Three short weeks ago, we woke up to a coating of white on the ranch. Snow blanketed everything. The breaking buds on the willows and cottonwood trees looked hunched and bunched up from the cold, as if trying to stay warm. These species were both used to the maddening duel between winter and spring—no, summer. Last spring, we planted some new …
Ruminations & Newsletters
Why We’re at Home on the Range
Whew. It’s been a week. Last Saturday, we began the long trail for the summer. The 440 cattle and their horseback range rider crews commenced a summer journey that will take them over 600 miles through sagebrush grasslands, deep canyons, and up steep forest cloaked mountainsides. They will gain over 4000 feet of elevation through the summer, …
Welding Friendships
Kimball Oil; Challis, Idaho. I paid Linda, the cashier, the $12 I owed her for the repair tire wrangler Colton had just performed after he mounted the big lug tire on one of Alderspring’s four-wheel drive pickups. Kimball’s was typical of small mountain town stores; they sold fuel, they maintained a C-store, and sported a full-service tire shop and …
The Power of Ten
As I left a note for the outrider horseback crew at the tiny outpost, or spike camp known as Aspen Spring Camp, I heard a twig snap. There, just 100 yards away, a thin line of wayfaring and lost-to-us Alderspring cattle picked their way across the down logs in the thick fir and aspen forest. I placed a rock on my finished note-paper in the middle …
Death… and Life in Bear Basin
The wind whipped across the basin with a pesky cheek-stinging flurry of horizontal snow. It was just a week ago, in mid-April. Caryl, border collie Clyde and I were on a quest: to find a sort of black gold, deep beneath the rolling hills of sage and grassland. We were in Bear Basin, and it is the highest elevation non-timbered sagebrush ocean …
A Rat’s Tail
Dear Friends, The faint but rhythmic thumping was unmistakable. I laid awake in bed on my back, eyes open and unfocused on the ceiling in the faint light from a setting crescent moon, Caryl breathing the deep respiration of sound sleep. It had to be around 2AM. I halted my own breathing to hear it better. Yes. Dull thump. Two second pause. …
When Frances Met Dolly
Breakfast trout; specifically, Dolly Vardens. It’s what 20-year-old Frances Alder would soon have in her creel. The year: 1948. The war had just ended a few years back, and she and her new husband, Ron were working a grubstake all their own in the mountain country of Idaho. They didn’t have more than a few dollars to their name, but that didn’t …
Just a Little Lost
Dear Friends I was actually glad the blizzard started again. Driving wind, gusting to something around 50 miles per hour blasted horizontal snow in my face. Upwind, I could barely hear the wolves howling. At least Melanie and Abby wouldn’t hear them again. They were buried under a mountain of loose clothing in my truck. When the big dogs …