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 …
Ruminations & Newsletters
“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 …
Re-creating Recreation
“Hey you guys—make sure you check your shoelaces on this ice!” I looked up to my daughters, downclimbing along the 1400 foot vertical precipice, as they gingerly worked their way along the sandstone ledges covered with fresh snow and ice. My only saving grace was that they had a solid 3/8 inch log chain bolted to the rocks along their route to …
Working into the Ground
The kids and I worked outside much of the day. It was a little bitter. Although windless, the temp never got above the low teens and the sun was hidden behind thick clouds that spat snow on and off through the day. There was hay to fork, cattle to sort, wood to cut, and dog housing to build (for the border pups). Fences had fallen down with …