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 …
At Home on the Range?
It was our second day on the range this past spring. Chilly williwaw winds buffeted the open rock and hill country we rode in. They brought squalls of icy rain and spitting snow streaming downward from the precipitous snow-covered heights above us which were partially obscured by low and fragmented …
When Cows Climb Cars
On the wind-swept high plains prairie outback of North Dakota, underneath a rusting vertical heap of green John Deere wheat combines, I discovered a Volkswagen beetle. It looked like a late 60s model in robin-egg blue and was partly crushed by the tons of rotting steel on top of it. I stopped, …
An Irish Blessing
A five hundred-foot pillar of cloud marked our progress on the otherwise monochrome of rolling sage that cloaked the expansive flats at the base of the mountains. The Pahsimeroi is sometimes called the “Big Valley†by local residents with good reason; it is a gently tilted valley up to 15 miles …
The Sign of the Beaver
It looks like snow today, this Christmas Eve. The sun has not yet risen over our big valley, and as I look up to the distant head of our valley, there is a warm glow that fills the notches between the peaks. The rose of dawn is attempting to fill that high country. But that is to the east. Our …