Miriam Austin doesn’t speed and tells me so and wonders why anyone would intentionally break laws and I slow down. Miriam would never sit in a tree to stop a timber sale or chain herself to a bulldozer or even, I expect, carry a sign in protest. She refers to Aldo Leopold only once in my presence. She does write detailed letters, unadorned yet passionate in their specificity. She is a self-employed, part-time-volunteer field biologist pursuing a classic, if neglected, line of study, taxonomy. She identifies species and habitats and documents them. As a sideline, she identifies and documents what degrades and kills species, too.

Sometimes Miriam spends six days a week in the field counting things—bats are a current project and she’s been poking around old mines recently. Miriam loves going to a familiar place and finding something new; it doesn’t have to be unique or even rare. She finds what other people have looked at for years and missed, overlooked or ignored. The problem is, she inevitably finds things that some would prefer not to be found and documents things that have been ignored for a reason. She doesn’t want to change the laws or the policies or the rules, but she makes people mad, run-her-off-the-road-in-the-night mad, by looking closely at the world around her, counting things, following the rules, policies and laws that already apply and holding other people to them. Even her own family.

Miriam’s words tumble out in long unbroken strings. Her e-mails arrive with few returns in the copy. Her reports, many of them done for just the per diem reimbursement that the U.S. Forest Service allows volunteers for gas and food in the field, are phonebook thick with exact times, places, witnesses, pictures. Beautiful pictures sometimes, like the alpine meadows on Mount Harrison blooming in the few weeks that southern Idaho allows at 9,000 feet. Each is imprinted with a time code from her camera, fuzzy red numerals in the lower right corner of each picture she passes to me. The time code is a reminder that, beautiful scene or not, there’s something amiss that caught her eye: the nubs of forage and the raw earth of overgrazed meadows, creeks with trampled banks and lots of cowpies. The brown lumps are a recurring image in Miriam’s pictures: if she can’t shoot a picture of the cow, she shoots a picture of what the cow leaves behind. Soon I hold a stack of pictures. She hands me a map and then more pictures. I hold them awkwardly.

When it’s cold, Miriam wears a soft field coat, the kind bow hunters like for its quiet movement and realistic camouflage. Instead of abstract green blobs, it’s screened with dark brown and gray in a pattern of hardwood tree bark, leaves and twigs. Today she wears a big green bow in her long, tightly curled brown hair with sparse strands of gray near her temples, silver buffalo earrings and rimless glasses with black low-cut boots and black jeans.

Miriam has been a veterinary surgical assistant, a den mother for Cub Scouts, a rancher’s daughter and a rodeo queen candidate. She started volunteering for the Forest Service about a decade ago, helping her son complete the renovation of a Civilian Conservation Corps–built campground for his Eagle Scout project. The scientific work grew from that, and when she finished her undergraduate degree in 1999 after a twenty-year hiatus, she went to work full time, counting, observing, documenting for whoever might pay. She adds, however, that she doesn’t work for any group—timber company or activist or federal agency—that she thinks will exaggerate or downplay her data for political gain.

She has multiple sclerosis and can’t walk for long distances like she used to. A few years ago, Miriam says, she was nearly admitted to a nursing home because she couldn’t get around anymore, but she resisted and finds that she’s stronger the more time she spends in the field. So she packs up her red Ford Ranger with Red Willow Research, the name of her nonprofit field data collection service, printed on the side and her dog and goes out to count, snap pictures and document. “If one woman with MS can keep track of all this country, then they have no excuse,” she says of the land managers and ranchers.

You have to go through channels to find Miriam. I called a home number I had for her near Oakley, Idaho, one of the small towns at the foot of the Albion Mountains near the border with Nevada and Utah. The man who answered the phone said tersely, “She doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Do you know where I might reach her?”

“No.” It wasn’t an angry no, really, or a tell-her-to-call no. It was a no with finality, punctuation on a story that isn’t told to strangers who call unexpectedly.

After seven years in Oakley, Miriam moved out recently, she says. She and her family just didn’t see things the same way. She spent many days in the field, documenting abuses to public lands. Her family held permits for grazing on much of the same land. Naturally, Miriam reported all of the grazing problems, and she fought with her family over it. Finally she moved out, taking a small house in a Twin Falls neighborhood ninety minutes away. She doesn’t publish the address or the phone number—she’s worried about harassment, she says. She’s reconciling with her family but doesn’t expect to move back to Oakley. There’s too much that they don’t agree on, she says.

Miriam doesn’t get to spend as much time on Mount Harrison as she used to when she lived in its shadow in Oakley, but she returns as often as she can and had been up on the mountain a few days before my visit. She’d found cattle grazing where they shouldn’t have in the research natural area near the summit of the mountain. The fences here, she explains, run off into the sagebrush of the high mountain and end without connecting to anything. They inhibit the movement of cattle, but do little to keep hungry animals from following the fence line to its end and grazing their way into the more fragile parts of the mountain. Some even make it as far as the summit and into the meadow where the only population of Christ’s Indian paintbrush grows in the world.

Christ’s Indian paintbrush is named for John Christ (pronounced with a short i), who identified the bright-yellow flower in the early 1950s on a few hundred acres of Mount Harrison in southern Idaho. Identified in 1974 as a separate species from other Indian paintbrushes, Christ’s Indian paintbrush, Castilleja christii, or christii for short, is a candidate for listing as an endangered species but isn’t one yet. The truth is, christii isn’t the spotted owl or the whooping crane and probably won’t ever cure cancer. It’s just one in the mosaic of rare, threatened and endangered species that dot public lands, a foot soldier of biodiversity and, for some, a headache in a harsh environment. Miriam visits the sparse acres where christii grows whenever she can, and she is one of its few protectors.

The ski area about two-thirds of the way up Mount Harrison gets the most snow of any resort in Idaho. The Albion Mountains jut up on the eastern edge of the Great Basin, collecting all the weather that blows across that desert unimpeded. The road to the top might not open until July and snow can be found in August. It’s one of those rare places where you can stand at the windy and frozen top and look into the hot valley below at the dust blowing. Christii blooms during a few-week window once the snow melts. By early September, it may again be encrusted in ice.

The Department of Defense kept a vault at the top of the mountain and then gave it to the Forest Service when the vault’s clandestine purpose had outlived its usefulness. The vault is just a concrete room under the fire lookout on top of the mountain, but the military presence explains why a good road goes to the top of a 9,300-foot mountain that’s snowed over for half the year and has no timber. Now it allows access that puts pressure on the christii. About 40,000 people visit the mountain each year, making it one of Idaho’s most popular, though unheralded, national forest destinations. Hang gliders launch from a meadow adjacent to the christii, and part of the work to preserve the plant has been to educate hang gliders about it. They’ve generally been cooperative, Miriam says. Local people come up the mountain to camp, ride off-road vehicles and take in the view. Ranchers graze their cattle. Most people from out of town breeze by the turn for Mount Harrison and head to City of Rocks, the granite outcroppings at the southern end of the Albion Mountains that attract rock climbers from around the world and history buffs following the Oregon Trail.

Tom Bandolin, a Sawtooth National Forest biologist who’s friendly with Miriam, tells me that the christii doesn’t need to be listed as an endangered species if there’s a workable strategy in place that’s being followed. It isn’t, according to Miriam, and Bandolin acknowledges that practice has fallen short of policy. Cattle frequently trespass into the research natural area established to help protect the christii and several other rare plants. But because there’s not much nearby water, the grazing possibilities are limited, Bandolin says, and that helps to keep the christii viable. Still, a few head get in the meadow where the christii is, and while Bandolin thinks that a few cattle are probably not enough to put the population in jeopardy, “we really don’t want to take that risk.”

Bandolin doesn’t expect much help locally. According to him, there’s a saying among ranchers in the area: They don’t want the cows home and they don’t want them dead and anything in between is all right. Hungry cattle in a field of rare plants don’t enter into this equation.

The biologist offers his own equation. “Stressed cows stress the ecosystem,” he says.

Miriam took me to the christii. A dozen steps off the road, she found a few frozen remnants. I stepped carefully, and then it occurred to me that I had no idea of what to avoid. So exactly how was I supposed to behave? There was no sign or interpretive plant identification plaque. I had Miriam, who could tell me far more, and she seemed unconcerned about my steps on the frozen ground.

The seeds of the christii feel kind of sticky and the stalks are stiff and snap easily. To the untrained eye, when you break off the September rime ice, they are unremarkable, brown. I try to envision the yellow spots in the profusion of color on Miriam’s time-coded pictures taken in a warmer season.

Later she tells me about a small debate over a sign next to the road to let people know about the christii. Some worry that telling people about the plant will encourage its destruction.

After inspecting the hang-gliding launch site, the clouds break, and we have a view of Cache Peak, Mount Harrison’s taller neighbor to the south. Miriam says she hopes the population of christii on Mount Harrison isn’t really the only one. Cache Peak would offer the same habitat, and maybe it’s up there but no one’s found it, she says. It’s more rugged country and there’s no road to the top. She’d like to try.

It isn’t the christii that got Miriam into trouble with the ranchers and for a time, puzzlingly, got her fired from her volunteer work for the Forest Service. It was a big book she put together of many of the seeps and springs in the area of the Albion Mountains and other neighboring Sawtooth National Forest holdings. It’s a straight report of the trampled banks and wasted riparian areas she found and illustrated with time-coded pictures. She submitted it to the Forest Service to become part of the public record. Some people, she says, still accuse her of making up the pictures.

“The ranchers do not want to be told that they’re doing anything wrong,” Bandolin says. “And she’s telling them.”

Miriam carries a cellular phone and brings a witness to stave off threatening ranchers. She has fewer confrontations in the field when she’s with someone, she says, though often she can scare them off by shooting their picture. It surprises her that the camera gambit works. “I guess they think I’ll show it to someone,” she says. It occurs to me that today I’m the witness, and I wonder if we would get something besides cautious waves from passing pickups if we were in Miriam’s bright truck and not my silver rental sedan. We find saltlicks where they shouldn’t be, twenty or more cattle trespassing again in the research natural area and a dead calf.

The calf lay by the edge of the creek with her head stretched away from her body. Miriam approaches slowly, wary of the bloated cow standing guard and licking the calf to try to revive it. Her soft words ask for permission to approach. The cow watches Miriam’s every step. More soft words, but she’s talking about the creek now, to me, in the same soft tone, pointing out the stubble that remains of the only edible plants and the stubble that remains of a few that aren’t so edible. These are plants that slowly poison, plants that only swollen or bony cattle turn to when everything else has been eaten to nubs.

When the cow relents, Miriam asks me to let her know if the cow tries to return. She kneels next to the calf and puts one hand on the body. It’s a cursory exam. The calf is still warm.

She returns to the car, careful not to touch anything with the hand she touched the calf with until she’s rubbed her hands with antibacterial soap. She picks up her cell phone.

Miriam was recently denounced in a local newspaper editorial after reporting a rancher for animal cruelty violations, and I wonder what this scene would look like to the rancher who owns that calf. She tells me later that the heifer calf might have been worth $2,000, and it’s bad business to allow too many of female calves to die. When she tries her cell phone from where we’re parked, she can’t get a signal. The weather’s clearing from the ice fog that had socked the mountain in earlier, and we decide to go to the top where she can get cellular reception.

After a short drive, we’re at the top. The clouds are breaking up dramatically in the high winds. The sky opens in alternate patches of gray and blue and we watch as the sun spotlights high meadows on neighboring peaks. The valleys below look hot and sunny, with a haze of blowing dust and green circles where the pivot sprinklers irrigate the high desert.

Her phone works. “Fresh, bright bleeding,” she says, from the calf’s eyes and nose and vulva. The vet on the other end says it’s likely not anything contagious to worry about. She calls and reports the dead calf in the watershed to the Forest Service. It’s a short call.