Our assignment, which we did accept, was to go to our mountain pasture and put up our lay down fence. Our pasture lays along a stockdrive, which means many ranches trail their sheep and cattle along the wide gravel road on the way to their individual mountain pastures. We have sections of our barbed wire fence that we actually lay down every fall. Massive drifts of snow build up over the winter and all that weight will break the wire if you leave it up. We try to get up there early and put our fence back up to help anyone that might trail by from having to keep their stock away from the fence or dig them back out of our pasture. The wire is still connected, but needs to be lifted up and put back in the staple brackets on the posts. We drove up the mountain road dodging the ruts in the road washed by all of the rain and runoff… crossing Hammer Creek where the new crossing is washed badly… Half a mile from our fence corner we come upon a drift. Not a piddly little snowdrift, a monster one that covers the road and runs downhill. That didn’t bode well for the rest of our drive. We 4 wheel above the drift and make it another quarter mile. Another drift, more runoff in the road and we stop. We fix a few broken wires and replace many staples, but a quick visit over the hill on our 4 wheeler shows the lay down fence is still under snow! We are way too early! But that’s OK…not much work was accomplished, but we saw hundreds of elk… a flock of snow geese… wildflowers by the thousands… and we had a good time!
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