Over the years, many folks have climbed Squaw Mountain, as shown by these cairns, captured by our new telephoto lens.
Tag Archives: Squaw Mountain
The Ides of April
Bull fight
The bull fight crowd is pretty placid
the cranes of spring
Seamus on the run
Free range children
Seamus with Val and Dulce
McCoy, Tiarnan and Maeve ready for lambing
Winter Scene and New Year poem
Squaw Mountain in Winter
The Year
What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Spring storm
Squaw Mountain
Sure enough–as soon as we finished shearing and started lambing, a cold, windy, snowy storm moved in. While we are happy to see the much-needed moisture, we have scrambled to try to save lambs. We estimate we lost about 150 lambs due to the severe weather. Our lambing grounds on Loco got a foot of fresh snow and we couldn’t get in there for several days. The herders were well-provisioned but couldn’t do much except get the ewes into sheltered areas.
This is the first year we have lambed ewes through our new shed on the private land on Cottonwood. We had preg tested the mothers of the replacement ewe lambs in March, and we sorted the mothers of twins into a bunch to be shed lambed. Our crew piled the straw bales to create wind breaks at each end of the shed, and were able to save most of the new lambs in the shed. We lamb later than most of our neighbors, and it is always a gamble.
Lambing shed with straw windbreak
Ewes pregnant with twin lambs sheltering in the shed
Ewes huddled behind tarp windbreaks
Baker’s Peak
Battle Mountain
Sheep Mountain
Horses at the lambing shed, with Muddy Mountain
Siobhan and Tiarnan in the mud
Spring calves under three mountains
Keeping an eye on the babies
The baby calves continue to arrive, keeping us and their moms busy. We have had, blessedly, a wet spring. We’ve gotten lots of wet overnight snows which melt into the ground the next day. As one of our irrigators said, “God gets all the high spots.”
Luckily, this weather has not been to stormy or windy, so it hasn’t hurt our calving. We did get a really wet snow today. It closed Interstate 80, but aminly gave us more water in the ground and in the streams. Our friends on down the Colorado River should be happy. It was this time last year that we had a killer storm that killed both calves and lambs, so we are grateful for wet weather that’s not too severe.
We are enjoying the return of the birds. Some are migrating through and some are coming to spend the summer. When we check the cows, lots of birds are in attendance. The cry of the Sand Hill cranes accompanies the calls of the mama cows and the baby calves.
in the Lemmons meadow
Baldie calf with Sheep Mountain
Cows and calves under Battle Mountain
Squaw Mountain
Steers in the morning, heifers in the afternoon
Cows at Elephant corrals
When the cows and their calves come off of the summer National Forest grazing permits, it is time to sort them. We pregnancy test the cows, and sort out the opens, and the cows who won’t make it another year at our high altitude. Some will go on to slaughter, and some will go on to homes where the wintering conditions are easier. We sort the heifers from the steers. The steers are all sold, and go on to feed and eventually become steaks. The heifers are sorted into replacement heifers for us, replacement heifers for other ranchers, and fed heifers.
Cows with Squaw Mountain
Eamon sorting
Seamus and Maeve, helping
Sharon and Siobhan, with extra horsepower
Jim, Tiarnan, Clyde and his mom Peanut
Cows coming into the Home Ranch corral
Eamon and McCoy looking through Dirte’s ears
First Snow
As Grandpa George used to say, “We’ve got two winters and only one summer ahead of us.”
photo by Eamon O’Toole
Ladder Ranch
