Manage, Not Damage

In 2010, Adams commissioned a ranch management plan from Bamberger, whose 5,500-acre Selah Bamberger Ranch Pre-serve in Johnson City is the largest preservation project on private property in Texas. Bamberger spent a year walking every inch of the Dobie property, meticulously cataloging its plants and wildlife, assessing the soil, and marking out the best places for potential walking trails. Bamberger helped Adams rally the support of the Texas Trail Tamers, a group of wilderness volunteers who donated an estimated $20,000 worth of services clearing trails along the top of the bluff and along the creek to "Philosopher's Rock," one of Frank Dobie's favorite resting places.

The trails blazed over a year ago are getting overgrown, however. While the ranch is serviced by the overworked UT maintenance crews, there are no special provisions for the care and upkeep of trails and country roads. With no one else looking after day-to-day issues on the ranch, Adams improvises solutions. When I visited the ranch with Adams, his SUV was cluttered with lumber and wood chips that he had purchased as a stopgap measure to fill in large ruts that had opened up on the ranch road. After the rainstorm the night before, he was worried about Packer, who currently lives on the ranch with her two sons. "She has to get her car in and out of the ranch every day to drive them to school," he said. "If a tire slipped into one of these gullies, she'd be in trouble."

Adams, a man in his sixties, emptied giant bags of wood chips into the deep gashes, laying long boards over the chips. Running out of boards, he stood over them, shaking his head. "I didn't bring enough," he said. "But maybe that will hold for a little while."Adams is quick to emphasize that the university has not been neglectful – rather, he says, it is unequipped to deal with the special needs of running a ranch. For example, there's the sticker problem. "The lawn around the ranch house is 54,000 square feet of stickers," Adams says, rendering it unusable for residents like Packer and her young children. This year Adams raised $700 to buy corn gluten, which kills stickers. The treated lawn, however, needs frequent mowing and bagging to keep the seed heads at bay. Even if UT could send out a crew to mow the lawn weekly, their riding mowers do not bag the cut grass. So Adams himself mows the lawn with a walking lawnmower.