Chica bringing down the cows
The cows and their calves have happily spent the last three months grazing on the Routt and Medicine Bow National Forest. October 1st is the off date for our Forest grazing permit. Friends and family help us as we bring the cattle down from their summering grounds.
Cows through the trees
Eamon, Rhen and McCoy
Rhen and Pal
Rhen looking for cows
Rhen, still looking
Home at last
Ewes and lambs heading for the corrals
Oscar sorting lambs
This has been one of the driest years on record. Usually our ewes and lambs graze on the Routt and Medicine Bow National Forest allotments until the end of September. This year, with much less rain than usual, we are sorting the feeder lambs off early to send them to the feed lot. Most years, we send the oldest (and heaviest) lambs first and the youngest lambs last. This fall, like many range producers, we are bringing the sheep down to the Home Ranch so the lambs can be sorted. This gives us less mouths to feed at home, and they transition onto a nutritous growth ration. All this is happening several weeks earlier than usual. We are at the mercy of Mother Nature. Each year, we gauge the present and try to predict the future. While our fellow Americans are trying to dry out from Hurricane Florence, we pray for rain, or snow–or both.
the sheep in the newly painted corral
Oscar and Raul’s lambs waiting for the truck
through the corral poles
down the chute
Raul and Edgar bringing up the lambs
a wether lamb with a ewe lamb earmark–marked “capon”
capon in the chute
Eamon counting lambs
They went that-a-way
Cows in Big Red Park, ready to rotate to a new location
Cows and Hahn’s Peak
Tiarnan and Sarah on the job
Tiarnan moving the cows to Silver City Creek
burned trees stand above the regenerating forest
In 2002, the Hinman Fire burned 31,016 acres in the Routt National Forest. It was part of what became the Mount Zirkel Complex of fires. Much of the burned area included trees blown down by a rare high-altitude wind storm with hurricane force gales. On October 24, 1997, it laid flat 20,000 acres and an estimated 6 million trees. leaving a pick-up-sticks matrix on the ground. The dead trees left perfect habitat for pine beetles, which have scourged the area and left millions and millions of acres of dead trees. Many of those beetle-killed dead trunks still stand, with thousands falling every day throughout the forests of the mountain West.
The Hinman Fire burned hot and hard, and left scorched tree trunks standing tall and dead. The trees were diseased and killed by the beetles, providing the “perfect storm” for the fire. It was particularly impactful to us, since we had 800 ewes and their lambs on the Farwell grazing allotment. In a effort that is still legend, our sheepherder Pepe Cruz brought the sheep down the Elk River drainage, trailing the sheep throughout the night, with a sack of new puppies tied to his saddlehorn. He brought all of the animals under his care out safely, with fire burning on three sides.
We still graze on that allotment. The regeneration of the landscape there gives me hope for the rest of the Forest, which has been devastated by beetles. In the burned over area, still marked by the standing spears of trees burned 16 years ago, the vegetation is rebounding and new growth trees are filling in the landscape. The burned area looks verdant and healthy compared to the rest of the Forest. It gives me hope to see the new forest rising from the ashes.
new growth
vegetation everywhere
Farwell Mountain
ewes and lambs grazing
Why is the bear crossing the Little Snake River?…
to get to…
the other side!
Leo’s camp with guardian dog puppies
Tiarnan helped tend two sheepcamps. We drove two and a half hours to Shirley Basin, where Guillermo is tending the bucks (well away from the ewes!). We took a back road through several gates, a muddy slough (didn’t get stuck, but it was a near thing) and a “Beware of Radiation” sign. On the way home, we left water for Leo in the Medicine Bow National Forest. I was lucky to have Tiarnan as a helper guy and good company!
Tiarnan filling the water bucket at Guillermo’s camp.
Tiarnan helping tend camp
Magpies hanging with the calves
“A little more to the left please.”
from “Magpie”by Ian Tyson
“Magpie.
you know the West ain’t never going to die
just as long as you can fly.
You travel all around these hills
like a gypsy,
I don’t see the matter with that”
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