Organic Beef Matters
News from Alderspring Ranch, with an occasional rant about American agriculture
Cabin fever has a way of bringing out the unique in people. They’ll invent strange and sometimes vexing pastimes in those places under the brittle and icy veil covered by the darkness of a Northern winter. Take curling, for instance. Some of us will never quite understand why this ice-bound game …
Winter firmly laid hold of our high country this week. Yesterday morning, while driving my pickup through Stanley Basin up the Salmon River from us, the ice fog was impenetrable by even my off-road lights. The mercury read 24 below zero at the Stanley Mercantile. It wasn’t quite daylight, and I …
Dear Friends and Partners, After the ground crew pulled wheel chocks, Howard Thompson, Flight Officer aboard the B-17 Flying Fortress fired up the 4 Pratt and Whitney engines while Commanding Officer and First Lieutenant Joe Brensinger worked through the preflight. It was late Tuesday afternoon, on …
It was the weekend before Thanksgiving Day. Winter had already staked claim on the country, but we had to ride. Thirteen-year-old Melanie and I left the woodstove warmth of our cozy kitchen after a breakfast washed down with hot coffee. In the mudroom, we put on silk scarves and oilskin slickers …
I stand in the backyard before anyone else is awake. It’s just me and the big white dog, Allie. My hands find the thick ruff of her neck, and she likes it. And I have the sense that there is no atmosphere and that there is nothing that stands between the heavens and us. The rosaceous dawn …
In retrospect, I know now that it was a love affair. Her name was Missy, and I believe it was mutual. I didn’t even try to keep it a secret from Caryl. I knew that she figured it out early in my forays into distant rangelands with the then nineteen-year-old Missy. We had been discovered in our …
