Five of us broke away from the Ranch yesterday on horseback to check out the low country of Alderspring’s summer range. There was a water tank to get fixed up at Magpie springs, we had spring-green horses to ride and get buck and crow-hop out of, and I just wanted to scope out the grass situation for what will be the first graze of our summer range season.
A fresh and fragrant spring breeze drifted down canyon as we trotted up the wash under azure skies. The moist volcanic soils of the low country did not disappoint. They were verdant with tall stands of native bluebunch and Salmon River wildrye dotted with yellow, pink and purple wildflowers. Even though the wildrye dominates the grasses found on our low range, it is found nowhere else in the world but here in the Challis volcanic area within a 30 mile or so radius around Challis, Idaho. We have some of the most extensive and dense stands within this plant’s tiny range, and it is nature’s gift to Alderspring. Caryl, my resident plant guru says that it is not considered rare or endangered because it is so populous right here, albeit only here and nowhere else on the globe.
I sampled the velvety leaves of wildrye, noting the robust flavor it brings to the beeve’s palate—a sweet and very mineralized flavor—almost like maple syrup. It’s no wonder they voraciously consume it. But there was an added gift it brought to the table, and it took Ted O’Neal, longtime range-wizened cowboy of this upper Salmon River Country to tell me about it. He was on Alderspring several weeks ago, and we were talking about grasses on these ranges as we leaned against his well-worn pickup. He said he liked “velvet grass” the best in the early part of the season, because the cattle ranged high on the ridges—far from the usual constraint of nearby water. That got my attention.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, that velvet on the leaves would hold droplets of dew long into midday, where those other grasses would quickly lose it. Them cattle would lick up all that dew while they were eating up some of that grass, and they wouldn’t come down for water until the end of the day.”
I had been witness to this, but never added it up. The beeves would only get a drink once a day when on these low ranges, but once we moved off the Salmon River wildrye, or velvet grass country, they would come in for water twice a day. They learned that the velvet not only fed them, but hydrated them. The cattle and country always were whispering lessons that we could learn from them—if and only if we were paying attention.
Magpie springs is a series of trickles that leaks from the cleft of two rock formations along the canyon bottom of Deer Gulch. We borrow a small pipe’s worth of water from the flow; probably about a twentieth of the total. Our tank overflow feeds back into the flow of the little creek. Even when we pull no water from it, the water flows down the tiny stream for only 100 feet or so. As you walk downstream, it disappears in the desert gravel and is gone like a mirage in the shimmer of august heat.
In that heat of late summer, Magpie becomes an oasis amid a parched desert; by then the lush grasses that cover the country now will be brittle, and only the lizards and rattlesnakes will venture forth in the day. Our cattle will be long gone for higher elevations as are the deer and elk, but the springs emanating from scabby rocks support a diversity of life through that sometimes scorching heat of high summer. A little stand of Quaking Aspens trembles nervously in the desert breezes, as if their life-giving spring could quit at any time. They provide shade for a host of life underneath. Wild stands of watercress, nettle, and monkeyflower on display in rock gardens are shaded by the small aspen and mountain birch. The trees in turn bear many nests, the most common of which is the scavenging yet iridescently stunning magpie. Elk and deer prints punctuate the mud along the water’s edge. The tiny oasis community is fenced by buck and pole to prevent our cattle from ever impacting the plethora of plants and animals that use these springs.
Yesterday, it was far from desert-like as the hills are cloaked with green and wildflowers. It will be so as we bring the beeves up there next week. Our stay around the Magpie country will be short, as after a few brief days, cowboys and cowgirls will move the herd to higher country, culminating at about 8000 feet in the high summer of August. By then, the snowdrifts will be gone, and will be replaced with green wild grasses much different than those that live near Magpie. Nearly 4000 feet of elevation separate the two, and create a climatic gulf between that found in summer desert scrubland and lush forested grasslands.
But to do this, the cowboy/cowgirl crew needs to get a handle on how to guide the beeves across the landscape. Left to their own devices, the young cattle end up in all kinds of predicaments from being wolf food to chowing down on poisonous plants. I recall one year on our former ranch in Idaho’s Lemhi valley when I was missing a few yearlings at the end of one grazing summer. One by one, I found them on various neighboring outfits, but what took the cake was when the manager of the 4F ranch in Montana’s Horse Prairie called me.
“I think I’ve got one of your steers in my corral.” I asked him how it was eartagged, and indeed, it was a match. So I hooked up the trailer to my pickup, and trundled over Lemhi Pass, and the Continental Divide. After a nearly 2 hour tortuous and sinuous drive, I was loading my stray out of their corrals, heading for home. They don’t call them “range” cattle for nothing. Maybe we should call these kinds “long-range.” This kid decided to not only leave his home county, he high-tailed it and left his home state. I guess he wanted to see the country.
So this week, it was Alder-Spring training, with a crash course in stockmanship and wilderness travel. The crew learned from lifetime stockman Dave Ellis, of Carmen, Idaho, who presented the finer points of “getting cattle to want to do what you need them to do.” The first day, everyone worked on foot, and on the second, everyone was on horseback.
Dave said that horses are a valuable asset in a stock manager’s tool box because “you need to be in better shape than the animals you’re herding.” Unfortunately, not many humans have the endurance of a yearling Angus steer, but a solid young horse can outwalk, outrun and out-endure any bovine. Enter the mounted stock handler.
The second half of herding in a wilderness environment was being able to live there with the beeves, and that means carrying your camp around with you, and leaving only footprints. Dave is also a veteran wilderness horse and mule packer, where you strategically hang 200 some pounds of camp, food, and horse gear on the back of a very dynamically moving live body and willing cayuse (horse) in a way that doesn’t cause a wreck of horse and gear. This is not bolting a rocket box to the roof of your SUV, as you can imagine. I think it might be more art than science as it is built on a thousand years of experience and tradition. Knots we would use this summer likely have been in practice for hundreds of years. Spanish explorers opened up the New World not with a wheel, but with pack animals.
I asked one of our new Alderspring cowboys, Josh C., who just signed on to the cow crew, what he thought about the 3 hour hands-on-the-horse packing class. Josh just came to us from college he was attending near Boston, Massachusetts. He’s been starting on the school soccer team, so at least I knew that he would be tough enough to handle the physical demands of a summer on the range.
After thinking a moment, smiling Josh said, “Well, if Dave presented the entire clinic in Chinese, I think that I may have learned just as much.” As you probably surmised, Josh doesn’t speak Chinese. It’s just that there was so much to learn, and he is so out of his element that he was a little overwhelmed.
It’s all good. We’ll have a few more clinics to come, and the best teacher is the range itself. A summer up there will change all that for cowboy Josh. His saddle sore butt will harden, and his face will nicely tan from long days with beeves under the high altitude mountain sun. And behind that face, his mind will fall into the rhythms of life on a wild landscape. And he’ll return to school in Boston forever changed.
You see, the wild mountain country redefines. For us living with the beeves, it rewrites who we are as we learn from the country and the beeves on it. It’s about discovering how velvet grass works, and being a foreigner who leaves only a footprint on the landscape. For the beeves, it creates a new standard of health and wellness for them, and us, the humans that are blessed by the wellness they provide.
Thanks for being part of the redefinition.
Glenn, Caryl and Girls on Alderspring
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