Cold
Waiting for the Storm
Badwater
photo by Sharon O'Toole
Winter is upon us with a vengeance. We have been praying for snow on the desert. The sheep rely on it for water in the winter, and without it, we have to haul water. Hauling water is expensive, time consuming, and hard on people and equipment. Since only a handful of sites are suitable for placing tanks and hauling water to, it also means that one piece of country gets a lot of use and the sheep can’t range as far to seek feed.
Two days ago, the weather report was calling for a foot of snow and the barometer was plummeting. The storm came in all right, and left us enough snow to get by on. It also brought the coldest temperatures of the season (so far). We woke up this morning to clear skies and minus fifteen degrees. We headed north to Badwater (some 75 miles north and west of the home ranch) to load some cull ewes which are headed for slaughter in Iowa.
Browsing at Badwater
photo by Pat O'Toole
Which reminds me of a story: Several years ago I was taking a trailer of old ewes to the auction in Fort Collins, Colorado. I stopped for gas and noticed the woman at the opposite pump eyeing us curiously. “What are you doing with those sheep?” she asked.
“Oh,” I replied, “they are just a bunch of killer ewes.”
She looked at me, looked at them with a more careful eye, and said, “Really! Who’d they kill?”
But I digress. Today our duty was to put several hundred killer ewes on a semi truck in bitter cold. Luckily it was an otherwise beautiful day, if you don’t count the wind. We were all wearing as much as we possibly could and still climb over the corrals.
The ewes were reluctant to load, perhaps preferring the freezing weather (after all, they were all wearing wool coats) to their fate at the end of the journey. Finally, they were aboard, and we were glad to pile into the warm pickups, even though we still had 150 miles of sheep hauling ahead of us.
Ready to unload at day's end
Powder Flat
photo by Sharon O'Toole
Sheep with moon
Powder Flat
photo by Sharon O'Toole
