Cliven Bundy says he met Gold Butte surveyors but didn’t menace them

Rancher Cliven Bundy says he and his son had a brief conversation with government contractors in the Gold Butte area on June 5, but he had nothing to do with shots being fired near the group’s campsite later that night.

In a phone interview Friday afternoon, the embattled Bunkerville rancher said the first he heard about the gunfire was when he read about it in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

He said the newspaper story prompted him to call Las Vegas police first thing Friday morning so he could tell them what he knew.

Bundy said he and his son, Ryan, were hauling hay to some cattle west of the Virgin Mountains at Dudd Spring when they came across an unmarked truck parked on the remote road. He said there was a man and a woman near the vehicle and another woman up the canyon a ways.

“I did question what they were doing there,” Bundy said. “But they were friendly, and I was friendly. I just figured they were camping like they told me.”

They were actually a survey crew from the Nevada-based Great Basin Institute, there for a week collecting data for the Bureau of Land Management on springs, seeps and cattle troughs in the area about 100 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

They would later tell Metro and the FBI about meeting the two ranchers, describing the men as “very cordial.”

But a few hours after the ranchers left, the trio reported hearing a vehicle on the road and then three gun shots followed about an hour later by three more shots. The surveyors packed their gear in the dark and returned to Las Vegas. The incident remains under investigation.

Bundy said the story doesn’t make much sense to him. He said doesn’t know who would have been shooting in that area at that time of night, and he couldn’t find any sign of the other vehicle the surveyors heard when he went back up there Friday with a Metro sergeant from Moapa Valley.

But Bundy stopped short of accusing the government contractors of making it up.

“I don’t know why they would. I don’t want to speculate,” he said. “I can’t say they’re wrong.”

Last week’s incident prompted a BLM directive that “all personnel and contractors” stay out of the Gold Butte area until further notice, said Jerry Keir, co-founder and executive director of the Great Basin Institute.

That’s perfectly fine with Bundy, who has long argued the federal government has no claim to the public land surrounding his ranch along the Virgin River, despite court rulings to the contrary.

“We don’t like them here bothering us,” he said of the BLM and the contractors it hires to do what Bundy calls “dirty work.”

The rancher said he wasn’t happy when he read in the newspaper that the survey crew was there to take stock of the water sources he uses for his cattle — water sources he considers to be his “personal, private property.”

He said he probably wouldn’t have treated the surveyors any differently had he known what they were up to, but he might have called Metro if he thought they were damaging his water lines or troughs.

“That’s not my job to deal with them,” Bundy said.

The long-time rancher stopped paying fees to graze his cattle on public land more than 20 years ago amid a dispute over restrictions on his operation by federal range managers. The BLM responded by cancelling his grazing permit in 1994 and closing the area to all livestock in 1999, but Bundy and his animals keep using the 600,000-acre swath of northeast Clark County, near Lake Mead’s Overton Arm.

Last year, the bureau moved to remove Bundy’s cattle, but the operation was hastily canceled and the cows released after a tense standoff between authorities and the rancher’s supporters, many of them armed militia members.

Bundy said things have been pleasantly quiet in the Gold Butte area since the BLM was “run off” last year. And while he insists he had nothing to do with chasing off the survey crew last week, he’s not sorry they’re gone either.

“We’ve gotten along just fine without the BLM,” he said. “We’re done with them, and we’re not going to let them come back.”

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Find him on Twitter: @RefriedBrean