Want to follow along more day-to-day? Find us on Instagram and Facebook.

And, as always, if you have any questions, observations, or comments, just shoot us an email to Kelsey at help[at]alderspring[dot]com.

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Next shipping day is DEcember 13!

Please note that this will be our last shipping day before Christmas.

Place your order by Sunday at midnight on the 12th to get it shipped on the 13th!

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Looking for this week’s featured cuts? Head to the page below. Scroll on down for Glenn’s story and other newsletter stuff!

This week’s deals include those lovely ribeye and New York steaks, specialty cheeses, whole beef tenderloin roasts, and certified organic and pasture raised turkeys! For orders over $200, everything is marked down by 10% until this Sunday at midnight.

This Week on the RancH

It’s wedding bells this week—but not here. It’s Jeremiah, long time Alderspring ranch hand, and Caitlin, range rider from two years ago. They’ve decided to tie the knot.

In Alaska. There will be a fair amount of the Alderspring crew up there to celebrate with them, but Caryl and I are holding down the fort with some unfortunate souls not able to head off to the celebration. It looks like they’re having a great time up there, despite it being a little bit wintry. Some of the crew is up along the slopes of Denali (even off the ranch in the winter, they are still drawn to the middle of nowhere!).

All’s quiet on the Western front at home. The beeves are out grazing; the horses pick their way over the pastures. The elk have settled down now that the rut is over, and the bighorn sheep are right in the middle of it. There are 3 bands or “harems” of sheep with big-curl rams standing guard just a few miles down the road. Nearly every time we go to town, we see them.

I brought a trailer laden with 21 organic yearling beeves up from southern Idaho yesterday. What is normally a 4 or 5 hour drive in the summer turned into a marathon 8 hour slog in the snowstorm night. Snow covered the road as I trundled up snow packed mountain passes in 4 wheel drive. There wasn’t a lot of folks on the road yesterday; after driving over four hours on paved state highways 21 and 75, I passed only 2 other pickup trucks over nearly 200 miles.

It was actually nice to see that Idaho is still quiet and unpeopled and essentially wild country through the middle of the state where we live and ranch. Don’t despair, dear readers—all of America is not yet paved; there are still wild places!

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Quote of the Week

“In wildness is the preservation of the world”

―Henry David Thoreau

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This Week’s Story From the Ranch:

On that Night of Noel

There’s a magic of that night before Christmas. You know what I mean; there’s like this palpable feeling–a spirit of expectation, of joy in that evening. It’s beautiful. Glenn wrote this several years ago on winter solstice. We can’t remember if we sent it to you–it wasn’t in the blog archives. But it’s about that night 35 years ago before the ranch, the kids, and so many blessings that Caryl and Glenn have seen since. Step back a few years…and you’ll see how even then, there was the beginning of a land, a country, a lifestyle that would be written on their hearts.

Last night was the longest night of the year. I could tell; this morning dawned clear after a clear diamond star night that let every available ounce of heat migrate skyward to the cosmos. I knew it was cold from the sear in my lungs as I jogged across frozen hay meadows in the near black trying to gather 23 head of horses that broke loose just as the sun went down. It took a bit of doing, but they thankfully went back in. The last thing I wanted to deal with on a night such as that was to have them at large in the desert. The next fence was 8 miles away.

The mercury read 22 below zero as the sun finally broke the horizon this morning. It was a little bracing as Annie and I milked Lucy the cow and loaded the outdoor wood stove with lengths of firewood.  December 21 isn’t always like that here in the central Idaho Rockies. But there’s several twenty-firsts that were freeze branded in my brain, and one in particular comes to mind. It was 35 years ago. Caryl and I were freshly married and living in our dream honeymoon home in the wilds of Freeman Creek, just a few miles from the Continental Divide. The nearest town, 12 miles away, consisted of a lone log post office; Carmen, Idaho; 83462.

Click below to read the rest on our blog!

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Featured Weekly Cuts

And then… THE HOLIDAY SCHEDULE!

If you’re thinking of giving the gift of Alderspring this year or just want to know when those shipping days will be over the next few weeks so you can get your beef when you need it, here are the details!

• We won’t ship any orders the last week before Christmas. This means your last chance to get a gift order shipped before Christmas is to place your order by this Sunday, December 12! Leave a note in the comments at checkout if you place a gift order before then but you’d like us to hold your order and not ship it until our last shipping day before Christmas, December 13th.
• We’ve switched to 2nd Day Air shipping only starting after Thanksgiving and until the 1st of the year. This is to make sure your order gets to you quickly and still frozen even during typical UPS holiday delays!
• To help reduce shipping costs for orders over $200: type “save $15 on ship,” in your shopping cart comments zone to get $15 refunded on shipping. Since our store won’t allow you to use more than one coupon code at a time, put this “save $15 on ship” in your ORDER COMMENTS and then use the “Merry Christmas” coupon code at checkout to get 10% off on everything in your cart. Both codes apply only for orders over $200.

Remember, our inventories are VERY dynamic! Our goal is to turn it over twice a month to offer you the very freshest product right off of the Alderspring Ranch pastures.

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And that’s it for this week!

Thanks again for partnering in what we do!

Glenn, Caryl, cowgirls and cowboys at Alderspring.

We’ve been crafting our pastured protein here in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains for nearly 30 years and delivering it direct to our partners for nearly as long. This is wild wellness, delivered from our ranch to your door.

Your partnership in Alderspring helps us maintain what is unique in today’s agricultural world; Alderspring is a Carbon NEGATIVE and Climate POSITIVE operation. We ran the numbers, and our cows help us capture more carbon in the ground each year on our irrigated pastures than we release!