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This Week’s Story: Ranching on the Deepest Lake

The weird, pulsing vibration was something you could feel in your boots. It wasn’t an earthquake, per se, but I wondered if it could bring one on. The contraption pulsed its way up and down our broad mountain valley on the main roads, piloted by one or two bored looking guys who likely were grad students, earning their PhD in geology. My girls called it the “Thumper.”….

Store News

Next Shipping Date: Monday, October 13th

We generally ship every Monday, holiday weeks excepting (see calendar). You’ll get a tracking number when we ship your order. UPS may initially show an extra day of transit time, but will correct late Monday night when orders hit the Salt Lake hub.

Next Restock Date: Wednesday, October 15th

We restock every Wednesday and send out a sale flyer on Wednesday in the early evening with the week’s deals.

This Week’s Reader-Only Deals

Use the code “ALLBUNDLES” to get 10% off all ground beef bundles and sixteenths in stock!

To access these sale items, and for more deals and products, you can click the button below!

Ranch News

It may be grainy and a little obscure but it is the middle of night, after all. Glenn grabbed this shot in the moonlight this week while Josh and Rose looked through the sheep getting a count of how many were ready. Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

That’s Scott, Tendoy ranch manager, on the left, and Noel, our refrigeration technical expert, positioning unit number two for complete overhaul and then installation into our new (three times larger) freezer box in our state of the art warehouse location. The whole thing is quite an upgrade for us and it’s been quite a journey to get there. But the nice thing is we own it as opposed to our former location where we rented our warehouse space! Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

It served us well, but time has definitely worn some tracks in our old freezer facility. After many, many years of packing beef out of this fairly cramped 2 aisle freezer we turned the lights off for the last time, and it warmed up to above freezing after about 20 years of service for us. The freezer box itself was manufactured in 1971, and I think it will still find a new home as we put it on Facebook classifieds! Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

It’s the mega-spread of cattle on the North Ranch! It’s most of Alderpring’s organic cow-calf herd, picking up the fresh greens that came as a result of our recent fall rains. Ironically, most of the greens they are loving to eat are perceived as a noxious weed through much of the West. It’s cheatgrass. Cheatgrass packs an incredible amount of nutrition and easy to access carbohydrates that are perfect for laying on winter fat that mother cows and their babies will need when the onslaught of winter hits. The cows are doing the land of favor as they’re eating all the plants before they can go to seed, thereby providing control to this weedy annual grass before it spreads. Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

In the high, Rocky Mountain west the kaleidoscope of fall color that many of you readers experience on the Eastern seaboard can be missing. We don’t have the reds that many of you experience in fall foliage. Predominantly conifer forests have their share of color in the gold and yellows of aspen, but little else except in the understory. Along boggy margins of creeks we can find things like huckleberries and Labrador teas making it up in spades for the reds we miss! The grandkids sure enjoy seeing them! Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

Fall isn’t all ranch work and cattle! It’s also time for football even though sometimes there’s a frigid wind coming off the peaks across the field! The grandsons scored several touchdowns! Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

That’s Caryl standing on the boundary of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. It’s the largest wilderness in the lower 48, and this is what so much of it looks like. It’s just a vast jumble of mountains, forests, rivers and lakes. Many of the granite peaks are unnamed. Even several lakes we fished were unnamed. And, of course, we saw no-one the entire time. I think what is most interesting to me is that every acre we had hiked on showed indications that they burned with wildfire within the past 15 years. It underscores the importance of how fire is an integral part of the montane ecosystems of the West. We’re currently hoping to work with The Nature Conservancy and the US Forest Service with using our cattle as a tool to create fuel breaks for prescribed fire to fix the forests that we graze on. Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

It’s incredibly thick and deep. It’s fall stockpile that we set aside for the cows and their young after they came back from the wild ranges. Scott and Rebecca and family are managing these cattle with a new break of grass almost every day. For those of you who remember that we bought this rundown potato farm in the next valley that had virtually no organic matter in ashy white soils, this is the place. Some of you may recall that some ground had almost no plant life on it. But now, four years later, after several rounds of cover crops and now planting perennials underneath the last cover crop, we’ve arrived at this place of diversity, productivity and resilience. Photo credit Glenn Elzinga.

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