After I lit the Coleman gas lantern in the cook-tent I stepped out through the open flaps and took one last look out in the fading light. The horse string was scattered out on their hillside night graze of bluebunch wheatgrass, and below them, over 400 head of yearling cattle bedded down contentedly after long day’s sojourn on rich spring grass. We …
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Returning to Our Home on the Range
This piece was first featured on the On Land website. On Land is published by the Western Landowner's Alliance. The publication highlights voices and stories of stewardship in the West. Visit their website for more information, to subscribe, or to read more about the efforts of those who are conserving and regenerating western landscapes. It was …
Where Surf Meets Turf
The October moon had risen high enough to yield the dapple of breeze swayed luminescence over our camp under the tall cottonwoods on the banks of the Salmon River. Caryl and I were spiked out for a few days at the very lowest elevation of the Hat Creek ranges, where we summer cattle. Just a month ago, 400 head of Alderspring beeves were trailed by …
The Arrowhead and the Pearl
Dear Friends and Partners: It was a hunter who first picked it up, and he probably was a resident of the Hat Creek country itself. The year is anyone’s guess, but it may be as early as when the last sheets of mountain ice left the Rockies—over 10,000 years ago. He may have been more recently a member of the Bear Hats, a subtribe of the Shoshoni …
Sheep in the Deep
Fresh out of the showroom, and on the way home from church, the 1972 red Pontiac Bonneville with a faux rag top cut a path through the early spring whiteout conditions on the high plains of Colorado. Sheepman Dave Jolly was behind the wheel, and his wife, Albertine, rode shotgun. She alone was the gravity and force that required travel on this …
Black Ice in Deep Canyons
Dear friends and Partners “Are you OK?” I tried to gain eye contact of the obviously more than a little dazed driver. His jeans were freshly shredded, coat impregnated with the reddish ocher of Salmon River cliff-rock, and had a few fresh and bloody scrapes and bruises on his ruddy complexion. He was aimlessly walking around, staring at his …
A Christmas Quest
Dear Friends The bright daylight of the brilliant winter sun in crystal clear skies was starting to fade as the horizon of rugged mountains gained the sun. And that meant it was already getting palpably colder. The other problem was that we were still a long way from the truck, and even that bus ticket out of the mountains was questionable. I …
The Story of the Grulla Gelding
Often the horses I work with teach me more than I do them. The difficult lessons of patience and humility are best learned through experience and training and riding horses is full of experiences both positive and negative. There is the elation when we are both on the same page, moving as the same unit, in time and balanced. And there is the …