Dear Friends “Push me up!” Susan scowled from her perch, halfway up the ladder to the high seat on the hay wagon. She was fairly heavy, and her skin-tight oversize western jeans created a fairly intimidating view of her backside, hanging precariously in mid-air. She was stuck there and couldn’t quite get enough traction to launch her abundant …
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“Gas” Fed Beef
Dear Friends and Partners, After pulling up to the pump I slid my credit card in the slot for a quick scan, and after the prompt picked my poison. Eighty-five octane with E10. Ten percent ethanol. It’s ubiquitous these days, that pesky ethanol. It comes from corn, ironically now being produced at a greater expense than the petrol it is …
A Day on the Range
This week's story comes from the third sister down, Linnaea. We've been reviewing applications and interviewing potential summer range riding interns for much of this week, so this account of a typical day up in cow camp seems appropriate. After all, green pastures and long, hot days are in our not-so-distant future. Linnaea, watching the herd …
Wanderlust in the Woods
“Yaa HOE Ya HOE!” The last “Hoe” really rang and echoed through the wide open old-growth and open understoried forests of the Northern Appalachians. It carried and wound its way through rhododendron-filled bottoms and over mountain laurel cloaked hillsides, both intoxicatingly fragrant with a riot of spring blooms in pink and white. It was only …
Close Encounters of the Salmon River Kind
The bizarre and unexpected sometimes show up in our headlights as we track through the Idaho wilderness night on twisty 2 lane highways. Linnaea, alone in her Outback, was carefully traversing the loneliness of highway 21 at 1 AM on a midwinter night a few years back. Idaho 21 is the only road through this untracked and wild section of Idaho, …
From Hot Dish to Hat Creek
Dear Friends and Partners It was 1985, and it was raining. Hard. And spitting snow. Kneeling in the muck on a slope so steep that as I knelt, my feet began to lose purchase on the ground and I quickly reached into my near-frozen bag of trees for a Douglas-fir seedling. I put aside my hoedad, the trademark tree planting hoe that would become my …
The Lost Great Pyrenees
It was a cold mid-December day when Allie and her best friend and border collie, Clyde, made a run for it. They occasionally do, just exploring the river bottoms adjacent to the big pastures on the Alderspring prairie where our beeves run herd for the winter. They ran off like Mutt and Jeff, big, white, wolf sized dog and 30-pound border collie …
Regenerative Ranching: Tripling Organic Matter in 10 Years
The ground fairly shook with the rumble of 350 head of elk stampeding away as I made my approach to my sample area in our south meadow. To my chagrin, they had been dining on the rich green that still grew in fits and starts on this late October day in our high valley of the Pahsimeroi in the remote mountains of Central Idaho. They were …