel road — with Hart Mountain as our North Star in the distance — driving another 40 miles on that gravel until we reach the headquarters. 

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Photo by Bob Keefer.

Although Hart Mountain may be a little-known refuge to folks on the west side of the state, it is actually a 434-square-mile wildlife haven for many different creatures, including pronghorn antelope (which, scientifically speaking, aren’t actually antelope), bighorn sheep and sage grouse. It is also a part of a larger refuge complex that includes the nearly 900-square-mile Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge just across the border in Nevada. The two refuges have an office headquarters in Lakeview and are separated by land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). They are connected because both refuges play vital roles in the greater sagebrush ecosystems.

“It’s this area where the greatest significance is when visitors come here and tell you it’s like taking a step back in time,” says Shannon Ludwig, project leader for Sheldon-Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge. “I’ve met with the Burns-Paiute Tribe and their comments were that this place is very important and culturally significant because of how it’s maintained and how it looks.”

The refuge sits at the base of the fault-block Hart Mountain in southeast Oregon. It’s about 30 minutes from the nearest town (Plush, population 67) and nearly an hour and a half to the nearest town with a hospital (Lakeview, population 2,400). The refuge was established in 1936 to protect the declining population of pronghorn antelope, following the establishment of Sheldon in 1931. Now, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), it is home for nearly 1,300 antelope. It sits between the mountain and a rolling ocean of sagebrush that continues on as far as the eye can see. 

At the Hart Mountain headquarters complex, a small group of Civilian Conservation Corps stone buildings from the 1930s, I step out of the car, the gravel crunching under my feet the only sound aside from distant birdsong. The silence encapsulates me, slows my heart rate. Out here you feel an isolation that few people truly experience. The desert sun and long bitter winters peel away any layers of pretense, revealing the unvarnished truth of who someone is, for better or worse. To live out here, one must accept the dissonance of the harsh realities of nature with its beauty. Luckily, Josh Loew says, he and his wife were up for the task. 

Trading the shores of Cape May for a Sagebrush Sea

Loew sits to speak with us in uniform, hiding light blond hair under a hat. With a little facial scruff and a respectful demeanor, he could easily be five years older. He hails from Newport, New Jersey, raised in a close family of blue collar workers — mainly welders — and welding was what he set out to do. He went to school for welding and enjoyed it, but ultimately chose to go to community college to study environmental science. At the college, he saw a flier for an unpaid internship at the Cape May National Wildlife Refuge, located at the north end of the New Jersey peninsula, famous for its miles of coastline and picturesque Victorian houses.

“I felt a calling for something else,” he says.

After being chosen for the internship, he spent a summer essentially paying to work there, spraying herbicide. The next year, he returned and was paid for his work through a nonprofit. Then, Loew applied for the federal Directorate Fellows Program (DFP) and was accepted. The program, a diversifying initiative, offers students and recent graduates an 11-week paid fellowship, leading to potential direct hiring within two years. 

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Josh and roula loew, and their son, louka, in front Of their home at hart mountain headquarters. Photo by Bob Keefer.

“They call DFP the golden ticket. If you get into that fellowship you get hiring privileges for about two years,” Loew explains. This meant that he would be on a shortlist of people called for interviews and jobs at different refuges around the country. 

He eventually got a job working for New Jersey Fish and Wildlife as a waterfowl technician, but continued to work side jobs at the same time such as asphalt work and landscaping. 

“A seasonal waterfowl technician wasn’t necessarily bringing home all the money,” he jokes.

In March 2023, Loew was cutting trees down (one of his other jobs) when he received an email from the manager of the Hart Mountain refuge about an opening as a wildlife specialist. He had never heard of it or applied to work there, but was on the list due to his fellowship. They have a hard time getting people to take the remote job, Loew says, explaining that the manager probably went through the list and shot him an email. 

“I read it and thought that Oregon was way too far,” Loew says. “But I couldn’t focus the rest of the day.” At the time, Loew and his pregnant girlfriend — Roula, now his wife — were doing their best to make ends meet, working different jobs and living with his mom. He says the email felt like their big chance. The couple had met in college, and she was also a biologist, so she didn’t need too much convincing for the move, Loew says. 

Ultimately, the adventurous couple felt they had to say yes. So they squeezed in a going-away party, a gender reveal, a baby shower and a wedding. Loew adds that his brother somehow managed to throw him a bachelor party. 

“We got married on March 12, and then we moved a few days later,” he says. 

The family of not-quite-yet-three packed up the back of their truck and drove out west, trading the densely populated cities and towns of the east for the sprawling sagebrush plains of the Oregon desert. 

“It’s been a rollercoaster at times, especially for my wife. She’s been through pregnancy, gave birth and is now raising a newborn — all here,” he says. “Lakeview maternity care was phenomenal.”

That December, the Loews celebrated their own little Christmas, noticeably missing the big family gatherings they were accustomed to in New Jersey. However, he says, they put a little tree up, and Roula Loew’s sister came out to visit. Moving out here involves both monumental and subtle changes, but it’s perspective that ultimately shapes the experience.

“I see this as a golden opportunity, as unbeatable elsewhere for the moment. For the years ahead that I can see, this is where I picture myself and my family to be,” Josh Loew says.

Loew was originally hired as a wildlife refuge specialist, and was often referred to as the assistant manager. He says he worked alongside the refuge manager, who retired in December 2023. Loew stepped in as acting manager and is also the safety officer. In October, Loew again changed job titles — from acting manager to the official manager.

“I pretty much do a little bit of everything,” he says of his day to day.

Aside from him, staffing is consistently low, but Loew says they make do. They have a heavy equipment operator and various biologists and biotechs that spend periods of time on the refuge.

Because of the staffing and different roles Loew is fulfilling, he explains that his day-to-day work is often different, and he is often doing a little bit of everything. He checks boundary fences or hops on an ATV in the cold before the sun rises to complete sage grouse surveys during their mating season. Thankfully, the original position he was hired for has helped him in his new role. 

“The wildlife specialist job was a good position to learn this because it includes working with visitors services, maintenance, and little things like checking bird feeders. There was a management and a biology piece,” Loew says.

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ANTELOPE CROSS THE ROAD THAT LEADS INTO REMOTE HART MOUNTAIN REFUGE. Photo by Bob Keefer.

Modern improvements

Now the man in charge, Loew oversees the dynamic challenges that face the refuge. One of these complicated issues is the double-edged sword of increased visitation. He explains that although visitors are great, the land can be both positively and negatively impacted by people. Loew emphasizes that overall, the mission and priority of the refuge is to protect wildlife and wildlife habitat.

“With increased visitation comes increased risk of fire and risk of invasive species,” he says. “With every 100 people there is always that one that causes trouble — like off roading and littering. And there are things that happen that we don’t know about, things that we can suspect people are doing, like not respecting gates and potentially poaching.”

He says they are trying to improve upon some of this by adding extra signage to gates. In the past, they used to close the gates and trust that most people would respect them, but unfortunately, Loew says, they need to make things more clear, especially for gates that close seasonally.

“Winter is a critical time for sage grouse that are nesting and leading their chicks around. There are also important times for pronghorn that are fawning,” he says. “They need to be undisturbed for even just a few days because this could mean life or death for them.”

Loew continues to say that what some people want — camping along creeks or riding dirt bikes wherever — isn’t necessarily what the wildlife needs. 

“You hear strong opinions that make it clear the mission we are pursuing isn’t what people think is best. They say there shouldn’t be gates and fences,” Loew says.

Another project Loew and his team are working on is a management plan for bighorn sheep. Loew says cougars have been depleting the bighorn population down to a dangerous level, so they implemented a regulated management plan that includes balancing habitat with the population of cougars. 

While preserving the sagebrush landscape requires careful wildlife management, it also demands addressing larger ecological threats like invasive species and fire. Ludwig, the Lakeview administrator who has been overseeing both Hart Mountain and Sheldon refuges for the last 11 years, says there are common elements in the way they manage sagebrush within the refuges — for example, prioritizing wetlands and springs. ​​He mentions that the timely precipitation they had in the last year provided good opportunities for young sage grouse to survive into adulthood. They also saw some increase in pronghorn.

“That precipitation within this landscape helped out the wildlife quite a bit, especially in light of the last several years as we were experiencing a really extreme drought,” Ludwig says.

 Another element is addressing invasive grass, which he says has the power to change the entire ecology of a sagebrush ecosystem.

“What I mean by that, is they perpetuate fire, and too much fire or recurring fire on a landscape is where you lose your vegetation, and it completely changes the ecology to basically an invasive grass dominated system.”

The other problem species that they address is invasive conifers. Although juniper trees are native vegetation, Ludwig says a lack of recurring fires over the last hundred years has allowed conifers to invade and expand. An overabundance of conifers causes the landscape to lose its underlying layer of vegetation which is critical for sage grouse, pronghorn and other sagebrush dependent species.

‘A peace everyone yearns for’

Loew takes us around the corner from the refuge visitor’s center to the small stone house that he, his wife, and their son, Louka, live in. It’s one of two that exist on the property. When we arrive we are greeted by two large dogs — a pitbull mix and an Aussie shepherd — that nearly leap over the fence in excitement. Loew tells me the dogs were brought with them from New Jersey, and I can’t help but imagine how much their dogs must love living out here with a big yard and an even bigger open space beyond it. 

Roula Loew walks out her front door to meet us barefoot in shorts and a tank top, her nine-month-old son perched on her hip. She has kind, dark eyes and a relaxed smile that makes her seem like she’s always belonged in a place like this. 

She’s grown to like living on the refuge, she says, and that the isolation reveals the primitive side of who humans are. 

“There is a peace here that everyone yearns for,” she says. “But there is also an emotional rollercoaster of isolation. You become more in tune with everything.” She adds that living far from the hustle of civilization, you don’t realize how much energy everything takes.

“You have to figure out how to overcome obstacles in the quiet,” she remarks. 

The couple didn’t have a TV or wifi for months when they first moved out here, and had only a few furniture pieces including folding chairs from Josh Loew’s grandmother. He says, thanks to his wife, it’s looking better. The couple is making a home for themselves at Hart Mountain in more ways than one. 

Later that evening, my EW colleague and I drive through the nearby Malheur refuge at a slow pace in the hopes of spotting wildlife. As spring turns to summer, the desert becomes a vibrant canvas painted in many colors. The wetlands are lush with tall green grass cohabitating along the sagebrush, and together they press up against brown stoned cliffs. It isn’t long before the sunset bathes the distant Steens Mountain in a soft pink light. We spot several owls, deer and meadowlarks, as well as California quail, followed by a parade of tiny chicks. Life is abundant in a land so often thought of as lifeless.

It’s easy to think that anyone who wants to live here must be a little eccentric for choosing isolation, for embracing solitude. But as we drive along the empty highway that curls up against tall mesas, I watch the sky cling to every ounce of the burning horizon although it is now well past 9 o’clock. In the ambience of the pitter patter of bugs as they hit the windshield, I am beginning to understand why someone would choose this place. And I think they might be right.

Read about the Warner Peak fire at Hart Mountain Refuge.