Sunday, July 23, 2000 | 10:18 a.m.
Death Valley is no place to be in July, unless maybe you're a rock, a turkey vulture or Diana Chontos.
The 43-year-old Washington woman is spending the summer in a tiny adobe house at Death Valley Junction, tending the wild burros, horses and mules her nonprofit group liberated from Death Valley National Park.
"Nobody can believe it -- especially without some kind of air conditioning," Chontos said.
Air conditioning would mean she and volunteer Rebecca Jones would get to sleep inside the house. But even nighttime temperatures loom near 100, so they sleep outside.
Chontos' bed is a hammock hung between fence posts. Jones retires on a rollaway placed in the dirt. Both abut the corral that is a temporary home for 100 burros, three horses and three mules.
"It's lovely at night," Chontos said.
Rest is lovely any time. Chontos and Jones have been living this way since volunteers rounded up the animals in March.
Death Valley Junction is a teeny community of hardscrabble neighbors just south of the California-Nevada border, where California highways 127 and 190 intersect. The park boundary is about 20 miles west of it.
Chontos and her husband, Gene, are co-founders of Wild Burro Rescue, an organization dedicated to the rescue of wild burros in Death Valley National Park.
They opened a 43-acre animal sanctuary in Onalaska, Wash., in 1991. They focused on Death Valley three years later after learning of the National Park Service's "direct reduction" -- shooting -- of wild burros there.
Death Valley's status changed from national monument to national park in 1994. It now falls under a Park Service policy calling for removal of non-native species that have detrimental effects, Doug Threloff, park natural resource specialist, said.
Wild burros and horses -- descendants of animals loosed by 19th century miners and ranchers -- are considered feral beasts. The agency has a zero-tolerance policy for them, Threloff said.
"Burros are very hardy animals. But the desert hasn't really evolved to have an animal that large in it," he said. "We're trying to basically maintain a primeval landscape here that you wouldn't have outside national park lands. We're trying to create something people can't see anywhere else."
When park officials decided they had to remove the animals, they also had to come up with a quick and permanent method. The problem with rounding up burros is finding a permanent place to keep them, Threloff said. Sometimes the only option is shooting them.
But when Chontos and her husband offered to do roundups and take care of the animals afterward, federal officials agreed as long as Wild Burro Rescue would take a certain number of animals each year.
Upping the ante
At first that meant 25 to 30 burros, Chontos said. Last year and this year park officials upped the ante to 100. Threloff says 200 burros were removed from the park this year, with half going to Chontos and half being taken to a sanctuary run by the Bureau of Land Management in Ridgecrest, Calif.
Threloff says there are about 350 burros still living in the park. They double in population every 4 1/2 years. There's no room to fall behind.
"In 4 1/2 years there could be 700 out there," he said. "There's a need to be pretty diligent and aggressive."
Wild Burro Rescue uses volunteer wranglers and pays the $10,000 it costs for a helicopter for March's annual roundup. The helicopter quickly locates the burros, and the noise from the rotors herds them toward wranglers on horseback.
Wranglers rope the animals and load them into trailers one at a time. It can take three or four people to load one burro.
The animals are taken to the Death Valley Junction corrals where they get checkups, medical attention and are gentled and groomed. Until this year most were transported back to the Washington sanctuary.
But the sanctuary is too small for the number of animals rounded up now. The Chontoses are under contract to buy 140 acres in Olancha, Calif., about 25 miles west of the park. Meanwhile, the animals are staying put.
The move will mean numerous trips toting animals across the California desert. It will mean moving water troughs, dismantling shelters and pulling awning posts out of dirt as hard as concrete.
But it's long overdue, Chontos said. She stood among her hooved charges under the white-hot sun. Wind puffed past her like the devil's breath and toyed with the edges of a few burlap bags tied here and there along the corral's sides.
Males and females, called jacks and jennies, are kept in separate corrals. Bags once covered all sides of the pens to keep them from seeing each other.
But burros are playful, and they liked tugging the bags from the fences. They chewed them or trotted around the corrals waving them in the breeze. Chontos replaces them when she has time, but the burros have more time than she does for such play.
"Boredom has set in," she giggled. "It's time to go to Olancha."
Boredom doesn't come so easily to Chontos and Jones. The animals are fed their biggest meal around 10 or 11 p.m., when it's cooler. Then it's up at dawn to begin the daily ritual of cleaning water troughs, raking, grooming, checking hooves and feeding again around 10 a.m.
Then it's back to raking. Jones does a lot of that. The sun shone relentlessly on her straw cowboy hat one recent midday. Jones rarely stops long to chat. The 26-year-old from Wichita, Kan., hopes to one day make a living in animal sanctuaries. For now, she works at them for free.
It's a business best learned by doing. Wild Burro Rescue is part of her "college education."
"I've just always loved animals," Jones said, momentarily leaning on her rake. "I'll just be happy working at it and getting paid."
She doesn't complain about the heat or the work. She considers the job her good fortune, not her burden. The roundup was hard, she said, but not for the reasons most would consider.
"It was hard on the animals," she said, putting her rake back into action.
Much of Chontos' day is spent scraping together enough money to pay bills for the two sanctuaries. Hay costs $10 a bale in Death Valley, and it costs about $100 a day to feed the animals.
She spends most of her time in the hot, tiny house chasing grants and donors with a cellular phone. She talks to her husband everyday but hasn't seen him since January. He's holding down the fort in Washington. In 26 years of marriage, they've never been apart for so long, she says.
She sat on an old rattan loveseat in the draft of two small electric fans mounted on door jambs.
Two steps away -- the other side of the room -- a 10-inch television and VCR sat covered with blankets to protect them from dust. There is no reception. The TV is for watching an occasional video. Chontos sometimes picks up one during her weekly jaunts to a Pahrump feed store.
The loveseat, a couple of straight-back chairs and drawings and photos of burros compose the house's Spartan decor. Large pots containing the scraggly remains of Chontos' eggplant and bell pepper "crop" stood near the front door. She had brought them inside hoping to revive them from wind damage.
Chontos gazed around her domain. This spare existence happened quite by accident.
Diana and Gene Chontos' journey into the burro-rescue business began 15 years ago with a harrowing trip hauling a horse trailer over the Cascade Mountains in a blizzard.
Birthday beginning
He was a criminal psychologist. She was a potter and art therapist for disturbed children. They left their Olympia, Wash., home in the snowstorm to attend a BLM wild burro sale. The burro was Diana Chontos' 29th birthday gift.
They came home with two burros.
"My new kiln house turned into the first burro stable. I didn't have time to make pots anyway," Chontos said. "The burros were both pregnant. Within six months we had four of them."
And they had new plans. They quit their jobs, sold the house and moved to the 43-acre ranch south of Olympia. They adopted two more burros and in 1990 packed what they needed onto the animals and began hiking across the West.
From July to November they covered almost 500 miles, traveling from the Columbia River to a wild horse sanctuary near Mount Lassen in northeast California. They wintered there, helping workers rescue wild horses and burros from Northern Nevada.
The group only wanted the horses. So the Chontoses took their burros and the newly captured ones back to Washington, where they created Wild Burro Rescue.
Roundups are physically hard. But Chontos says it's harder emotionally to watch wild animals being hauled into captivity for the rest of their lives. Some die from sickness. Others just don't want to live.
Chontos has coddled ill burros for days on end, skipping meals and sleep only to lose the animals anyway.
"When something's wrong with a burro, nothing else gets done," she said.
She recalled a "preemie" born this spring to one of the females rounded up in March. Its lungs weren't fully developed. The mother walked away, leaving it to die as she would in the wild. But Chontos and Jones worked around the clock to keep it alive.
Jones wrapped the foal in a blanket and curled up with it on the living room floor for a whole night. It made the inevitable that much harder.
"It was hell," Chontos said.
More hellish still are adult burros that can't adjust to life in a corral. A close look at one of the gentle beasts shows a thin, vertical shoulder stripe.
The stripe is what remains of the burro's wild ancestors that once roamed northern Africa -- an area that "looks just like Death Valley," Chontos said.
"They're free spirits taken out of their home. They have no idea what's coming down on them when our helicopters and horses show up," she said. "They take one look at the corral. They see the mountains they were used to, and they just want to die."
Chontos tries to find suitable foster homes for some of the animals. One Las Vegas Valley resident has acquired four. And 14 others now live on the Montana Large Animal Sanctuary near Polson, Mont.
But Wild Burro Rescue will keep most of them. Placement standards are tough, and none are permanent. They issue foster contracts, not sales. No money changes hands.
If the living conditions deteriorate or foster owners must move, the animals are returned to Wild Burro Rescue.
"They can't be sold or bred or anything," Chontos said. "We keep all the old ones, and we place or keep the others in the family groups they were caught in."
So like the old potato chip slogan, you can't have just one. It more likely will be four to 10. And foster owners must provide a three-sided shed or full barn in cold areas, a fence (no barbed wire), half an acre per animal and plenty of hay.
No alfalfa -- burns their kidneys -- and no owners from back East. Wild Burro Rescue routinely inspects foster homes.
"W only place them close enough to where we can monitor them easily," Chontos said. "Our contract's harder than getting a foster kid. A lot of people won't (sign it). They think it's ridiculous."
But she figures it makes more sense than shooting them. She reached out to stroke "Sunflower," one of seven burros born at the Death Valley ranch this year.
"Burros have served humans for 400 years," she said. "It's about time we give some of it back."
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