It's been an eventful (full?) week with long days (often into the night), tumultuous weather, and a new summer horseback crew learning the ropes. Yesterday, a couple of aspiring range riders inadvertently overloaded the fenced corridor that led to the ranch's livestock scales, causing a cattle surge …
Springtime in the Rockies
This story is by our 2nd daughter, Abby. She and her husband Ethan live near Alderspring. Both work here at the ranch while also raising their own pastured pork. Weather is coming. All of us can feel it. I get up at 7:00 because, even on a Saturday, my 1 ½ year old daughter doesn't believe …
The Meaning of Meat
Dear Friends On a July day in 2019, I navigated my pickup truck up the endless logging road switchbacks that wound their way upward and across the North Fork of Hat Creek drainage in the Salmon River Mountains. With me were four scientists from all over the US; specialists in fields somehow …
The Last Beaverslide
Photos in this story were taken by Kathy Hunt. Currently based in Arizona, she still is passionate about telling the story of ranching in the West through her pictures. You can see more of her wonderful images on her Facebook page Here. Dear Friends "It's gone," Caryl plainly stated as she …
The Wild Ones
This story comes from Abby, second of the Elzinga sisters. Abby lives a few miles from the ranch with her 3 kids and husband, Ethan. It was just Becky and I in the front, driving the long, dark road home from Salmon. My three little kids snored in their car seats in the back, rocked to sleep by …
Are Fearsome Herbivores History?
Dear Friends Sometimes I am grateful to be clad in the cover of steel and safety glass. And to be racing along at 55 MPH. Because if I was simply a human on two legs in the deep winter white as we drove through in a sort of snowplow carved tunnel, I am almost certain the fiercest herbivore would …