Scroll down for Glenn’s weekly story and updates from the ranch this week!

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This week on the ranch…

Here’s sunset on the range, and the cattle slowly drifting into the “night pen,” a small temporary hotwire enclosure we put them in at night to protect them from wolves. Here, Melanie is counting. We get a count every few nights to make sure that we aren’t missing anyone.

Here’s another shot from the range, taken by Linnaea on her last range stint! We’ve now started grazing timber as the open country dries out in the heat. And it’s beautiful in here. The cattle attack these green meadows as if they can’t get enough, and we simply enjoy the break from the sun during the heat of the day.

And here they are–ribeyes fresh from the range, finished on those mountain meadows. We captured this photo this week after sorting and counting steaks for inventory. They arrive at our warehouse fresh from the butcher (refrigerated, of course!), and we curate and spread these steaks out on metal trays and then blast freeze at -30 degrees F. Why do we handle this final step in freezing? Because even though we love our small-scale butcher and the skill and knowledge they bring to the table in cutting these steaks for us, they don’t have the system to blast-freeze these steaks at the low temperatures we need! When a steak is frozen too slowly, off-gassing occurs during freezing, forming air bubbles that then allow ice crystals to form in the package. Those ice crystals cut into the surface of the steak, which means that when the steak is thawed, all those beautiful steak juices leak out into the package.

We put literally years of effort into the raising of these steaks. And it would be unthinkable to ruin all of that in one fell blow of a too-slow freeze. Blast freezing maintains the integrity and flavor of the steak like no other method! All so that final cut of beef ends up as the best possible experience on your plate.

Melanie snapped this photo last week as she and Linnaea were bringing some green horses up to cow camp! Melanie is on Janie, a 6-year-old mare with a few rides on her. Linnaea is riding Melanie’s mare Spark and ponying Merry, a young mare Melanie started who is ready to get some miles on her. The girls trotted the horses into camp for several miles to get the kinks out before they joined the cow crew and put the young ones to work. Having a job to do is a great way to get a young horse thinking and moving instead of getting themselves in a bind!

Range rider Cat kept hearing weird sounds at night while sleeping in her teepee. Then, a few nights into the stint, she spotted the source of the sound on her way to bed. This baby owl (there were two of them, actually), was watching her from the tree top. Slightly eerie, maybe, but a pretty cool and rare sighting! We were glad to share cow camp with these guys, and they didn’t seem to mind us too much, either.

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Quote of the Week

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity”

-John Muir, Our National Parks

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Dear Friends,

“I think I found an orchid,” I stated as I strode into the kitchen, back from a body-torturing 54 mile dirtbike ride across the high foothills of the Rockies. Don’t misunderstand—I am much more of a horseback guy than a dirtbike guy, although for a 62 year old, I can give most 20 somethings a run for their money on remote single tire tracks (actually cow, elk and wolf trails) that they would call “just too sketch.”

My only reason to get on the contraptions on a grass scouting mission is because pickup trucks or UTVs take forever to negotiate those rock trails, and my back would fail being cooped in one, and when two track turns to cow track, those vehicles stop (I keep going).
Besides, 54 miles is too far for a horse in a given day.

On the bike, I can look a piece of country over quickly before we bring the cowherd into it. I’ll spot wolf sign (and put the crew on alert), measure water yields on creeks that we’ll borrow water from with firehose and pump, and find good crew camping locations and good horse pasture for the string…

Read the story on our blog by clicking below!

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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.

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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.

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