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This Week’s Story: Hope in Fire Season

I bashed my head on the frame of the pickup in an unconscious attempt at sitting up, perhaps dream initiated. This was the second time. Awake, first forgetting where I was, but rudely brought back to reality by unyielding steel on forehead. I’m surrounded by the noise of truck traffic, helicopters in landing and take-off, and incessant radio chatter over PA. It all comes back to me…..

Store News

Next Shipping Date: Monday, July 14th

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, July 16th

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 “WILDHUNTER” to get 10% off organic grass fed regenerative wild hunter!

Use the code “ALLSIXTEENTHS” to get 5% off all sixteenths in stock.

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

Ranch News

It’s Clyde, on a rangeland meadow about 35 dirt-bike miles from headquarters.  I clicked a shot because this was one of our night grounds where we kept cattle in a hot wire enclosure safe from wolves. As you can see the vegetation response is amazing where the cattle have concentrated for a few nights here. I believe it’s a combination of hoof action manure deposition as fertilizer, but probably most importantly the injection of biology from cow saliva as they grazed last year’s grass. It turns out many of the same microorganisms that the soil needs live in the gut of cows and that occasional exchange is important.

Here’s another shot of Clyde very proudly overwhelmed by deep grasses…brought on by cows.

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The entire range crew gets a digital copy of the given days grazing map. It’s a digital photograph composite taken from Google Earth. North is always up, but that’s the easiest thing. The crew still has to have good reckoning skills to determine distances between the pepper of trees and open country.  They need to be able to spot the difference between sagebrush, grass and rocks and be able to find exactly where they are on a given map at any time of day. Most of the trees in the pic are Douglas-fir trees which can often be pretty open and have abundant grass in the understory…the cows like it because it is green and cool.

It was branding day for another bunch of new calves this week. It coincided perfectly with the arrival of four new interns from all over the country. Here Josh and Rose on the right of the calf are schooling the new intern starts on the intricacies of band castration of young calves. Kaya from Arizona is on the elastrator device and is castrating for the first time. Neutering of the male calves is the necessary part of management to prevent young heifers from getting impregnated too early– allowing for very difficult births from immature cattle during the middle of a frigid winter.

Here’s Josh branding a young calf. If you look carefully you can see what looks like a little puff of smoke from the branding iron. Rest easy. It’s not smoke–it’s just a little moisture in the air condensing around the 80 below zero iron temperature. We detect a little bit of discomfort as we would all feel if somebody touched us with a cold object, but numbing happens very quickly, and the process appears to be painless, unlike hot branding . Freeze branding just freezes the follicles, preventing pigmentation from coloring the hair. As a result, in another month the area of the brand will have white hair or albino appearance making the brand very clearly visible from a long distance away. The brand you see is the E bar E. It’s registered to only us in the entire state of Idaho. It’s illegal for anyone else to use it and prevents the theft of our cattle from the open ranges. As the saying goes in Idaho: “Love your neighbor. But always brand your cattle anyway.”

Here’s cattle in the wolf-predation-preventing “night pen” in the early morning just as a powerful sun crests over the ridge.  Each morning when I’m up there I get up at around 4:00 a.m. and make coffee for the crew at 4:30. Then we grab halters and go hunt horses down in their big pasture night pen of their own, grab a halter, and catch horses and saddle up as it’s getting light.  Then, we make the several mile ride horseback over to the spike night pen where another crew member is “night owling” there in a minicamp right with the cattle. Then we open the hot wire gate of the night pen and they are off to grazing.

Here’s one of our water pumping setups at almost 8,000 ft elevation. Beyond you can see the 60 mile view of the high Pahsimeroi Valley (headquarters is in the middle of it) spread out below us. Here you see a water pump with a draft line that comes out of a pond you’ll see in the next picture. The coolest thing is the orange water and fuel proof apron that we keep the pump and the small gas can on to prevent spills. The US Forest Service partnered with us on these and gave us several of them so we could keep water quality perfect as we found it–in case there was ever a spill or leak. And that fits just perfect with us with our organic certification. We found pumping water from small creeks, and in this case a little pond of which we have many on the Range, enable us to place water tanks several hundred feet away from these pristine water sources and thereby prevent any cattle impacts to these critical watersheds.

Here’s the Little Pond from which we are pumping. You can see a little wooden framework that’s floating out there with a filtration device on it to prevent any frogs or fish from getting sucked down the line. Just beyond the pond you can probably spot a poly wire temporary fence that cowhand Webb and I constructed in just minutes to completely prevent any cattle trampling of the banks of this pond and the habitat associated with it.

It’s dark outside. In the northern latitude that means it’s probably close to 11:00 p.m. and it’s time to down some chow. The day starts for the cowhand crew around 4:30 a.m. and often ends around midnight or even later on long trail days. Tonight’s dinner is beef burritos. It was Sheldon from Colorado’s turn to cook and that mountain of food on the griddle is what he produced. Although everyone’s exhausted the banter around the table and the cook shack is still pretty animated despite the time of day. Most people on the Alderspring cowhand crew have not only made great acquaintances for their term here but find they’ve often made friends for life. It’s a band of brothers and sisters that forms, who live a little in the mantra of “eat more, sleep less.” There’s always more food. Not so with chances to sleep.

Your purchase supports our regenerative work. For more information go to https://www.alderspring.com/regenerative/.