EDGEMONT-Mark Tubbs' boots should be wet.

He's standing just below the high-water mark of a huge irrigation pond on the west side of his Fall River County ranch. In a normal year, the big pond holds water 20 feet deep.

This is not a normal year. The big pond is bone dry.

Below and to the east lies another dam that, in a normal year, captures floodwater. This year, the pond below the dam holds weeds instead of water.

Farther east, old cows stand in a dried-out pasture, picking at sparse patches of grass. They've been there only a couple of weeks, but the grass is nearly gone. Soon, they'll be gone, too.

Elsewhere on Tubbs' sprawling ranch northwest of Edgemont, other groups of cattle graze on dwindling pastures.

In a normal year, the grass here is good.

In a normal year, Tubbs gets 1,200 to 1,400 big round bales each weighing 1,700 pounds off his hay land. Last year he got 60 bales. This year, he didn't get one bale.

This is not a normal year.

"It's pathetic," Tubbs said, as he drove around his drought-stricken ranch this week. "It's discouraging is what it is."

Virtually all of western South Dakota has been in the grip of drought for most of this decade.

This year, some parts of northwestern and north-central South Dakota got some relief with spring and summer rains after suffering with severe drought last year.

Conditions are particularly encouraging in the northwest, according to range specialist Roger Gates of South Dakota State University's West River Ag Center in Rapid City. To the east, in the Timber Lake area, conditions are much improved over last year.

Farther south, however, in the Faith and Philip areas, moisture was spotty, Gates said.

Areas north of Faith got decent moisture last fall and this spring, according to Scott Vance, co-owner of Faith Livestock Commission. To the south, ranchers didn't fare as well, with grass or water.

The big drought-driven cattle selloff earlier this decade has slowed, Vance said, and ranchers are beginning to get back to selling their calves in October and November, rather than being forced to sell them early.

But he said most area ranchers are still running 25 percent fewer cows than before the drought started. Smaller cow herds mean fewer calves and a smaller calf check in the fall. The financial impact ripples into Main Street businesses all across western South Dakota.

Gates said it's a difficult step for a rancher to cut back or eliminate a cow herd he may have spent decades building.

"That's a bitter pill," Gates said. "But that's the part of the world we live in."

Larry Nelson, who ranches in southern Harding County, said better moisture this year has improved range conditions and probably kept him from selling all his cows last spring. But it wasn't enough to encourage ranchers in his area to start rebuilding their reduced herds.

"I think people at this point are trying to maintain what they've got. If we get another reasonably decent year, then people might think about trying to up their numbers," said Nelson, newly elected president of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association.

Nelson said ranchers' fixed costs, including taxes, vehicle maintenance and fuel, continue, even if their herds - and their incomes - are smaller.

Even in the northern quarter of the state, things are starting to dry out again, according to state climatologist Dennis Todey, with the SDSU Extension Service in Brookings.

The latest U.S. Drought monitor now classifies all of western South Dakota as at least abnormally dry, with areas in the southwest in moderate to severe drought.

The hardest hit counties this year are Fall River, Shannon, Custer and Pennington, and part of Haakon County, Todey said.

In Shannon County on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Duane Pourier said he has been forced to sell half of his horse herd off his parched ranch near Rockyford. Porcupine Creek quit running two months ago, Pourier said.

His place didn't get much of the August rains that fell in the Black Hills.

"We didn't have much grass," Pourier said. "The prairie dogs are damaging it anyway," he said.

On Mark Tubbs' ranch near Edgemont, it's so dry the cottonwood trees are dying. The weeds aren't even growing.

"It's too dry for Canadian thistle," he said, laughing ruefully.

For two years, he planted alfalfa seed to try to bolster his hay land. It didn't sprout.

As the grass disappears from his pastures, he'll have to begin feeding expensive hay soon.

He bought 20 tons of hay from Harding County at $65 a ton and spent $750 to have it hauled. He estimates he still needs another $50,000 to $60,000 worth of hay to get through the winter.

Tubbs isn't sure what he'll do next.

He might cut his cow herd by 20 percent.

He's thinking about going more to a yearling operation - buying yearlings in the spring, putting them out to pasture and selling in the fall or earlier if need be.

Tubbs took some cattle to Nebraska.

"It turned out drier down there than up here," he said.

Still, at 55, he doesn't have huge debt. He's been ranching since 1973 on the place established by his great-grandfather in the 1880s.

Tubbs said younger ranchers making land payments are in difficult straits.

"Their bankers are making their decisions for them," he said.

But he doesn't know of anybody forced out of business by drought, so far.

Tubbs said he will probably apply for some of the federal drought aid approved earlier this year.

"I don't want to have my hand out," said Tubbs, a typical conservative rancher. "But everything's twisted up so tight. Everything costs so much anymore."

He said a new federal rangeland insurance program might provide some relief, but it's a gamble. His premium would be about $10,000.

"If it costs me $10,000 to make it rain, I guess that's worth it," he said.

The best solution, of course, is moisture. If good rains fell next spring, the country will come back, he said.

Without rain, the country is "pretty dang unforgiving," Tubbs said.

"It takes the heart out of you. You think you'll wait 'til next year. It turns into another year and another year and another year."

Contact Steve Miller at 394-8417 or steve.miller@rapidcityjournal.com

Here's a sampling of precipitation totals and departures from normal, 30-year averages for several West River locations since April 1 this year (as of Oct. 7):

Bison, 13.11 inches, 0.17 inch above normal.

Buffalo, 9.32 inches, 3.77 inches below normal.

McIntosh, 17.33, 4.46 inches above normal.

Newell, 10.46 inches, 1.23 inch below normal.

Faith, 15.24 inches, 1.95 inch above normal.

Philip, 10.16 inches, 3 inches below normal.

Rapid City, 12.39 inches, 0.29 inch below normal.

Custer, 17.93 inches, 2.14 above normal.

Hot Springs, 11.12 inches, 2.68 inches below normal.

Oelrichs, 10.99 inches, 2.32 inches below normal.

Porcupine, 13.83 inches, 0.24 inch above normal.

Murdo, 16.5 inches, 1.93 inches above normal.

Mission, 15.89 inches, 0.10 above normal.