It's a lovely, bright sunshine day over quiet waters. As you look east, surprisingly, there's no vessels of any kind on the vast body of deep azure blue; and there is no end to it. The sea alone is the horizon, and the sky is dotted with white clouds. There is no haze, typical of coastline vistas; …
Pronghorn Power
As we quietly pick our way horseback along the quiet bubbling of Little Hat Creek, you'll feel them. Perhaps it's a sixth sense, or acuteness that we aren't even aware of: smell, maybe, or a fleeting and subconscious capture of their motionless sentry-like form. The perception nags at you. …
Sheep, Wool, Lamb, and Lloyd
The phone was ringing, irritating, as I was hands full, shoving more split wood in the Majestic cook stove in our tiny log home's kitchen in Freeman Creek. The hungry maw of that and the main woodburner were the only things that kept Caryl and I from absolutely freezing over this long and dark …
Red on Thin Ice
I am grateful. This winter is passing us by without brutality. I feel as if we dodged a bullet this year, while other parts of the US have experienced subzero temperatures and dumps of snow. It's hard to ranch in the frigid cold. We've been there. When it is tough outside, there is this …
When You Might Need a Rock
It was one of those subzero days, back in early Alderspring history before hired help. With frozen wooden hands, I finished the feeding of 6 tons of grassy alfalfa hay, and jumped down off the 4 foot high bed on the back of the rusting 1959 Chevy Viking ranch truck. It was good that I was finished, …
A Fortune 500 of… Plants!
It was hot. Sure, we were at around 6500 feet elevation, near the summit of Little Hat Pass. But it was the early afternoon in early June, and we'd been grazing the beeves up the cool west facing slope leading to the pass all morning. But now we'd reached the height of land—the ridge of the low …