10/17/05

A small crew and all are veterans this week. Brian from N.H. is here for two weeks. Walter from MD. is here for two weeks as well. Don from Ohio, Wayne from Fla and his brother Robert from Ky. make up the rest of the crew.

I told them they were our Guinea pigs for how we are going to do things next year.

On the way home from Albq. we stopped and loaded two hundred bales of hay for the calves. It was a heck of way to start the week.

The corrals are full of calves we hauled in last week and I am not real happy with the way things are in there. We don’t have enough feed stations and are wasting 50% of the hay we are feeding. And also not enough water stations and the timid ones are not getting enough.

So today we put in a workday. All of the guys pitched in and we assembled the three feeders Maggie bought last week and then built a sixty -foot feed bunk out of logs and posts. Then we hauled panels from the arena and shored up a couple more pens. By the end of the day we were pretty dang wore out but we now had a really well set up feed lot consisting of six corrals, seven feed stations and four water stations.

All this after unloading the hay first thing after breakfast.

Don spent the day cutting firewood for all the cabins. Something we just hadn’t gotten around to doing.

The work we did would have taken me a week if I had ever gotten to it at all.

10/18/05 Tuesday

I left about 5:30am to take the trailer back to the hay farm, I got home about 3pm.

Everyone else went out to camp and started gathering more calves. They rode about six hours and came home with six calves. We are now looking for the ones with the smart moms who are hidden out. They are tough to find in a 14,000-acre pasture.

It was a bit windy out there; it kicked up late in the day bringing in some cold air with it.

Hi was 60…low was 28

10/19/05 Wednesday

We worked the south side of the main road back to the Wilderness boundary. We gathered everything we could find back there and moved them out to the Basin. By the time we were all done we had about a hundred head and sorted through them coming up with 11 calves to wean and haul home as well as six old cows we are hauling back and putting in the north trap till we have enough for a load to the sale. Brian has been staying out with Nate at camp while the rest of us have been back at H.Q. each night. We feed the calves in the morning before we go and feed them when we get home in the evening.

When I pulled into the corrals I found Wayne who had taken the day off from riding down there feeding by himself. He told us Leasha was sick, Maggie was cooking and he was doing the chores. This is the kind of help we like!

10/20/05 Thursday

We got to camp at a pretty decent hour and quickly saddled up. Maggie came out with us today to give some help.

Brain and Nate were already riding; they went on their own plan of gathering around Pine canyon.

Our plan was to gather as much as we could of the cattle we had left in the Basin and get them moved into 7HL. We had to spend a good part of the day gathering around the Basin and then finally mid afternoon we got moving with about 85 head of cows. We went up the Basin and through Wolf Camp gate and from there tried a short cut over T Bar Ridge that worked out. We put the cattle through a gate in Hidden Valley and let them drift down from the ridge. It was a long push and everyone had a lot of work to do. We got back to camp with just enough light to unsaddle. We got home about 9pm, Leasha was still not there so Maggie whipped up some white trash food and we all happily ate it.

Hi was 60, no wind after a low of 29.

10/21/05 Friday

It was a shorter day than we have had in the past. We gathered cattle from the Canyon Creek and Pine canyon area pushing them north to the Incognito gate. We put about thirty head through the gate. There were some more cattle up on the mountain to our east so Nate along with Brian and Don headed up there while the rest of us headed back to camp to fix a few things around there and start loading up some stuff we had to haul back to H.Q.

We all got home abit after dark and found Maggie had whipped up a great meal that sure made up for the last couple meals.

I can’t thank this crew enough for all the work they did. Every morning they were up feeding the calves before breakfast in the dark. Loading hay bunks and filling water tanks. Then an hour drive out to work, saddle horses, and ride all day. Then a long drive home and feeding again in the dark. It sure wasn’t much of a vacation!

10/22/05 Saturday

Maggie and I took the crew back to Albq. hauling a load of claves with us to take to the sale. Nate hauled a load up as well. We took the Grade B calves. These are the ones that just aren’t perfect. Some are a bit too small, some are too big, some just don’t have the right body type, some have ears too big and some have too much white. All these things make a difference in the price. We hauled 22, so out of 210 calves just 22 Grade B is not bad.

We did some errands and then went out to dinner. A nice little break.