It keeps on snowing on the ranch. It doesn’t accumulate much because of our powder dry mountain air—a lot of it evaporates (actually sublimates) before it gets a chance to melt. We’re up to several inches now, still shallow enough for the horses and cattle to nose through and graze some of the stockpiled grass under the snow.
I’m grateful that it isn’t very cold. We just go through now routine motions of feeding hay every day to beeves, as do all of our neighbors. But this isn’t just any hay.
Idaho hay is internationally renowned for its nutritional value. Because our moisture comes in the form of irrigation from summer snow packs, we can completely control the drying of our hay, and bale it up green and fragrant.
That’s one of our advantages over our eastern counterparts. The other reason for Idaho’s hay fame is that our highly mineralized soils and cold night create a dense nutritional package in our stored grass. Finally, a lot of our hay is what we locally call “wild hay.” These bales are made from the semi-wild and highly biodiverse lower meadows where plow and disc have never been.
Feeding hay wasn’t the way it always was. Wintering livestock completely changed after the winter of 1887. It was a on a brutally cold day in the high Lemhi Valley, feeding cows among the willows of frozen Tex Creek, that I found out all about it.
I had the long driving lines of the draft horse team threaded through the wooden lattice work that formed the front of the hayrack. The rack Lloyd Clark and I rode was like a hay wagon of summer, but mounted on a long bob sled undercarriage made of rough lumber and wrought iron.
That iron had been recycled maybe 5 times over 100+ years, refitted with new wood every 20 or 30 years to replace the wood rotted and worn from hard use. I thought of the blacksmith, the iron-handy tradesman from the 1890s or so who set up shop in the closest town of Junction, Idaho (now no more) and first hand-forged the sleigh runners and bolster tackle on which we depended today.
Lloyd rode with me on the front of the hayrack”¦or perhaps, I should say in. Under tattered Stetson, his weatherbeaten face showed all of his 77 years like growth rings on a tree, and was all I could see along the lattice of the rack front.
Both of us were burrowed down deep in the loose hay piled high on the rack with only faces and mittened hands exposed so as to keep our extremities from freezing to frostbite in 20 below zero air. Driven by incessant wind, the effective temperature was closer to minus 50 degrees, and would freeze exposed skin within minutes.
Earlier, I had forked more than enough hay off the 20 foot tall haystacks to the hayrack below. We had loaded the rack on the lee side of the huge stack of wild hay that we built during the heat and green of the Upper Lemhi’s short summer. Blown snow floated high across the open mountain valley in windrift snow-devil swirls that sometimes reached 100 feet and created ground blizzards that cloaked the meadows.
Lloyd growled at me with his gravely voice from the rack below that we had to layer the hay on the deck carefully or the wind would blow it off the hay rack before we could get to the waiting cows.
The great Belgian draft team moved briskly in the frigid air. Their tails were up, and heads were high in spite of the weather. Their massive frames sported heavy hair coats and abundant fat to keep warm, even in the windstorm. Even their faces were covered with thick hair, and their eyes stated a quiet resolve of readiness and willingness to pull when we first hitched up.
In the early morning before the short day’s light began, Lloyd and I left warm kitchen with their bridles under our coats as we headed to the barn. Lloyd always put his horses first; that didn’t mean babying them, but he was always fair, and applied the Golden Rule to even them.
As he handed me the steel bitted bridle in the kitchen while we donned our winter clothing, he saw my questioning look, winked at me, and growled with a half grin “Now, Honey, how would it feel to you to put a frozen steel bit in your mouth at 20 below?”
A little side note here: Lloyd called everyone Honey. Anyone under 60 that is. It was a great evener. I saw cocky teenage boys who thought they were God’s gift to the cowboy world show up to work and be called Honey. I realized after a while that it likely gave Lloyd pleasure to call them that. After all, he could outwork and outride any of them.
The horses knew where we were going. There was about a half a mile sled across the frozen hay meadows, and soon enough, the ghostly shapes of frozen willow shrubs emerged from the wind driven snow. The shrubs soon became thick, and then some 10 feet high, and as we sledded into the depths of Tex Creek bottoms.
Here, the wind almost completely abated. Deep snowdrifts tilted our load as we sledded silently over them, until finally we were among the waiting cowherd, dug deep in the abundant willow cover.
We lined the rack out among willows and began to fork hay as Lloyd spoke to the team about where and when to go. The onslaught of wind could still be seen and heard above us in the rustling willow tops, but other than that, there was little sound except the sound of hay being forked, sleigh runners on snow, and an occasional low from a contented cow.
It was Lloyd who spoke (or growled) first as we forked away. “Them old boys never fed hay. They wintered them cattle in the thick grasses of the creek bottoms. It wasn’t until after the winter of ’86 or ’87 that they started. Nobody even put up hay for winter feeding until then.”
“Them old boys? You mean eighteen eighty six?”
He leaned on his fork handle as we bumped along. “Yep. Bunch of those old boys who still ranched when we settled here in ’46. They’d been through it, all right. Lot of them lost everything. A January blizzard settled in over the country and all or most of their cattle died–froze to death. After that, people started putting up meadow hay, like we do here”¦at least the ones who still could be ranching”¦who still had some cattle left.”
Some fact checking showed that Lloyd was right and he actually knew firsthand guys that had been through it. I found some sources citing that as many as 3-5 million head of cattle lay dead across the northern Rockies and high Plains. The death toll took months to be tallied as bovine and wild animal carcasses slowly became exposed as snowdrifts melted off the landscape.
They would later clog rivers and creeks as springtime came on, ruining drinking water for many. It was a perfect storm of disaster for livestock and people. Even entire herds of wildlife were wiped out by the chain of events that started early as the preceding June.
Although that previous spring initially appeared normal with creeks swollen with snowmelt and green grass emerging with abandon, the rains that usually came in June ’86 were paltry, and below average. Summertime was no better, and the unusual heat that characterized July and August exacerbated the effects of the lack of rainfall.
It was bone dry, and it was slim pickins for beeves trying to amass good flesh for winter. Like the wild animals, cattle were managed to go into the winter fat. A cow could easily winter on the fat she carried on her back combined with grazing the dormant native grasses protected under shallow snow.
These grasses typically cured with high nutrition that held through the winter. But the cattle that fall were thin, and the cured grass sparse. Stockman looking upon their herds with a wise eye were hanging all their hopes on a mild winter.
With the onset of fall, locals observed harbingers of a tough winter ahead: birds flew south earlier, and beavers harvested more wood for winter food. Indeed, cold weather came early in November, with subzero temps borne on Arctic express winds. Nature began the payback of low summer moisture with a steady snowfall. Several Chinook wind thaws hit the high Plains in mid- December, but only melted enough to crust over the deepening snow.
A hard freeze at New Year’s made the crust bulletproof, and beeves could hardly get through it to eat what little grass there was. Sixteen inches of new snow whipped by 50 mile an hour winds on January 9, 1887 was the final nail in the coffin of the free range cattle industry that typified life in the Great Plains and Intermountain West.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of those hard hit. Long before politics and the Presidency, he was somewhat of an avid frontiersman and cattle rancher. After seeing what happened on his Medora, North Dakota ranch in early 1887, he wrote: “Well, we have had a perfect smashup all through the cattle country of the northwest. The losses are crippling. For the first time I have been utterly unable to enjoy a visit to my ranch. I shall be glad to get home.”
What left Roosevelt and all of his western ranching counterparts so vulnerable? It was the complete lack of haystacks. There was virtually no stored forage anywhere to be found in the Northern Rockies. You see, in the mid to late 1800s, cattle were run on open and fenceless summer grazing ranges, contained by only riders on horseback who lived with them.
In the winter, they were brought home to valley bottom ranches where abundant valley bottom native grasses, such as Great Basin wild rye sustained them until the mother cows calved as wild elk and bison did on the green grass of late spring and early summer. It was an elegant protocol”¦with absolutely no margin for a droughty summer followed by a winter turned bad.
And that is why, after more that 100 years later, we feed hay. There are many winters where we feed very little to our mother cows, but this hasn’t been one of them with the many subzero nights and cold in the high Pahsimeroi so far this year
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People wonder “how do you continue to grow great beef all winter?” What most people don’t realize is that every part of the country has periods where the grass is less than ideal and good grass managers learn how to grow great beef through those periods.
Even places that are warm year round have what graziers call “the summer slump” where their grass grows poorly. We may have to feed hay when the weather gets really cold here in Idaho, but grass fed producers in other parts of the country have other issues to deal with.
We actually like the hand we’ve been dealt here on our high mountain ranch. We like that our environment makes for “hard” grasses (what the old timers called nutritionally dense grass that grows in dry high elevation areas), and thrifty, healthy cattle.
Although it would be nice to have more rain sometimes, many of those warm rainy places have soils that are leached of minerals, unlike our young mountain soils. And with time, and mistakes, we have learned over the years how to manage our pastures to produce the highest quality species-diverse green hay that we can.
The result is that even in the winter, our beeves continue to thrive and grow and produce amazing-tasting grass fed beef without any supplemental feed, something that most people say can’t be done.
We attribute that to the semi-wild nature of our ranch, with robust cattle and nutritionally dense grasses, and the 20 years of experimentation as we’ve worked to make our beef better and better.
It’s been very satisfying work.
Happy Trails!
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