“Check out the giant bumblebees,†Caryl said as she walked slowly through the riotous display of wildflowers. She had come with me on this trip to check water on the range, and as is typical, she was wandering around looking at plants. The wildflowers are amazing this year, with hills painted …
Beauty from Ashes
In the late afternoon of August 8, 2018, hot gusty winds lifted off the sunbaked deserts of the Snake River Plain, 122 miles to the south of Alderspring and our summer grazing country of the wild and remote Hat Creek Ranges. The oven dry winds blew up our valley and fanned a late afternoon …
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 …
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 …
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 …