Recently, we ran a promotion with a friend who has been a fan of our beef for years. His customers are very health conscious, and clearly are willing to spend money on the best supplements, technology, and sports equipment. While a large number of his customers gave our beef a try, a few …
When You Might Need a Rock
It was one of those subzero days, back in early Alderspring history before hired help. With frozen wooden hands, I finished the feeding of 6 tons of grassy alfalfa hay, and jumped down off the 4 foot high bed on the back of the rusting 1959 Chevy Viking ranch truck. It was good that I was finished, …
When Cows Climb Cars
On the wind-swept high plains prairie outback of North Dakota, underneath a rusting vertical heap of green John Deere wheat combines, I discovered a Volkswagen beetle. It looked like a late 60s model in robin-egg blue and was partly crushed by the tons of rotting steel on top of it. I stopped, …
An Irish Blessing
A five hundred-foot pillar of cloud marked our progress on the otherwise monochrome of rolling sage that cloaked the expansive flats at the base of the mountains. The Pahsimeroi is sometimes called the "Big Valley" by local residents with good reason; it is a gently tilted valley up to 15 miles …
The Sign of the Beaver
It looks like snow today, this Christmas Eve. The sun has not yet risen over our big valley, and as I look up to the distant head of our valley, there is a warm glow that fills the notches between the peaks. The rose of dawn is attempting to fill that high country. But that is to the east. Our …
Cabin Fever
Cabin fever has a way of bringing out the unique in people. They'll invent strange and sometimes vexing pastimes in those places under the brittle and icy veil covered by the darkness of a Northern winter. Take curling, for instance. Some of us will never quite understand why this ice-bound game …