Three short weeks ago, we woke up to a coating of white on the ranch. Snow blanketed everything. The breaking buds on the willows and cottonwood trees looked hunched and bunched up from the cold, as if trying to stay warm. These species were both used to the maddening duel between winter and …
Why We’re at Home on the Range
Whew. It's been a week. Last Saturday, we began the long trail for the summer. The 440 cattle and their horseback range rider crews commenced a summer journey that will take them over 600 miles through sagebrush grasslands, deep canyons, and up steep forest cloaked mountainsides. They will gain over …
Welding Friendships
Kimball Oil; Challis, Idaho. I paid Linda, the cashier, the $12 I owed her for the repair tire wrangler Colton had just performed after he mounted the big lug tire on one of Alderspring's four-wheel drive pickups. Kimball's was typical of small mountain town stores; they sold fuel, they maintained a …
The Power of Ten
As I left a note for the outrider horseback crew at the tiny outpost, or spike camp known as Aspen Spring Camp, I heard a twig snap. There, just 100 yards away, a thin line of wayfaring and lost-to-us Alderspring cattle picked their way across the down logs in the thick fir and aspen forest. I …
Death… and Life in Bear Basin
The wind whipped across the basin with a pesky cheek-stinging flurry of horizontal snow. It was just a week ago, in mid-April. Caryl, border collie Clyde and I were on a quest: to find a sort of black gold, deep beneath the rolling hills of sage and grassland. We were in Bear Basin, and it is …
A Rat’s Tail
Dear Friends, The faint but rhythmic thumping was unmistakable. I laid awake in bed on my back, eyes open and unfocused on the ceiling in the faint light from a setting crescent moon, Caryl breathing the deep respiration of sound sleep. It had to be around 2AM. I halted my own breathing to …