Wisdom Comes from Experience
Welcome to our blog. I gotta tell you, this will be a new experience for us. Mostly, Sharon will write and Pat will photograph, although we might change roles sometimes. Ranching is all about flexibility, right? I remember sitting on a bale of hay at our neighbors’ 100th ranch anniversary party chatting with a lawyer friend (yes, it’s possible) about the old days when his family was in the livestock business. He said, “Sharon, I don’t know why you do what you do, but I’m glad.” I told him, “I can tell you why—because every day is interesting. Sometimes it’s interesting good, sometimes interesting bad, but when I get up in the morning, I know the day won’t be dull!”
Or as we sometimes say, “Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from bad experience.”
Our ranching operation includes several hundred head of cattle and several thousand head of sheep. It is a traditional, “transhumance” range operation. We trail our cattle to the mountains in the summer and to the home ranch in the winter. Our sheep trail over 150 miles from our summer country in the high mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, to Wyoming’s Red Desert for the winter months. Along the way, we ship, shear, lamb and calve. I think we probably put in more trailing miles than any livestock operation in the United States. We have traditional sheep camps, with Peruvian herders, horses, Border collies, and livestock guardian dogs.
Our most interesting experience so far this summer—which will surely lead to wisdom—is the arrival of the Rainbow Family on one of our National Forest summer sheep grazing permits: Big Red Park, north of Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
The Rainbow Family is an amorphous group who style themselves as “the largest non-organization of non-members in the world”, (www.welcomehome.org). They call themselves hippies (I remember the hippies. They were happy!), who choose a different National Forest for a gathering the first week of July each summer. They show up, about 20,000 strong, with the high (so to speak) point being a huge circle in a meadow where they hold hands, meditate and pray for peace and love. I really hope that part works out.
The arrivals so far are mostly young, overwhelmingly white, and dressed in goth black. They looked like the homeless sorts you see hanging around big city bus stations, only less washed.
Spokesman Bodhi, from New York City, said, "We need a fresh water source, one main meadow that is 100 acres or larger and about five to 10 square miles of hippie land.”
"And we will need another large meadow to accommodate thousands of vehicles," he said.
Said meadows include riparian areas which we have carefully husbanded for years, under the watchful eye of the Forest Service. The Rainbow Family plans to leave a team to “restore” the area after the Gathering.
So it goes. An employee recently asked Pat when the work would end. Pat told him that we consider our year a circle and a cycle, so as time goes by, we just continue with new beginnings. In this blog, we will, over the course of the year, explain our doings, our philosophy of the issues and of topics as varied as genetics and immigration. We will talk about the impacts of the nearby oil field and the trophy ranches on our traditional rural community. We will keep you folks posted on these interesting days and others.
