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Photos from the Ranch This Week…

First cow camp of 2024, set in the hills of what we call the “High Valley.” From this camp, the crew has a daily view of the Lemhi mountain range in the background.

The herd spread over the hills above cow camp enjoying their fresh forage.

The pace of inherding is mostly slow. By not hurrying the herd from place to place we allow them plenty of time to graze their fill.

Glenn giving end of day instructions to the range crew.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, calving and ranch work continues! Here, Wesley gets a calf started on a bottle. It was a twin and its mother rejected it and kept the other twin (it’s often the sad case when a cow has twins). We took this guy in off the field to bottle feed!

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Dear Friends

Sometimes, I get swept away by the quest for perfect, even though, truth be told, perfection never happens in ranching. It’s been a ‘helluva’ week and I don’t throw that word down there lightly. Chaos dances hard in the spring, and walking in calm despite that can be challenging.

First, there’s a lot going on. Cattle going out on range, crews camping with them, stock drinking water systems as the temps get up in the 80s (challenging in the desert), horses to train, horses to shoe, calving cows, irrigation systems and of course, shipping beef. Every one of those areas has stuff going wrong; some major, some not so much.

Calf gets run over in an accident (immediate death, by the way). Calf’s mom really wants a baby. My daughters kidnap an unsuspecting twin from the big calving bunch out on the sagebrush desert, leave it with Dad (“here ya go, Dad—heard you needed another calf”) as they head out to remote wilderness cowcamp for a week with their crew. Cow-Mom doesn’t want new baby because I buried the dead runover one six feet under already, and usually grab the hide off the dead one to ‘fool’ mama with a fleece tied to the back of the new one (smell is the main identifier). So it’s been days trying to get mama to quit kicking and take baby (they always do).

But 1450 pound mama can put up a fight, and 220 pound Glenn isn’t much of a match. It becomes a mind game, and our cows are semi-wild animals, crafty and take no prisoners (we want them that way because our predator burdens of wolves, cougars, coyotes and bald eagles are real). Thank God that in general, Your’s Truly is just a tad above the intellect of crafty wild cow. We don’t name them Blossom or Daisy for good reason. They can literally send you to the hospital when protecting themselves or their young. I’ve been rolled, stomped, rib-crunched and knee-busting kicked by them.

It’s all about respect. Mutual, by the way, in case you didn’t know that. I love those cows and see them as my very best employees.

Center pivots, all working earlier this spring, had lightning or something get into them and fry some electrical (we have 12 of them). Put on the extreme electrical tech hat to fix 480 volt systems. Make dang sure the power is off!

Feeding cows the last of the hay while trying to maximize the spring pasture yield despite cold, cold weather last week (frost nearly every night until last night, and snow in the hills all around the ranch). Grass is slow, slow in coming this year.

It’s been a lot. Most days, I don’t crawl into bed until 1 or 2 am, and get up before sunup. They say you need less sleep as you get older—but I don’t think they are reckoning hard physical work into that equation.

But it is all good.  

I moved cow camp with the crew on Thursday this week–all day affair. I was able to hang out with the crew that’s been there for a week. Somehow, some way, they had clean faces. We call these low elevation desert camps “the dirt camps” because the volcanic ash dust just plain permeates. It is rough. But they were all smiling, and not quite shiny, but they looked good…and their horses were really good. Strength, shining sinew, shape, quiet partnership eyes. Beautiful dependable equine partners in our 500-mile quest for grass.

And it made me reflect on how good we got it. Ours, outside of the center pivot irrigators, is a similar existence in husbandry that humankind has worked in for thousands of years. There’s a rightness to it; there’s relationship with the animals, the land and the life on it.

It reminded me of a time in the early dabblings of our ranching career, where Caryl and I worked for Lloyd and Beva Clark (never for wages—just for their incredible knowledge). They were the last of the animal only generation; it was the end of an era that we got to live and work in, and we learned the why of what we still do today.

Step back in time just a bit with me, to Leadore, Idaho, in the 1880s. I’ll introduce you to the Clarks. By the way, I suppose it was actually the 1980s…

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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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