When Lucas and Elsa had their litter last November, one puppy stood out due to his coloring. Drifter, as I called him, had a drift of white snow on the right side of his face. Not simply a wide blaze, a bald face, atypical in English Shepherds. Among the four males in the litter, Drifter…
June in the mountains
Six foot tall Brandon stands in the snowdrift that blocked our way to our mountain pasture.
Visit to the mountains
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…
Stories
Well, branding went just peachy! No one got hurt, we had plenty of food and drink, it was a cool, overcast day, and the rain started after lunch! We were a little short on help since it was on a Wednesday, but the 21 people who were there stepped it up and handled things well. We…
Whew…
The view from above…Elsa rests at my feet during a break on a long day of gathering. Never far from where I am, this is typical Elsa. If I’m on horseback, she’s at my horse’s back end on the left side…95% of the time. I didn’t teach her that, maybe that’s where the shade always was! …
Reality
For every person that watched Roy Rogers or Clint Eastwood or Robert Fuller or Lee Horsely and thought, wow, I wanna grow up to be a cowboy… the shine wore off of the romantic version today. We fought hard today to get 175 pairs out of the badlands. We are exhausted, sweaty, sore, and in…
First day
Though this week has been a busy one, today’s job was our first day of gathering in our “badlands” pasture, and it has been a long day. Gone are the days when we woke up at 3 AM to eat a hearty breakfast and we were on horseback riding out before the sunrise. Now we leave…
Branding
Some of the girls on the crew…………………………………….some of the guys……………………………………… Our first branding of the year took place last Saturday. Branding is a stressful day. For my husband, he has to gather cattle, branding supplies (vaccine, medicine, barrels, irons, wood, and all the little details) and arrrange the time and place for friends, neighbors,…
Blizzard
My daughter has completed college and a semester of working as a substitute teacher. She now has applied for various teaching positions around the state, hoping fora small rural school 5th grade position. Since they were almost doubling her rent at the end of this month, she elected to move home and work on the…
So Much to Tell
It has been forever…and there is so much to tell. I guess I can start with some of the latest news and work backwards. It has rained and rained and rained and rained and snowed and snowed and rained here… We’ve had 2 weeks of wet weather, but the last four days have been phenomenal. …
Horses
So much of what we do on the ranch has changed radically from a few years back. Where 3 or 4 families could live and be supported on this place when it began, the ranch supports now supports two. Where the work in the fields were done by teams of horses, large blue tractors have…
Photo of “Cuteness”
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an entry about “Cuteness”. Lucas and I attended school for the last time this spring, and once again, we had the pleasure of listening to kindergartners read. This time the weather was cooperative and we managed to be outside among the shade of playground equipment. “Cuteness” was her…