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 …
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, …