Through sanctuary and advocacy, Neda DeMayo has devoted herself to saving wild horses — and to helping people re-connect to the natural world.

To understand Neda DeMayo, you have to understand her lifelong devotion to wild horses. At age 6, after watching a helicopter chase and capture horses on television, she declared to her stunned parents that she would make a place for these horses. Decades after witnessing the scene, the visionary behind Return to Freedom Wild Horse Conservation has done just that.

DeMayo (whose first word was horse, according to her 94-year-old mother, Stella) began taking riding lessons at age 5 near her rural Connecticut home and at 8 years old had her own horse with an unruly pony to keep him company. A week after graduating from high school, she jumped in her car with her dog and best friend and traveled across America, landing in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she became a holistic practitioner and was active in theater arts. Just a few years later she left with her backpack and a one-way ticket to India. Upon returning to California, she studied fashion design, eventually establishing herself as a Hollywood costume designer/stylist for the likes of Sandra Bullock, David Duchovny, Jeff Goldblum, Antonio Banderas, and others.

While enjoying the creativity of working in the theater and film industry, DeMayo was shocked to discover through press reports in the early ’90s that there had been no end to the helicopter roundups of wild horses she had seen as a child and decided it was time to take action on their behalf.

“Although in my heart I hoped for true preservation — where wild horses, wildlife, and our vast habitats could remain untouched — I knew there needed to be an educational element to bring an awareness that there were still wild horses in America, what they are, their value, and what threatens their survival threatens our own,” DeMayo says. “The value of creating a sanctuary is not only to provide refuge for the animals that live there, but to be able to effect change to save thousands more through education.”

Exploring the logistics of what might be involved in operating a wild horse sanctuary, DeMayo began to delve into the politics surrounding wild horses. Traveling to observe herds in California, Nevada, and Oregon, she quickly understood that America’s wild horses were caught on the front lines in a battle over the use of our federal lands and natural resources, so she turned her focus to finding solutions.

During this exploratory time, having long ago left the world of traditional riding behind, DeMayo was fascinated when she learned about the work of author and equine facilitator Carolyn Resnick. “Carolyn’s methods are based on developing the bond between horse and human. The work is transformative because to inspire the natural desire in the horse to follow your leadership, you need to earn that trust. Her method is based on the matriarchal behavior in the herd as opposed to dominance through more predatorial behavior,” DeMayo says. “The communication was more congruent with what I observed in wild bands.”

She had purchased a young, unruly Arabian mare named Taj, but she hadn’t ridden much for several years because she found herself questioning the ethics of riding: “I loved horses, but why did I need to ride them?” Developing this horse-human relationship in line with Resnick’s methods, DeMayo says, deepened her understanding of horses and herself. She did ride again but was able to start Taj without the use of ropes or tack of any kind, riding bridleless and bareback before adding light tack later. “I had a shift in the way I perceived leadership and the dynamics of shared leadership within herds and what we as a human community can and need to learn from the natural world.”

As luck would have it, her father, Bill, a former partner with Ernst & Young, was nearing retirement from his position as a planned giving officer for the University of New Haven. Her father and mother, by then in their early 80s, joined their two daughters on the West Coast and decided as a family that it would be fulfilling to be involved together with something that served a larger purpose. DeMayo and her parents had visited a wild horse sanctuary in Northern California. The experience inspired the DeMayos to pool their assets and buy a rundown 300-acre ranch — and in November 1998, Return to Freedom launched its American Wild Horse Sanctuary near Lompoc, California, 60 miles north of Santa Barbara.

With it, DeMayo’s dream of a safe haven for many of America’s wild mustangs became a reality.

DeMayo started Return to Freedom with a focus on educating the public that horses live in herds made up of harem and bachelor bands and the strong bond that exists between these highly social mammals. Her fundamental purpose for the sanctuary was to explore alternatives to how wild horses and burros were being managed both on the range and after capture. The sanctuary was created as a model for solutions that could be applied on the range to replace the government’s endless and costly capture-and-removal management program.

The first 25 horses arrived at the sanctuary from the Hart Mountain Fish and Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in December 1998. The horses were among 279 that were gathered on horseback from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service land by the late wild horse advocate Jim Clapp, one of a very few individuals skilled enough to do so. The small herd now had a new home in the hills of California’s Central Coast.

Maintaining the sanctuary for more and more horses would prove an expensive proposition. As more herds arrived on only 300 acres, not only did feed prices increase but supplies and the need for safe handling equipment as well as hiring help grew along with the organization. “I started raising funds by inviting people to quietly observe the horses who were captured on horseback and therefore maintained in their naturally selected family and bachelor bands and relocated to the sanctuary,” DeMayo says.

The next group of horses came from the Sheldon FWS Refuge in Nevada. Upon hearing that the USFWS was planning to remove horses from the Sheldon Refuge, Return to Freedom submitted a proposal that enabled Clapp to once again set up camp for several months and gather horses in their family bands. He subsequently relocated 50 more to the sanctuary.

“We got involved there because horses captured off FWS lands are not branded and most end up sold for slaughter,” says DeMayo. “FWS did not use helicopters at that time and we were able to relocate entire bands from a specific area of the refuge.

“When you understand how deeply bonded they are — and how they suffer when they are ripped from their herd and their range — if you are able to keep families together and release them into a sanctuary where they can live out their lives, unbothered, it’s all worth it.”

Over the next 15 years, Return to Freedom’s sanctuary became home to harem bands representing the diversity of the American mustang. These include dwindling populations of Spanish mustangs descended from Spanish Barbs, 100 percent pure-in-strain Choctaw Indian ponies, Cerbat, Wilbur-Cruce Colonial Spanish Mission horses, Sulphur Springs horses, and larger horses whose herds returned to a natural state over the past few hundred years in the challenging habitats of the American West.

To maintain their family bands, solutions to expanding herds — whether on private lands or dwindling rangelands — needed to be explored. “Reproduction is a reality,” DeMayo says. “And while we agree or disagree as to how our water and grazing rights are allocated on government lands, the horses continue to suffer from capture and separation from their herds and their freedom at great expense to the taxpayer and the horses themselves. Since 1999, we have sought out the least intrusive way to manage population growth, which would allow the stallions and their harem bands to remain together.”

DeMayo turned to The Science and Conservation Center in Billings, Montana, and the late Dr. Jay Kirkpatrick, for guidance. The least invasive form of fertility control is native PZP, a humane vaccine that slows down reproduction. Decades of data confirmed no threatening side effects (other than a decrease in foal births). Return to Freedom became the fourth wild horse fertility-control project overseen by the center. The vaccine has curbed reproduction at the sanctuary by 91 to 98 percent, and mares are living well into their 30s without ill effects.

Return to Freedom has advocated for almost 20 years for the redirection of funds spent on expensive and traumatic roundups toward viable and minimally intrusive alternatives that would enable wild horses and burros to remain on their rangelands.

“We need to find solutions that ensure that wild horses and burros receive a more equitable share of the public lands designated for their protection in 1971. We have to strike a balance that benefits wild horses and other wildlife as well as ranching interests,” DeMayo says. “Congress could change the discussion by creating tax credits or incentives for public-land ranchers who reduce their livestock grazing on designated wild horse Herd Management Areas and by increasing water and rangeland restoration projects through university and volunteer programs.”

DeMayo’s father passed away three years ago, but he lived long enough to see the addition of a 2,000-acre satellite sanctuary in San Luis Obispo, California, provided by a generous and committed family through Return to Freedom’s wild horse conservator program. Today, Return to Freedom provides refuge to 500 wild horses and 46 burros at four locations, two of which are leased temporarily.

Two locations are open for guided tours and photo safaris. Guests can photograph and observe the diverse strains of the American mustang and meet the “ambassador” horses like Spirit, the Kiger mustang stallion who was the muse for DreamWorks’ 2002 animated feature film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

“Return to Freedom’s sanctuary functions as a living history museum so that people can see the important role the horse has played in the development of our country, as well as their importance as an integral part of the ecosystem,” DeMayo says. “Education has been the foundation of our advocacy work and has inspired others to find their voice.”

Advocacy remains high on DeMayo’s agenda. Return to Freedom has galvanized support from the Hollywood community to get the message out to the public; some of the celebrities who have gotten behind the effort include board member Robert Redford, singer Carole King, and actors Ed Harris, Wendie Malick, Viggo Mortensen, and Noah Wyle.

The organization also has relationships with reform-minded ranch owners, government agencies, other sanctuaries, and animal-welfare organizations. At the two-decade mark, DeMayo remains a tireless advocate. In the coming year, she’ll be focusing on fundraising for a larger preserve and educational center.

Zeroing in on the crux of the matter, DeMayo poses something to all of us: “A question for the American people should be whether it is acceptable to have a future in which there are no wild horses living on their public lands. Return to Freedom contends that public lands are part of our collective inheritance as citizens and that the wildlife, resources, and habitats on those lands — including wild horses and burros — are part of our shared responsibility.

“We believe our country will be poorer if future generations cannot see wild horses run free.”

From the January 2018 issue. 

The post Return to Freedom Wild Horse Conservation appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

This Palomino stallion is Horse of the Year and one for the ages.

Christmas came early last year for the Return to Freedom Wild Horse Conservation and its founder Neda DeMayo when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals recognized the sanctuary’s 31-year-old Palomino stallion, Sutter, as its 2016 Horse of the Year, on November 17 in New York City. The annual Humane Awards luncheon recognizes animal heroes who have demonstrated extraordinary effort as well as individuals who have shown great commitment to animal welfare.

Born in northwestern Nevada, Sutter was captured from public lands when he was barely 2 years old. He was adopted by a private party through the Bureau of Land Management, but he didn’t find a happy home. He endured ongoing abuse, including being whipped, left tied under a hot tarp, and deprived of food and water in an effort to break his spirit.

Deemed “dangerous,” Sutter was returned to the BLM and marked to be destroyed. Fortunately, Return to Freedom’s colleagues at the Heritage Discovery Center in central California rescued him. “For months, Sutter remained so traumatized that if anyone even walked nearby his enclosure, he would slam himself into walls, attempting to free himself,” DeMayo says. “However, with patience and time he began to build a bond with humans who treated him with loving care.”

During the next few years, Sutter learned to trust people and became a very social and curious horse. He was soon appearing in documentaries, educational films, historical reenactments, and at various venues including two walks in the Rose Parade, where he safely carried a novice rider along the parade route.

When the Heritage Discovery Center was forced to move in 2002, DeMayo adopted Sutter, and he became an ambassador for wild horses at clinics and other events. Early last year, Sutter became the first horse born wild on the range to be inducted into the Equus Foundation Horse Stars Hall of Fame. The foundation is dedicated to improving the quality of life for America’s horses in transition by keeping them safe, working, and loved.

“Sutter’s story is emblematic of the suffering so many of America’s wild horses have endured as a result of the struggle over the use of our shared public lands, water, and grazing resources,” DeMayo says. “It’s also a tribute to the resilience of these amazing horses and what’s possible when they’re treated with patience and respect and are allowed to live in the right environment.”

In honoring Sutter, the ASPCA had this to say: “To this day, Sutter continues to not only thrive, but inspire equine awareness, rescue, and advocacy through his own story and by representing the dwindling number of horses who deserve our promised protection on public lands. A true people-lover, Sutter also reminds us that when we extend love to animals, we receive it back, multiplied. For these reasons, Sutter is the 2016 ASPCA Horse of the Year.”

From the January 2018 issue.

The post Meet Sutter appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Now is the last chance to get your Western homestead ready for winter.

Late fall, when it starts freezing most nights and soil temperatures dip below 50 degrees, arrives anytime from the end of October to well into December, depending on how far north or south or high above sea level you live. In that time, caring for your Western homestead — be it the garden, orchard, pasture, or equipment shed — requires reliable seasonal planning. Here’s your checklist for staying on schedule this fall.

LIVESTOCK

• The highest priority is getting the livestock ready for winter, which means making sure there’s enough feed, liquid water is available, and all have shelter from winds and storms.
• Additionally, clean out the chicken coop and cattle shed, spread the litter and manure on the nearly bare garden, and compost the leftovers.
• Don’t forget to put fresh bedding in the coop, place a heater under the water font, and hang a shielded heat lamp. (Chickens can stand a lot of cold and dark, but they won’t lay much without light and warmth.)
• For water for bigger critters, put the stock tank inside a bigger one, with wood chips between the two for insulation, and a homemade wooden cover that leaves just a small opening for the cattle to drink. This cuts down on the amount of electricity the tank heater uses.

GARDEN

• If the soil hasn’t frozen yet, till in the manure spread on the garden, then apply a light mulch of old hay or grass clippings to not lose any bare dirt to wind or water erosion.
• Also, gather any final seeds for planting next spring.

ORCHARD

• In the orchard, cut the grass short for the winter and put screening around the base of young trees to prevent rabbits and mice from chewing tender bark.
• A 6-foot high cylinder of mesh fencing around the entire tree, anchored by a metal fencepost, prevents tree damage. A deer can leap a 6-foot fence without any problem, but they won’t leap into that little cylinder. Older trees don’t need all this protection, but it’s necessary for the younger ones.

EQUIPMENT

• After finishing with the tiller, mower, tractor with bale fork, etc., be sure to change the oil, clean the air filter, put a gas preservative in the fuel tank, and apply grease and oil to all moving parts.

Lastly, savor the best time of year: no bugs, cool dry weather, and lingering fall colors. We take the dogs for a walk before heading home to a good dinner and pleasant long evening by the wood stove. Life is good!

Ann Larkin Hansen is the author of several books, including The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner: What to Do & When to Do It. She lives with her family on their farm in northern Wisconsin.

The post Western Homestead: Your Autumn Checklist appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Learn how to winter-proof your Western homestead.

The restful, relaxing days of deep winter—when nothing is growing and not much has to get done each day, besides livestock chores and keeping the wood box filled—are a welcome respite from the urgencies of the growing season.

Though parts of the country don’t always experience a true winter—like the far southwest, most of Florida, and quite a bit of the west coast—many regions must routinely prepare for air temperatures below freezing, a ground that’s frozen, and bursts of snow and ice storms. Sometimes otherwise warm winter climates face unexpected weather changes and dips in temperature.

For me, the winter season is the perfect time for catching up on paperwork, finishing indoor projects, and planning ahead for a smooth spring. Here’s how to prepare your Western homestead for the year ahead.

LIVESTOCK AND POULTRY

• Check the animals twice a day, and give them water, feed, and clean bedding. Watch for coughs, lameness, or any other signs of illness—catching problems early makes them easier to solve.
• If more than half of your hay or other feed is gone by mid-winter, find and buy some more to make sure you’ll get through until spring. Hay gets more expensive the closer it gets to spring.
• Order chicks, find out where you can get weaner pigs, or a new bull, ram, or billy if that’s what you’ll need for the coming season.
• This is the best time of year to trap or poison rats and mice. Make sure that poison and traps are placed where pets, poultry, and livestock can’t get at them.

GARDEN

• Order seeds now, when selection and availability are at their best.
• Review your notes from last year to plan the upcoming rotation, which vegetable varieties you liked or not, and identify where there were big insect, weed, or disease problems. Make plans for getting on top of those next year before things get out of hand.

ORCHARD

• Order new trees for early spring delivery, as well as any needed pest controls.
• Sprinkle wood ashes from the stove lightly at the drip line around the trees.
• Begin pruning fruit trees in late winter, removing the water sprouts and branches that are too crowded or interfere with each other.

EQUIPMENT

• Order or buy parts: belts, blades, chains, cotter pins, etc. Buy supplies such as grease, engine oil, lubricating oil, hydraulic fluid, and so on. Clean, sharpen, or replace worn tools.

WOODLOT

• If you own trees (besides the ones in the orchard), now’s the time to prune and thin for better growth. Leave the best ones and use the worst—the dying, sick, crippled, and stunted—for firewood.
• If you have or can find a neighbor with a small sawmill, you can harvest some big trees and turn them into lumber.
• When it’s too wet, the snow is too deep, or it’s just too darn cold to be out in the woods, treat yourself to some time in your wood shop. For me, the best part of winter is spending time in the woods or in my wood shop.

KITCHEN AND COLD CELLAR

• Check over pumpkins, squash, potatoes, apples, onions, and any other stored fruits or vegetables once a week and remove anything that is starting to rot.
• Herbs that were hung to dry last summer can be processed into flakes (I rub them through a colander) and put in a jar for easy use.
• Fruits that were juiced at harvest and the juice frozen or canned because there was no time to do more can be made into jelly.

One last, very important note: with the wildfire season slowing down, take the time now to protect your home from danger next season. Pick up woody debris near the house and burn it when it’s raining or there’s snow on the ground. Brush and high grasses and forbs near the house should be mowed or cut to the ground. Prune the lower branches of nearby trees and thin them so their canopies (the upper branches) aren’t touching. This will slow or even stop fires from reaching your buildings. Visit firewise.org for more information and tips on keeping your Western homestead from being burnt in a wildfire.

Ann Larkin Hansen is the author of several books, including The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner: What to Do & When to Do It. She lives with her family on their farm in northern Wisconsin.

The post Western Homestead: Your Winter Checklist appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Wyoming cowboys feed elk forced from their winter migration routes, but some question the wisdom of doing so.

Hundreds of elk lift their heads as John Fandek arrives at the Black Butte elk feed ground on his snowmobile. They watch as he harnesses draft horses Pepper and Emma and hooks them up to the hay sled. The climbing sun glares off the snow in the Upper Green River Valley in western Wyoming, and Fandek squints as he loads hay on the sled. The elk wait at a distance as Fandek drives the horse team out to spread the hay for their daily feed.

The Upper Green drops from 8,000 feet in elevation at Green River Lakes down to 7,346 feet at the tiny town of Cora, Wyoming. Winter snow deepens over fence lines and leaves ranchers to dig out their houses and barn doors. Ungulates — elk, antelope, mule deer, and moose — smartly attempt to leave this valley to winter in the high desert that spreads south. But the Upper Green is a bottleneck now corked by vacation homes, small-acreage hobby ranchettes, the spread-eagle town of Pinedale, oil and gas wells, and the roads and fences that connect them all.

“The available winter range for wildlife in western Wyoming continues to diminish as development continues,” says Fandek, a resident of the Upper Green for more than 50 years. “That’s the conflict.”

For wildlife to access undeveloped areas of land, they must pass through miles of houses, ranchettes, and cattle ranches. Elk are more attracted to haystacks and livestock feed lines than antelope and deer are. The first recorded request for government assistance with elk came from ranchers near Jackson, Wyoming, in 1906. That same year, the U.S. Forest Service fed 40 tons of hay to 1,000 elk starving on “The Bend” of the Green River — just around Gypsum Mountain from what is now the site of Fandek’s home.

“Initially, ranchers threw out a little hay to elk they felt were starving,” Fandek explains, “and it evolved into this whole-scale feeding program operated by [Wyoming] Game and Fish. Of course, some people are very opposed to it because it interferes with the natural way of things.”

In Wyoming, around 10 to 15 percent of the approximately 112,000 elk visit 22 winter feed grounds. Fandek has fed up to 900 head of these elk at the Black Butte feed ground for 38 years.

“I never imagined it would be the long-continuing event it has been,” Fandek says of his elk-feeding job. “I drove horse teams to feed hay to cattle in winter, and feeding cows is about the same as feeding elk.”

For decades Fandek managed the ranch that surrounds Black Butte. He spent frigid days feeding horses and cattle close to ranch headquarters. Then he drove the horse-drawn sled half a mile to the feed ground to buck bales off the haystack and spread the hay across a meadow for the elk. Feeding by four-hoofed horsepower is the most reasonable way to move hay given how deep the snow accumulates.

No longer working at that ranch, Fandek still feeds elk daily from November to April as a contractor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. In the past, Fandek shoveled snow away from the hay sled and stackyard gates, and then loaded as many as 100 90-pound small squares by hand onto the sled. As more hay producers switch to baling hay into large squares, it forced WGFD to purchase certified weed-free hay in 800-pound bales only movable by a tractor.

“The elk look domesticated here,” Fandek says, “because they get into this pattern every day for six months. They accept people. But when I hunt in the fall, they are wild animals. Elk don’t walk up to a human because they think he may have some hay in his pocket.”

Balancing the needs of humans and wildlife with finite land resources remains a puzzle. Cattle ranches provide open space essential for wildlife on the Upper Green, but the rampantly infectious brucellosis carried by bison, elk, and cattle leaves ranchers averse to wildlife mixing with their livestock.

“Ranchers don’t want elk on their land anymore because of government sanctions on the shipping and selling of cattle meant to contain brucellosis,” Fandek says. “Any cattle testing positive for the disease are condemned, and ranchers may lose their entire herds.

“In the early 1980s, the ranch I managed turned up with brucellosis. The policy is the herd must have three consecutive clean tests. The cattle just bolted away when we’d try to gather them into the corrals, because they were so tired of being handled. We finally tested out of quarantine.”

The Upper Green is on the 217-mile Path of the Pronghorn, the longest documented terrestrial migration in the United States. In 2008, the U.S. Forest Service designated it as the first federally recognized wildlife corridor — important not only for pronghorn antelope but also elk. Many landowners on the Upper Green choose to place their land in conservation easements to preserve open space. An easement attached to the land deed in perpetuity prevents houses, roads, and fences from carving up more wildlife habitat in the valley.

With historical elk migration routes altered by human infrastructure, a frequently asked question is whether the elk population should be allowed to shrink to fit today’s available habitat and the WGFD terminate the winter feed grounds.

Jillian McGinnis, a cowboy and former elk feeder in the Pinedale area, says it bothers her that feeding elk disrupts natural selection.

“Every winter, we keep animals — like an old, lame cow elk — alive that would die without supplemental hay,” she says. “We shouldn’t choose what lives and dies. That’s what winter is for.”

On the other hand, she adds, migrating elk will go onto ranches for hay if they have no other food source. “Because of the economic and disease effects on ranches, I do think the elk need to be fed to keep them away from the ranches,” she says. “It’s a necessary evil.”

Back at the Black Butte feed ground, Fandek has no permanent solution either. “What’s the answer?” he asks. “At this point you can’t just cut it off. For generations now, the elk have migrated to winter feed grounds. They don’t know how to go around all the housing and energy developments to reach the Red Desert. If I didn’t feed them here at Black Butte, the elk would go down country to some ranch’s hay pile.”

Fandek gestures to indicate the Upper Green. “Potentially these multimillion-dollar ranches could be acquired for elk habitat and livestock removed,” he says. “But who’s going to buy the ranches and preserve their open space? And, even then, elk can’t stay here because snow depth buries the grass. As Jim Straley, a retired Game and Fish biologist, said, ‘We’ve got the tiger by the tail and can’t let go.’ ”

Fandek turns back to Pepper and Emma and clucks a giddy-up to quicken their pace back to the stackyard to load more hay. Sandhill cranes croak their spring return to the still snowy Upper Green as the elk move stately among the spread hay.

From the February/March 2018 issue.

The post Where the Elk Roam appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Not 10 miles from the famous western film location of Lone Pine, California, photographer Ansel Adams documented a very different chapter of western history at the Manzanar Japanese internment camp.

When C&I interviewed photographer Jody Miller about her career for our February/March 2018 issue, we were fascinated by her stories about Ansel Adams. She’d studied with the master and had firsthand information about his work and his personality. Among other things, we learned that some of his favorite images were the ones he shot at California’s Manzanar Relocation Center, one of 10 U.S. internment camps where, from December 1942 to 1945 during World War II, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated.

On February 19, 1942, a little more than two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing Japanese relocation. Manzanar opened about a month later, on March 21, 1942, as the Owens Valley Reception Center, and was later converted into a relocation camp. Designed to hold 10,000 people, it operated at, or near, capacity during the war.

“The residents worked in agriculture inside and outside the camp,” according to Military Museum. “The camp had its own farm area just to the south and a hog farm a half mile farther south. Guayule, a rubber-producing plant, was grown in several locations as part of a government-sponsored experimental program to grow natural rubber in the U.S. America's main supply of natural rubber had been lost when the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia. The camp also had a camouflage net factory, which was the only factory of any kind in any of the camps.

“Conditions at Manzanar were similar to those at the other camps, although Manzanar had a golf course where some of the other camps did not.”

This was the scene that Ansel Adams encountered when he visited Manzanar in the fall of 1943. There he would take 240 photographs that would become one of the best records of the camp and some of the most well-known documentations of the internment era

Located in Inyo County about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles, Manzanar sat in beautiful, if remote, country at the edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains. At the camp, Adams would shoot photographs that departed from his traditional landscape work. Concentrating on the internees and their activities, he produced portraits of the people and their family life — in the barracks; at work as welders, farmers, and garment makers; during recreation, playing baseball and volleyball.

A book of his images, called Born Free and Equal, was published in 1944. As Adams explained in a letter to a friend at the time: “Through the pictures the reader will be introduced to perhaps twenty individuals ... loyal American citizens who are anxious to get back into the stream of life and contribute to our victory.”

Apart from two images, Adams gifted his Manzanar photographs to the Library of Congress. The two he held back — both shots of the mountains near Manzanar in keeping with his famed landscape style — are among his most famous: Mount Williamson, the Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1944; and Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California, 1944.

After the last internee left the Manzanar Relocation Center on November 25, 1945, the camp closed. Manzanar was then dismantled, except for the camp auditorium, the only building that remains intact.

Now a national historical site, Manzanar is open to the public. Inside the Manzanar Visitor Center you’ll find exhibits, a 22-minute film, and a bookstore. In the camp itself, is Block 14, where you can see two reconstructed barracks, a women’s latrine, and a mess hall with exhibits. A 3.2-mile driving tour reveals remnants of orchards, 11 excavated rock gardens and ponds, building foundations, and the camp cemetery.

To see Manzanar as Ansel Adams did, you can view his photographs on the Library of Congress website. (The Library of Congress site also includes digital images of the first edition of Born Free and Equal.)

Offering the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965, Adams wrote in a letter, “The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment. ... All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.”

See Collection Highlights here.

The post Ansel Adams at the Manzanar Relocation Center appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Photographer Kathy McCraine captures the life and food of chuck wagon cooks on a historic Arizona ranch.

It’s unlikely Charles Goodnight had an inkling about the lasting impact his modification of a Studebaker army-surplus wagon into a field kitchen in 1866 would have on Western culture and American life at large. Goodnight’s chuck wagon was a product of necessity meant to efficiently and quickly feed cattle drovers on the trail and on ranch lands. Now, the chuck wagon is used for competitive racing. It’s the subject of festivals and cooking contests. Heck, the cooking rig and the rustic, Dutch oven-based grub that evolved from the chuck wagon’s larder draw people to weekend “cow country cooking” experiences for a nostalgic taste of the old days when horsepower referred to actual horses.

The chuck wagon at O RO Ranch, though, is driven out of necessity, not theater. “There’s nothing like it,” says Kathy McCraine, who in her new book Orejana Outfit: Arizona’s Historic O RO Ranch 1993 – 2013 documents the lives of the cowboys of the O RO Ranch and the men charged with feeding the cowhands. “They have a wagon. They don’t have very good roads. So everything is worked horseback. It’s like stepping back a hundred years.”

McCraine says part of what made O RO special during her visits is that the ranch took on “really good hands,” and that included the cooks. “Some of them were really interesting and some of them were really outlaws.” Take Lenny McNab, for example, McCraine’s favorite wagon cook subject. The classically trained chef had no cowboy cooking background when he came to work the chuck wagon on the O RO in 2006. From head to toe, “he was a real character,” the photographer recalls. McCraine captures McNab in just that way — dressed in what he imagined to be authentic cookie’s garb: a bowler hat, overalls, boots, and a sly grin.

“Lenny would come up with all sorts of dishes,” McCraine says. “I once went out there with a jar of dried shiitake mushrooms. Lenny went crazy over that and came up with a Dutch oven prime rib roast with sweet onion-shiitake mushroom sauce.” That recipe made its way into McCraine’s cookbook, Cow Country Cooking: Recipes and Tales From Northern Arizona’s Historic Ranches. Another of the chef’s recipes is featured on our recipes post. McNab moved on, fashioned himself into a colorful cowboy chef personality, and won the 10th season of Food Network Star. (The Food Network scrapped McNab’s award for winning — his own show — when a series of vulgar online comments reportedly made by McNab came to light.)

Still the cowboys and cooks continue working the O RO Ranch, where one can always find a taste of the old days.

Find recipes from Cow Country Cooking here.

From the February/March 2018 issue.

The post Cow Country Cooking appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

If you’re headed out to Big Bend National Park, you’ll appreciate this itinerary of towns along the route — and a few flavorful local recipes.

Stop 1: Big Spring

Eat: Executive chef Rob Cook’s dishes at Settles Grill offer cuisine that combines West Texas comfort food with Southern elegance. Over the years, the restaurant has hosted notable guests such as Elvis Presley, Lawrence Welk, and President Herbert Hoover.

Play: Big Spring State Park opened in 1936 and offers dramatic views off the 200-foot bluff. Catch the sunrise or sunset, hike, bike, or have a picnic on this preserved land and take in the fresh air. Don’t forget to check out the historic totem pole and the Native American artifacts and fossils from the area, on display at a seasonal interpretive center.

Stay: Hotel Settles originally opened in 1930, when the building consisted of a hotel, restaurant, and pharmacy that served as a hub for the bustling community. After recently undergoing a $30 million renovation, Hotel Settles reopened in 2012 and evokes Southern charm honoring the building’s original elegance.

Stop 2: Marathon

Eat: White Buffalo Bar is a legendary watering hole that features an extensive tequila selection, fresh-squeezed margaritas, and delicious signature cocktails that can be sipped inside by the fireplace or outside on the patio while listening to live music.

Play: Evans Gallery — Austin transplant James H. Evans has been a Marathon fixture since 1989, capturing breathtaking shots of the West Texas landscape, flora, and fauna. You can see his work in the Evans Gallery down the street from the Gage Hotel and are likely to find Evans himself in the gallery on Saturdays and Sundays.

Klepper Gallery — Native Texan E. Dan Klepper, one of the featured artists in C&I’s February/March 2018 issue, exhibits his work in a 100-year-old adobe building he converted into a gallery. Unless he’s on the road, you’ll find him there, just around the corner from the Gage Hotel.

Stay: Gage Hotel — Built in 1927 by acclaimed architect Henry Trost, the legendary Gage Hotel is located just outside Big Bend National Park. It offers authentic laid-back luxury with premier accommodations, top-notch service, and first-class dining. On March 24, the hotel’s new Brick Vault Barbecue and Brewery is set to open on Main Street with barbecue, beer, and music on the menu. The brewery — serving Howdy Cream Ale and Capt. Sheppard’s Pecan Porter, among others — was named after an actual 1886 vault on the premises. The only thing that survived a fire that burned the original mercantile building to the ground, it’s a focal point of the renovation.

Stop 3: Alpine

Eat: The original Reata Restaurant, nestled in the southern end of the breathtaking Davis Mountains in West Texas, has been providing fine dining to residents and visitors of the Big Bend for nearly two decades.

Play: Big Bend Brewing is located in the backyard of Big Bend National Park. Venture out West and visit the tap room, tasting brews that are a tribute to the spirit of West Texas and trailblazers of the Big Bend region.

For a great introduction to the history of the Big Bend region, visit the Museum of the Big Bend located on the campus of Sul Ross State University. Built in 1936, the museum has been preserving the area’s history for more than 80 years, collecting artifacts since 1921. Numerous exhibits include the Texas pterosaur, historical maps, and early Native Americans and buffalo soldiers. Every April, the Trappings of Texas exhibit and sale, one of the longest continuously running exhibits of its kind in the country, features fine Western art and custom cowboy gear.

Stay: The Holland Hotel has been open since 1928 and still serves as the epicenter of the Big Bend community. Located within walking distance of shopping, galleries, dining, and entertainment, the hotel offers a home away from home full of Southern charm and hospitality.

Stop 4: Marfa

Eat: Stellina — Hip, sophisticated, and super-social, this restaurant, next to the beautiful pink-stucco historic landmark Presidio County Courthouse (1886), features an ever-changing menu of delicious Mediterranean fare, along with an impressive wine selection and craft beers.

Play: Chinati Foundation — The Chinati Foundation is a contemporary art museum based on the ideas of its founder, Donald Judd, who envisioned bringing art, architecture, and nature together in a coherent whole in this remote landscape. Intended to preserve and present permanent large-scale art installations, Chinati, which opened to the public in the mid-1980s, was an early attraction in Marfa, along with the famed mysterious Marfa lights.

Stay: Hotel Saint George — This reincarnation of the old Hotel St. George, originally built in 1886, incorporates locally sourced elements and repurposed materials from the original building, all melded with world-class contemporary works by artists living in or tied to the community.

Recipes From West Texas

Bourbon Cider Sour

Courtesy Pharmacy Bar & Parlor, Hotel Settles

(Serves 2)

3 ounces (2 shots) Jim Beam Bourbon (or your preferred bourbon)
1 cup apple cider
½ cup orange juice
¼ cup sugar
Crushed or cubed ice
1 Gala or Honeycrisp apple, sliced for garnish

Mix the bourbon, apple cider, orange juice, and sugar together. Place the ice in the serving cups and pour the liquid over the ice. Garnish with apple slices.

Jalapeño-Cilantro Soup

Courtesy Reata Restaurant

This rich and creamy pepper bisque always seems to surprise guests at the Reata Restaurant the first time they try it. “The subtle flavors are as comforting as a warm wooly blanket on a softy downy bed — in fact, it’s really had not to curl up for a nap after you’ve had a bowl.”

(Serves 6)

½ tablespoon unsalted butter
5 jalapeños, seeded and minced
2 tablespoons garlic, minced
¾ cup red onion, finely chopped
1 avocado, peeled and diced
4 Roma tomatoes, diced
8 cups heavy cream (use the highest fat content available)
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 bunch cilantro, stemmed and chopped
Tortilla crisps (recipe follows)

In a large stockpot, heat the butter over medium heat. Sauté the jalapeños, onions, and garlic for about 10 minutes, or until the onions are translucent and the peppers turn soft. Remove from the heat and add the avocado, tomatoes, and cream. Lower the heat; then return the pot to heat, stirring constantly so the cream doesn’t separate. Slowly bring the soup back to a simmer, cooking to reduce by about 30 percent, stirring often to prevent scorching or sticking. Season with salt and pepper. Just before serving, add the cilantro, reserving about 1 teaspoon per serving for garnish. Sprinkle with the reserved chopped cilantro and [tortilla crisps].

Tortilla Crisps

6 corn tortillas
Peanut oil, for frying

Heat the oil in a cast-iron skillet or deep fryer to approximately 350 degrees. Cut the tortillas into ¼-inch strips. Fry the strips for about 1 minute on each side until they’re crispy and lightly toasted.

Pan-Seared Pepper-Crusted Tenderloin With Port Wine Glaze

Courtesy Reata Restaurant

This is the Reata Restaurant’s all-time bestselling dish. “We predict once you’ve had your tenderloin glazed with port wine, nothing else will ever do. The black pepper for the coating must be coarse and freshly ground, and for goodness’ sake, please don’t let the amount of pepper scare you away. We promise it makes the meat melt-in-your-mouth good!”

(Serves 6)

6 (8- to 10-ounce) beef tenderloins, well-trimmed
12 tablespoons cracked black pepper, or coarsely ground
Kosher salt
2 – 3 tablespoons oil, for sautéeing
2 cups port wine glaze (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Generously coat both sides of each tenderloin with the cracked pepper. Season each side with salt. Heat a dry sauté pan to smoking hot. Add the oil 1 – 2 tablespoons at a time. When the oil is hot, add the crusted tenderloin and sear for about 3 minutes. This is really important, because a good, hot sear holds in the juices. Turn the steak and sear 3 minutes more on the other side. Repeat for all 6 steaks.

Reserve the seared steaks in a baking dish. Remove the sauté pan from the heat and set aside to use with the sauce.

Finish the steaks in the preheated oven for 8 – 10 minutes to achieve medium-rare temperature. Serve immediately on a bed of about ⅓ cup of the port wine glaze.

Port Wine Glaze

(Makes about 2 cups)

½ (750-mm) bottle port wine (because the sauce reduces so much, an inexpensive bottle is fine)
⅓ cup honey
2 quarts veal stock (recipe follows)

Combine all the ingredients in a large stockpot. Cook over high heat for about 1 hour, until the liquid has reduced by about 75 percent and is the consistency of syrup.

Veal Stock

“We’ll fess up,” the folks at Reata Restaurant admit in the headnotes for this recipe. “This takes a long time to cook — but we swear it’s not that hard. It’s just not always practical to make it before you prepare a big meal, where maybe only one recipe calls for veal stock. So, if you must, you can combine equal parts of chicken stock and beef stock and get a flavor that’s pretty close. But promise us you’ll try this one day, okay? We promise it will be worth your while!”

10 pounds veal bones
3 yellow onions, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 head fresh garlic, cloves peeled
¼ cup fresh thyme, diced
5 dried bay leaves
½ cup tomato paste
2 gallons water

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Place the bones in a large, dry, covered roasting pan and cook for 3 hours. Add the water (be very careful, as the pan will be extremely hot and the water might spatter!) Add all the remaining ingredients, cover, and roast for 1 hour. Remove from the oven. Carefully pour everything, including the bones, into a large stockpot. Cover, and cook over medium heat for at least 12 hours.

More on West Texas and Big Bend

E. Dan Klepper and the Middle of Nowhere

Birds and their Earthbound Companions

The Craft Beer Revolution

Recipe: Reata’s Habanero Margarita

The post West Texas Road Trip appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc traces the roots of American music through iconic cities like Chicago, Nashville, and New York in the latest IMAX feature film, America’s Musical Journey, dancing into theaters this Friday.

In the latest IMAX release, America’s Musical Journey, audiences are taken on a journey that requires more than a backpack. You’ll need a nice set of headphones and some dancing shoes along the way.

America’s Musical Journey follows Grammy Award-nominated singer and songwriter Aloe Blacc as he traces the roots of America’s music and follows the footsteps of Louis Armstrong through the colorful locales and cultures where America’s music was born. Serving as a virtual tour guide, Blacc travels through such iconic cityscapes as New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Nashville, Memphis, and Miami, exploring the collision of cultures that gave birth to such American art forms as jazz, blues, country, rock ’n’ roll, and hip-hop.

Actor Morgan Freeman narrates the film.

Leading the ensemble are Academy Award-nominated director Greg MacGillivray and his producer son, Shaun MacGillivray. They’ve created an immersive experience of American culture and creativity with a soundtrack that showcases the immense passion for creative innovation in it purest form.

“There’s so many genres and not many kids notice, but there’s been so many new genres over the last hundred years. Jazz, the blues, rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop [were] all created over the last hundred years. That’s a pretty small timeframe. [It’s gratifying] to be able to tell that to people around the world, to showcase this story of creativity and inspiration and light a spark for people to care more about the arts,” Shaun says.

The project took six months of research and scripting and was a year in production, and an additional six months of editing. The result is 45 minutes of a seamless, immersive musical journey.

This is hardly their first IMAX rodeo. The father-son duo have extensive experience within IMAX — they’ve worked on many types of IMAX films, from educational topics like space, engineering, travel, and nature to human topics like We, the Marines and the Robert Redford-narrated National Parks Adventure.

The huge format and high resolution of IMAX make for an incredible vehicle for their goal of developing incredible stories.

“This is our 40th IMAX giant-screen film in 40 years and it starts [this month] with America’s Musical Journey. That’s an incredible accomplishment,” Shaun says.

In that long résumé, this is the first time MacgillivrayFreeman Productions has tackled a story about music.

“We found a subject that’s really exciting: being able to tell a story of music, art, and creativity and how our country is relatively young, and how ... this melting pot of people coming from all over ... really sparked ideas and sparked new ways of thinking,” Shaun says. “[Working] with our museums and science centers around the world to be able to showcase that in the film is really inspiring, too.”

Finding a lead character who could embody the MacGillivrays’ ideas didn’t turn out to be too difficult. Soulful singer-songwriter Aloe Blacc — known for hits that include “The Man,” “I Need a Dollar,” and Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” — was a natural choice.

“We loved his background and we loved his type of music, which really transcends genres,” Shaun says. “The premise of it is he follows in the footsteps of Louis Armstrong.”

Blacc guides viewers through Armstrong’s hometown of New Orleans, then travels to Chicago, New York, and many other locations, introducing musical prodigies along the way.

One of those prodigies is 17-year-old Willow Osborne, who has traveled around the word playing banjo.

Osborne learned to play the banjo from former Dolly Parton bandleader and four-time international banjo champion Gary “Biscuit” Davis. After years of practice and perfecting technique, Osborne became a YouTube sensation (watch her videos here). Her goal is to spread more knowledge about her instrument.

“I was just so excited to be able to go and have the opportunity to show kids and other people a little bit more about music that they may not already know,” Osborne says. “[Being part of this project] I learned a lot about music that I didn’t know, and I’ve been in it for 13 years now. It really made me excited to think about how many kids are going to benefit, and hopefully be encouraged to learn music and be more invested.”

Most recently, Osborne has been finishing the last leg of a U.S. tour and is getting ready for her next semester at Arizona State University, where she studies biological sciences online. America’s Musical Journey is her first experience with film, but she’s already a natural.

“I’ve been on stage my whole life,” she says, “[but] I had no idea what to expect being in front of cameras and the film crew. I was honestly really nervous, but I just went in and I told myself, You just do the best you can. I was amazed — everyone was so kind and wonderful. It was really a lot of fun to be on location with the big IMAX camera. It was a completely different experience for me because I’m used to having a live audience.”

Osborne steals the show during one scene where the camera captures a moment of pure musical joy. While she effortlessly picks at her banjo, massive groups of kids clap, cheer, and dance with exhilaration. The energy is palpable and it’s a standout moment in the film.

“I had a lot of fun,” the banjo prodigy says. “I love playing with kids and seeing the smiles on their faces. They were just all dancing around me. It was really fun. I think the people who see it are going to get a laugh and smile out of it.”

America’s Musical Journey hits the giant screens February 16. Watch the trailer below.

For more information on America’s Musical Journey or to find a theater playing the film near you, visit the film’s website.

The post America’s Musical Journey Makes Its Way to IMAX appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Sculpting a bronze or welding a creation made from castoff metal scraps, this Wyoming artist takes his inspiration from ranching and cowboying, family, and Mother Nature.

Tom Ford pulled off his cowboy boots, stripped off his jeans, and tossed them onto the table in front of his dismayed professor. The assignment for the art class he was taking at Northwest Community College in Powell, Wyoming, was to sketch the displayed flower vase. “The professor wasn’t happy when I ignored the vase and drew my spurs. He told me, ‘Draw what’s on the table,’” says Ford. “He didn’t think me adding my britches was funny.”

Ford also had a habit of drawing horses instead of what was actually assigned. “Finally, the instructor said, ‘If you can’t bring it in here, you can’t draw it.’ The next day I had a horse standing in the classroom. Of course, I went to the dean’s office. College and I didn’t get along.”

Soon enough Ford left college in Powell to return to cowboying near Gillette at the Pickerel Land and Cattle Company. Back under wide-open skies, he sketched Wyoming cowboy life, looking to the great artists C.M. Russell and Frederic Remington for inspiration. But neither cowboying nor his nascent art paid well, and Ford had to hire on at a nearby coal mine to support his family. “I worked a shift every other week,” he says. “It allowed me time to cowboy and do my art.”

While he was juggling mining and cowboying, Ford managed to create the monumental bronze Pulling Leather, which depicts a larger-than-life bucking horse and cowboy. Today it stands outside Gillette’s CAM-PLEX Heritage Center, where you can plainly see that the bronc buster is wearing a replica pair of those same spurs Ford dug in with in his art class.

If Ford was uncompromising in college, it’s because he can’t help but see all his art through the prism of his Western lifestyle. “Ranching and cowboying — it’s about community and family. And you’re out there with God and Mother Nature.” When it comes to his art, these are his natural subjects.

It all came together for Ford a year later when he went to Casper College as an adult for an oil painting class. Initially he found the class’ emphasis on cubism far from his cowboy experience. “Then the more that I looked at it,” he says, “I saw Mother Nature in it. When you get up on a high ridge and the sun’s coming up, the rays highlight different levels of the plains. In cubism, the lights and darks are just like how light moves through nature.”

Light has become something of a preoccupation. In his early work, Ford fixated on the smallest detail, down to every single horse hair. These days, he strives to sculpt, paint, and draw loosely to allow light into his work.

Though Ford considers bronze sculpture his central passion (despite how time-consuming it is), lately he’s especially been enjoying welding castoff metal. Scrap pieces he finds behind his family’s machine shop might become buffalo, antelope, and horse sculptures. “I enjoy doing recycled art and metal work because I get a kick out of creating something a client wants,” Ford says. “If I can make someone crack a smile or remind them of a good memory with my art, I want to create it.”

For more information on Tom Ford, visit his website.

The post Cowboy Sculptor Tom Ford appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

The paniolo on Hawaii’s Big Island have passed down ranching traditions for generations.

This week brought us the latest lifestyle documentary video from the folks at Yeti. “Parker Ranch” turns a lens on a community of cowboys, the paniolo, who live the ranching life on Hawaii’s Big Island. Director Chris Malloy, a Yeti Ambassador, captures the experience and heritage of a community working the land, processing meat, and winding down at the end of the day.

The post Video: Yeti Spotlights the Cowboys of Hawaii appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

It’s the first day of spring, which means it’s time to get ready for that spring rush.

Everything on that spring checklist seems to happen at once: new chicks, livestock babies, moving manure, planting the garden and new trees, uprooting invasive species, fixing fences, and getting the equipment running. My dad used to say, “Preparation is nine-tenths of the game,” and he was right. Knowing what’s coming, having a plan, and having the supplies and equipment you need on hand, organized, and in working order means you’ll be ready to take action on the long list of chores you’ll want to finish during the spring months.

Livestock and Poultry

• Clean up and spread chicken litter and winter manure on pastures and fields as soon as the ground has thawed and the soil has firmed up. Manure not needed in the field should be piled and composted for fall spreading on field and garden.
• Check all fences: Tighten slack wires and repair breaks or bad posts before turning livestock out to pasture. If you use rotational grazing, start setting up a temporary electric fence to subdivide the pastures.
• Livestock and poultry can go on pasture as soon as the ground firms up. Keep hay available until they quit eating it.
• Prepare pens or paddocks for livestock due to calve, foal, kid, or lamb. Have your veterinary kit updated and ready for any birthing complications, and have the vet’s phone number handy.
• Male kids and lambs should be castrated by the age of 3 weeks and vaccinated by 8 weeks. Calves can be castrated at birth or a couple weeks before weaning.
• Set up the brooder several days ahead of chick delivery date to get the temperature right and stabilized. Have starter feed and grit on hand.

Garden

• To minimize the chance of contamination by fecal pathogens, don’t put fresh manure on the garden in the spring—use compost instead.
• Wait to till the garden until the soil has thawed and then firmed up.
• Start some warm-season vegetables indoors for mid- and late-spring planting: tomatoes, peppers, squash, herbs.
• Plant cold-tolerant seeds as soon as the ground is thawed and not soggy: peas and lettuce first, followed by cabbage, carrot, potato, radish, and spinach.
• Stay on top of weed control.

Orchard

• Finish pruning trees before bud break; Remove the prunings and burn, or brush-pile in the woods.
• Plant new trees.
• Look for and destroy tent caterpillar egg cases and nests.

Equipment

• Make sure all engines start a couple weeks before you think you’ll need them. Check tire pressures and radiator levels.

Woodlot

• Finish up winter pruning, thinning, and firewood harvest.
• This is a great time of year to uproot invasive species like buckthorn, since the soft ground of early spring makes pulling easy, whether you use hands, a mechanical puller, or a chain on the back of a tractor or ATV.
• Plant grass and clover seed on bare spots in your woods trails.

Kitchen and Cold Cellar

• Clear out the last of the root vegetables and save seeds from those that kept the longest.

A Final Note

Timing is everything in the spring, from getting seeds in the ground when the soil temperature is right to arranging lambing, calving, foaling, or kidding to happen when it works best in your system. Many folks like to birth their livestock in late winter; I prefer warmer weather when there’s clean green grass but before fly season really takes off – around here in Wisconsin that’s on average from mid-April to early May. I like to get the fruit trees pruned before it’s warm enough for fungal spores to be floating around looking for wounded wood to infect, and before new leaves obscure the branch structure.

Lastly, learning how to synchronize your rotational grazing system with the rate of grass growth will maximize pasture production and save you from buying a lot of hay in a drought – though you may still have to buy some. I cover the topic of grazing in my most recent book, and there are plenty of resources available on-line or through grazing groups as well.

Ann Larkin Hansen is the author of several books, including The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner: What to Do & When to Do It. She lives with her family on their farm in northern Wisconsin.

Photography (top to bottom): New to the World by David Strozdas, Simple Life by Jeanne Harford, Solitude by Erica McCrary, Sculpted Fields of the Palouse by Carla Francis, The Golden Light by Crystal Gibson

More Spring:

Ramp up for WildFlavor and the Cowgirl Spring Roundup at The Resort at Paws Up
Fashion Finds: Spring Boots, Bags, and Hats
How and When to Roam Free at any National Park in 2018

The post Western Homestead: Your Spring Checklist appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

When Hurricane Harvey flooded Southeast Texas farms and ranches, cowboys answered the call.

Chance Ward ducked out onto his trailer’s screened-in front porch and listened to the rain beat against the metal cladding of the roof. It had started coming down in earnest that morning, August 26, 2017, when Hurricane Harvey’s fat feeder bands started arcing out of the Gulf of Mexico and breaking over the coastal plains like waves. They stretched from Galveston, Texas, clear to Ward’s little spread in Liberty County, in the sparsely populated piney flatwoods more than 60 miles from the coast.

When eight hours had passed without so much as a moment’s letup, Ward knew what was coming. There was hardly a square foot from Coldspring south to Liberty that he hadn’t crossed horseback in pursuit of game or a stray heifer. He understood these bayous and river bottoms, what they could take, and when they’d jump their banks. Here, pincered between the East Fork of the San Jacinto River and the Trinity River, the flood, he worried, would get biblical before it was over.

Ward has a physique built for steer wrestling, with a torso like a 50-gallon drum, and a broad, friendly face. Most of the time he works in his feed store, but he also auctioneers livestock, raises cattle, breeds working dogs, and contracts with the sheriff’s department to track down and round up everything from loose yearlings to llamas.

As parts of the county took on more than 2 feet of water in 24 hours, his son Rowdy, a 17-year-old ace bareback bronc rider and team roper, was already out helping people move horses. The rivers were coming up faster by the moment. “Don’t make any plans,” Chance told Rowdy. “We’re fixin’ to get busy.”

By August 28, Harvey had been downgraded to a tropical storm even as the water kept rising and the rain kept coming down in unprecedented volume. Southeast Texas was in the midst of the worst flood disaster in state history. Parts of Liberty County would ultimately receive more than 4 feet of rain. Flood gauges on the East Fork of the San Jacinto and Trinity were already breaking crest records by feet, not inches. Livestock, Ward knew, could drown by the thousands, fenced into the floodwaters with nowhere to run. Because plans don’t last long when the rivers hit flood stage, Ward’s was simple: Find stricken animals and swim them to high ground.

His life here had trained him for this, an event sure to serve as a yardstick against which all others would be measured. As a boy, Ward had learned that fast-moving water is more dangerous than any gator. That you give a swimming horse its head and never fight the current. And that if you tie off a cow’s legs and keep its snout out of the water, you can float that animal on its side for miles.

As the waters steadily rose, spilling over ridges no old-timer had ever seen submerged, the riverine cowboys prepared to put their abilities to the test.

That morning Chance and Rowdy climbed into a Dodge diesel 4x4 and motored over swamped county roads to his father’s house, where Ward had temporarily stabled his horses and dogs. He hitched the truck to a gooseneck trailer while Rowdy collared a few “black mouth curs,” yellow scent hounds that won’t be found on any kennel club registry. They packed the dogs into the trailer’s forward compartment. They hauled their halters, blankets, and saddles out of a plywood shed and loaded the horses into the trailer as the hounds yipped and the diesel chugged in idle. Then they set out.

The highways had become rivers. Eighteen-wheelers sagged in the ditches like capsized barges. Cars had been carried off by the current into the nearby woods. Ward took it slow, water to the headlights, the brush guard pushing through the flood like a boat’s prow. In the trailer, the hounds were up to their ears and paddling. Ward had left the gate unlatched, just in case they got into trouble and needed to extricate their animals in a hurry.

The truck pulled off at a ranch sitting under 5 feet, and 6 to 7 in places. They unloaded their mounts and swung aboard. In slanting rain, they shouldered through water that licked at the backs of their knees. Rowdy headed toward a corral, inside of which a dark bay stud paced, cutting an anxious wake before the gate. Rowdy’s lariat flared and flicked out from his hand, cinching around the horse’s neck. With his rope in one hand, he leaned over and grabbed the gate’s top crossbar with the other. Rowdy, long and lean where his father is stout and broad, jerked sideways in the saddle, little by little torquing the gate’s rusted hinges. Ward video-recorded it all and posted the footage on Facebook, his flood diary on the move.

Rowdy pulled the stud from what would have been its grave and swam him to high ground. They went back and forth this way, roping seven horses in all, most of them scarcely halter-broken and floundering around a barn with the turbid, mud-brown floodwaters nearly up to the eaves. With all the animals pulled to safety, Ward and Rowdy started to move down the road.

By then word had traveled by mouth, phone, and Facebook, and soon neighbors were wading out to the roadside to flag the Wards down. And so they got back into the water, roping and leading livestock to relatively dry land. They didn’t stop until nightfall, wet, chapped, and worn out.

They went out the next day, too, and the day after that, though it wasn’t just the two of them any longer. Cowboys all over the area, mostly from around the Wards’ hometown of Tarkington Prairie, threw in with them. The next day it was a group of hands from Waco and Buffalo. The rescues got bigger, more difficult, and more dangerous. In Dayton, in the south part of the county, seven cowboys churned through choppy waters across a wide, largely treeless pasture that now looked more like a lake. They cut the wire fence that had trapped the cattle and led through the opening some 250 head in water up to their briskets.

Along the river bottoms, they traveled by jon boat, by airboat, and by horse. They swam their mounts for miles through the deep woods in water as high as 17 feet, using the county roads, the dirt farm lanes, and even the overtopped Interstate 69 as canals. They dodged seething flotillas of fire ants, not always successfully. They plucked dogs from the water and chickens from foundering coops. They swam alongside alligators and water moccasins, longhorns and donkeys.

Some of the latter they roped, some they floated, some they pushed, and some they paddled alongside of. After a few days in the water, the flood had begun to break the animals down. They often had bad “river rot,” the hide sloughing from their legs and bellies like ragged strips of cloth. But these were the lucky ones. Wherever the water was high and the animals fenced in, they found drowned cattle, bloated and drifting. They found ponies that had been deposited some 10 feet off the ground into the high-water-marked tree limbs.

Faced with so much death, Ward would try to remember what his uncle up in Coldspring — the cowboy who taught him most of what he knows — had always told him about death when the land that provides suddenly turns. “It ain’t about what you lost,” he’d said. “It’s about what you saved.”

By one estimate, Ward’s group moved more than 1,100 animals to safety. His Facebook posts ended up on news broadcasts all over the world. One of the small-town cowboy’s videos was viewed as many as 12 million times. Ward and Rowdy came to symbolize the self-sufficient streak running through rural Texans.

These were hard days, to be sure, but they were good, too. It wasn’t unusual for Ward to bring a bunch of out-of-town cowboys to his dad’s house, where his sister would fry up steaks and eggs — a king’s feast, as far as they were concerned. Then they’d all crash into exhausted, blackout sleep, men strewn all over the house in every conceivable nook.

Ward and Rowdy were in the saddle every day, from daybreak to dusk, for seven days. Surely, Ward thought, they had saved what they could. Nothing else could last this long out there, standing or floating, much less in the still-high waters along the Trinity River bottom.

But on the night before the last day of his mission, Ward got a call about some cattle in those very straits. “Bulls---,” he said. “There’s no way they’re still alive.”

“No,” the caller insisted. “They’re down there. They’ve been seen.”

The next morning, Ward, Rowdy, and a group of cowboys saddled up once more and found the cows huddled on a small patch of high ground, surrounded on all sides by lapping floodwater. The cattle could scarcely move. The land had become so saturated that they had all begun to sink, the mud pulling them under like quicksand. As Ward and his group began to dislodge the cattle and push them out, a neighbor told him about five horses marooned even deeper into the river bottom. There was probably no way to reach them, the man said, and wasn’t it a damned shame. But Ward believed there was no place in Liberty County he couldn’t touch, so he put out a call for an extra boat. When it arrived, they navigated seven miles by airboat and jon boat into the heart of some of the worst flooding in Texas. They arrived at a small river house in the woods, sitting high out of the water on stilts, with a long, wooden ramp leading to the front porch. The horses were there, all right, gaunt and sunk in at the hips, eyeing them listlessly. A stud and a yearling were submerged nearly to their flanks, and a mare and her baby stood on the ramp, which was slick with hay and several days’ worth of dung. Then Ward spotted the fifth: a downed mare, her forelegs plunged through the ramp’s shattered wood. A man appeared on the porch. He said she’d been trapped for two days at least and that he couldn’t free her. This wasn’t his house; he’d simply taken shelter here. And these weren’t his horses, either, but he couldn’t leave them. They belonged to a neighbor.

“He never even attempted to get them out of here,” the man raged. “He said he did but he didn’t.”

Ward turned the options over in his mind, what few there were. The horses would have to swim for their lives, seven miles to dry ground. They had extra halters, which they slipped over the stud and the other mare. For the smaller colts, they fashioned halters out of spare lariats. Before they could lead the horses down, however, they’d have to move the stricken mare off the ramp and out of the way. They surrounded her and every man lifted and pulled with everything he had until she was free. But even then the mare couldn’t stand, and now Ward knew why: Her legs had been badly mangled in the fall.

Leaving her in pain, to Ward’s mind, was a greater sin than euthanizing someone else’s animal, so he made the only call he could — an act of hard mercy with a pistol slug to end her suffering. He and the others pulled her body to a nearby tract of woods and left her to the water. Then, they prepared the others for the final swim.

They eased the horses off the ramp and set out into the flood, Ward and the others guiding them from the boats with ropes. Before they’d made much progress, one of the colts, green, untrained, and weak from privation, started to balk and fight the rope. So Ward climbed into the dark, slowly moving water, and swam beside him, knowing that an animal will trust flesh over metal and motors.

He swam with the guide rope, keeping the animal heading for land. When his arms and legs began to flag, Ward would grab the gunwale, catch his breath, and glide along with the boat. For two miles at least, he and the colt paced one another, until he had it exhausted to resigned obedience. Ward clambered back into the boat with scarcely another stroke left in him, and they covered the last miles, the pine and oak rising sharply out of the water on either side. Finally, after four straight hours of swimming, they made it to water shallow enough to walk through. They staggered another mile and a half after that, Ward’s legs shaking and tensing along with the horses’.

Finally, the trailers came into sight. They loaded their rescues, left the river bottom behind, and drove them to a farm owned by some kind people who knew how to cure river rot and nurse a half-starved animal back to health.

With dusk coming on, Ward and Rowdy returned to Ward’s father’s house, as tired as they’d ever been in their lives. They unsaddled and stowed their gear in the plywood shack. They put a little extra feed in the horses’ buckets.

Even that night, the water had begun to work its way through the creeks, bayous, the rivers, and finally back out into the Gulf. The flood was receding. No other calls came in after that last day on the river bottom, which is probably just as well. “We were so give out,” Ward says, “but we were proud of what we accomplished in those seven days.” He was proud of what he and Rowdy had saved. After a week in the saddle, in the rain and the water, Ward plunged into sleep, his body wrecked and his conscience clean.

From the April 2018 issue.

The post Riders on the Storm appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Pat Harvie’s spread in the Aleutian Islands has lush grasslands and no natural predators, but that doesn’t mean ranching in the Cradle of Storms is easy.

America’s westernmost ranch does not lie along the slopes of a remote mountain range, nor under a bone-bleaching desert sun, nor on a tropical beach. Instead, the massive ranch lies northwest of the contiguous United States and Hawaii, clinging to the heart of the Cradle of Storms, as locals call this region of Alaska.

Resembling a strand of emeralds set against a steely gray sea, the Aleutian Islands reach for Asia with the snowcapped peaks of dozens of volcanoes peppered by the domes of small Russian Orthodox churches.

The jagged islands separate the frigid waters of the Bering Sea from the relatively warm waters of the Pacific with its Kuroshio current. The mixing of these waters gives birth to some of the most violent storms recorded in North America, often draping this world in fog for weeks and keeping the lush grasslands of these islands green.

Wrapped in mist is the 686-square-mile Umnak Island just west of Dutch Harbor. Seventy-two miles long and 16 miles wide with a volcano of its own, the island is also the home of the nearly 200,000-acre Bering Pacific Ranches Limited with its 8,000 to 10,000 head of cattle, operated by 62-year-old Pat Harvie.

“It’s cold, miserable weather on the island,” says the native Albertan, his heavy mustache still dark despite his years. “There’s been some tough stretches.” But, he later adds, the ranch’s position at 53 degrees latitude and the warm ocean current to the south also produce favorable working weather to both the cowboys and the cattle.

For a quarter century, Harvie and his cowboys and processing crew have shared Umnak Island with the Native village of Nikolski, home to fewer than 30 residents and a wilderness lodge. There are about 10,000 reindeer, a small bison herd on the far end of the island, and a few wild horses. The Okmok volcano and other mountains in the center of Umnak Island separate the ranch from the village a little more than 40 miles away.

The ranch house, housing for cowboys, slaughterhouse, and pens were originally part of Fort Glenn, a World War II Army air base that was effectively abandoned a few years after the Japanese surrendered. The slaughter plant was built up from the concrete foundation of one of the military structures. The site is leased from the Alaska Department of Transportation, and grazing rights for the ranch are leased from Native corporations that own land on the island.

Unlike the rest of Alaska, the island has no predators.

“The cattle go wherever they want. There’s few fences on the island,” Harvie says. “Besides grass, kelp on the beaches sustains the cattle.”

During roundup and slaughter operations, the ranch hires on a cowboy crew of 10 to 15 hands, along with 20 people to work in the slaughterhouse.

“We don’t advertise for cowboys,” Harvie says. “We usually get the crew we need through word of mouth. It gets to be an interesting mix of cowboys up here.”

Cowboys who arrive soon discover their only contact with the world is through either satellite phone or by way of Coast Guard radio. There is only diesel-generated electricity, and no parts store nor a mechanic down the street or in the next town to repair things, leaving ranch hands dependent on goods arriving by boat — or the kindness of others. In 2015, a scientific team studying the local volcano shared food supplies with two ranch hands when their own food shipment from Dutch Harbor failed to arrive for weeks.

Shipping containers stacked on top of one another hold an assortment of parts and materials. For the entertainment of ranch hands, the Buoy Bar was built in a gap between containers complete with a wooden floor and pool and foosball tables.

The ranch maintains a small herd of 11 saddle horses, but the real work bringing in the cattle is done with a two-seat helicopter. With stock ranging 50 miles or more from the pens, Harvie found horses to be impractical across such distances of rough terrain. The helicopter is ideal for working the valleys, driving the animals out toward the holding pens.

When circumstances line up, the ranch becomes fully operational in the fall months, each season processing 500 to 1,000 head with 40 to 60 head per day after the cattle have been rounded into pens following a summer spent fattening up.

The real trick is getting the beef to a market. Umnak has no natural harbor. Harvie and his cowboys load pallets of frozen beef onto a landing craft, then navigate through the surf and high waves to a waiting freighter rocking from large swells offshore. The beef is then shipped to Seattle.

After the season is over, the cowboys leave the ranch to the winter caretaker, a retired Texas cowboy who does simple maintenance and looks after the facilities with his wife.

Harvie and a partner, Bruce Hubbard, started the ranch in 1992. The two were looking for a location to start their own cattle operations. They explored the area around Dawson Creek, British Columbia, where the Alaska Highway begins, and did not like the offerings there.

“We walked into the lobby in a Fort St. John hotel and found a notice that a ranch in the Aleutians was for sale,” Harvie says. The two made their way to the island and purchased three cattle herds already there, two located on Umnak and one across the straits on Unalaska.

Their gamble was to market the beef for its purity with no hormones, stimulants, or antibiotics. Unable to get financing through a bank, they put down their own money and persuaded 22 shareholders to invest in the enterprise. The State of Alaska Department of Natural Resources Division of Agriculture assisted by providing the seed loan to build the slaughter facility.

Others had tried raising livestock before on Umnak and failed. In the 1930s, Carlyle Eubank operated a sheep ranch on the island with 15,000 head and a crew of six. He shipped out 120,000 pounds of wool in 1937, but World War II would kill his market. Another ranch gave it a go in the 1960s with 5,000 head but could not turn a profit. The ranchers walked away and left the cattle behind. Many of their descendants make up the current Bering Pacific herds.

Setting up the new ranch operations has led to adventure and tragedy alike. During one roundup an aggressive horned range cow chased a cowboy into a bog and gored his horse’s hip. They stitched it up with dental floss. On another, two cowboys had to be medevaced to Anchorage after a bull tossed them around with its horns.

Alaskan pilot Lonnie Kennedy was killed in a helicopter crash in 2010 while attempting to free one of the ranch’s bulls that had become ensnared in a fishing net. The pilot tried knocking the bull down with the chopper, but its landing skid hooked the animal briefly, lifting it off the ground. The added weight caused the helicopter to pitch forward and to the right, slamming it into the ground. Kennedy sustained fatal head injuries. The crash killed the bull as well.

In 2008 when Okmok erupted for several continuous days, the ranch was evacuated periodically, once during a noontime darkness as heavy volcanic ash fell. The volcano has erupted ash a few times over the last 100 years.

Hubbard has since retired from ranch ownership, but Harvie is still making improvements to the property. He often stands by the ranch house looking out to his left across grasslands unbroken to the horizon line while on his right a blue sea stretches as far as the eye can see. Beyond that horizon, there is nobody between him and Asia. He stands at the virtual edge of the continent.

From the April 2018 issue.

The post The Ranch at the Edge of the West appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Happy #NationalPetDay! To celebrate, we’re looking back at our favorite images of furry friends from past years’ photo contest issues. 

In the West, we love our pets as much as our people, treating them as part of the family. In honor of National Pet Day, we’d like to share some of our furry friends with our readers.
Enjoy! Don’t forget to share pictures of your loved ones at @Cowboysindiansmagazine #PetsoftheWest.

The post C&I’s National Pet Day appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

We’ve got vacation ideas in the West for folks who live on the edge and folks who just want to relax.

America’s long infatuation with road trips of all kinds has always transcended the beaten path — especially in the West.

Up a glaciated mountain in the Cascades with crampons. Behind a team of huskies in the Alaskan outback. On an endless stretch of mountain bike single track along the Continental Divide.

In a sea kayak, jeep, or twin-engine Piper Navajo. By steam-powered train or dual-sport motorcycle. Aboard a Hummer in the Arizona desert, a helicopter in the Black Hills, a sand rail in the Oregon dunes, a bobsled in Park City, Utah, a paraglider off the edge of California ...

Or on a horse, of course.

What inspired us to list 25 top off-road adventures in the West, featuring just as many different modes of conveyance (including our own two feet)? Well, we had to stop somewhere. Plus, what better way to celebrate the magazine’s silver anniversary than by spotlighting 25 transporting experiences in so many of our favorite places?

Some of these trips can be done in an hour or three. Others may require days, weeks, or even months, and some serious planning. And many might be a little too adventurous for your taste. That’s why we’re rounding things out with a bevy of milder experiences.

Dog Sled

You don’t have to be Iditarod material to have a doggedly good time learning the ropes behind a tireless team of Alaskan canines. Sign up for dog-sledding school with Paws for Adventure and you’ll be warming up to Fairbanks in winter as fast as you can say “mush.” The 20-year-old company introduces clients to the sport with some basic training and terminology: how to harness, snow hook, ride the runners, and safely establish a working relationship with a three- to four-dog team. Then it’s time to put new skills to the test on a 10-mile “Fun Run” through the nearby field and spruce forest. Follow it up with one of several dog-sledding overnight offerings, including a three-day beginner’s tour and a six-day mush along the Denali Highway from Paxson to Maclaren Lodge.

Where: Fairbanks, Alaska
When: November – March (November – January for mushing school)
Why: As much as we can appreciate a good snowmobile ride, mushing is Alaska’s official state sport for good reason.

Sandrail

No, it’s not a mirage. Those enormous sand dunes rolling from Highway 101 to the Pacific Ocean for 40 miles along the central Oregon coast are really there. Predictably enough, so are a handful of roadside operators in and around the sleepy town of Florence waiting to give you an unforgettable spin through Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, one of the largest expanses of temperate coastal sand dunes on the planet. ATVs and dune buggies have their rightful place in this mini desertscape. But for the real stomach dropper, there’s the sandrail — a low-slung, barebones race-car version of a dune buggy built for handling this terrain like a Lamborghini would. 

Where: Florence, Oregon
When: March – December
Why: Best thrill ride on the West Coast’s biggest dunes.

Raft

It’s where Big Bend National Park gets its name — from that broad canyon-flanked crescent of the Rio Grande where you can “go for days without seeing another boater,” notes the National Park Service. It’s also where dedicated adventure-seekers making it all the way out here are richly rewarded with one of the best float trips between deep West Texas and the rest of the universe. Visitors can opt for single- or multiday floats with veteran local adventure tour operator Far Flung Outdoor Center, headquartered near the old ghost towns of Terlingua and Lajitas. A favorite section: Santa Elena Canyon — featuring 1,500-foot canyon walls, myriad wildlife, and a growing suspicion that you have the whole world to yourself.

Where: Big Ben Park, Texas
When: Spring and Fall — for milder temperatures and more stabilized river flow
Why: Coolest Float trip after a very long drive

Train

Thanks to our resilient fondness for train travel and some dedicated preservationists, vintage trains are still chugging through the California redwoods, Alaskan Klondike Gold Rush country, the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the canyons of Utah and New Mexico. For sheer history, scenery, and vertiginous drama all in one 45.4-mile ride aboard an 1880s-era passenger car pulled by a century-old steam locomotive, there’s no time machine quite like southwest Colorado’s Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. Rolling from Durango to the once-booming mining town of Silverton (now a National Historic Landmark), the trip climbs to more than 9,300 feet along a narrow, winding route above the Animas River Valley that could only have been inspired by late-19th-century gold and silver fever. Gape out the window or from a seat in the open-air gondola.

See also: the Colorado-New Mexico Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad. 

Where: Durango, Colorado
When: May 5 – October 27 (shorter winter trips available November – May)
Why: The ultimate 19th-century thrill ride on a historic narrow-gauge railway

Mountain bike

Twenty years ago, the Adventure Cycling Association launched the mother of all off-road “bikepacking” trails — the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route — roughly tracing the Continental Divide for more than 2,700 miles through two Canadian provinces and five Western American states. Yes, hardcore mountain bikers complete the entire trail every year and there is an annual self-supported race open to both single-speed and tandem bicycles. No, you don’t have to go it alone, do the entire GDMBR, or break the current speed record (13 days, 22 hours, 51 minutes) to fully appreciate this ever-evolving mountain-biking masterwork. Favorite doable portions of the largely dirt and gravel route run through Alberta’s Flathead Valley, Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, Colorado’s Boreas Pass, and New Mexico’s remote Gila Wilderness. This year, the ACA will be hosting five guided tours along select spots, ranging from British Columbia’s Wigwam River Valley to Wyoming’s high plains to a sky-scraping spin through the Colorado Rockies. 

Where: Select routes between Banff, Alberta, and Antelope Wells, New Mexico
When: Spring, summer, and fall
Why: Pedal the world’s longest mountain-bike route — or a supreme leg of it.

Horse

Doing the 17-mile scenic drive past the Mittens and other instantly recognizable sandstone mega-sculptures from Stagecoach and several more of your favorite westerns may be the first order of business. Getting on a horse and riding off into the sunset and/or sunrise in this remote 91,000-acre Navajo Tribal Park and iconic movie setting (John Ford alone shot 10 films here) takes you to an entirely different place. Monument Valley horseback rides — bookable through authorized Navajo guides within the park — range from hourlong rambles to full-day trips into the backcountry with an overnight in a traditional Navajo hogan.

Where: Monument Valley, Navajo Tribal Park, Utah-Arizona border
When: Temperate shoulder seasons — spring or fall
 Why: It’s the closest you’ll get to starring in your own John Ford movie.

Jet Boat

 Tough as it is to turn your back on southern Oregon’s dramatic sea-stack-adorned Pacific Coast, one of the biggest temptations to point your outboard inland hides in the sleepy town of Gold Beach. Here’s where the historic Rogue River — one of eight original rivers included in 1968’s Wild and Scenic Rivers Act — meanders through the state’s most awe-inspiring forest-draped outback. And here’s where visitors can bounce up and down a not-so-lazy river — past schools of steelhead and lone fishermen in waders; through peaceful valleys, roaring canyons, old-growth pinelands, and lost-in-time river towns where the mail is still delivered by watercraft — on a specially designed hydro jet boat. Launched in 1958, Jerry’s Rogue Jets plies the white-water-laced Rogue on 64-, 80-, and 104-mile round-trip river odysseys, piloted by mail-delivering local guides whizzing passengers through outer Oregon’s wildest, wettest, and (since 1895) most die-hard postal route.

Where: Gold Beach, Oregon
When: May 1 – October 15
Why: The mail just isn’t delivered this way back home.

Hikingboot

How do we get away with recommending a 2,650-mile hiking trail covering the mountain-spined lengths of three giant Western states for your next little walkabout? By singling out a few stellar legs of the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail (PCT) to sample before taking those thru-hiker dreams to the next level. California: The greatest hits of Sierra Nevada backcountry are everywhere along the 215-mile John Muir Trail, stretching from Yosemite National Park to the summit of Mount Whitney. Oregon: Follow the PCT/Timberline Trail into Mount Hood’s Paradise Park for gorgeous wildflower shows and magnificent views of the state’s highest peak. Washington: Way up in the Cascades, Goat Rocks Crest has been called “the PCT’s aesthetic high point” by Backpacker magazine, featuring prize vistas of Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helens. For hiking and equestrian intel along the PCT — from safety and logistics to permits, gear, and volunteer programs — visit the Pacific Crest Trail Association. 

Where: Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail
When: Late spring (Southern California) – late summer (Northern California through Washington)
Why: Any spectacular portion of the West’s epic hiking trail will suffice.

Snowmobile

Lake Tahoe’s ski resorts hog most of the attention in California/Nevada’s famed winter playground. That leaves miles of prime snowy backcountry open to small convoys of snowmobilers blasting through some of the finest machine-groomed track and off-trail powder “roads” in the Sierras. Ride to the crest of 8,200-foot Mount Watson with Lake Tahoe Snowmobile Tours. Zip through the pine-studded meadows and ridgelines of Tahoe National Forest with Eagle Ridge Snowmobile Tours. Or set out even farther through the Truckee-Tahoe backcountry with Coldstream Adventures. For a full list of snowmobile outfitters, contact the area’s North Lake Tahoe and South Lake Tahoe visitors centers.

Where: Lake Tahoe, California/Nevada
When: Late November — Mid-April
Why: Best way to make bigger tracks in Sierra country.

Dual-Sport Motorcycle

What’s even more liberating for easy riders than sharing all those Rocky Mountain freeways with SUV and RV summer traffic? Straddling a dual-sport motorbike and disappearing even deeper into the Wild West, to where the two-lane blacktop ends and the gravel- and dirt-road magic really begins. For able riders looking to push that freedom envelope a touch further, Golden, Colorado-based 106 West Motorcycle Adventures offers some of the most comprehensive guided backcountry runs between greater Denver and outer Utah. With a fleet of BMW and Triumph dual-sport bikes built for this demanding terrain, their trips typically range from eight to 14 days. A best-of-both-worlds “Mountains and Canyons” two-week odyssey loops from Golden through Colorado’s San Juan Mountains and Utah’s canyons, passing Native ruins and old mining towns along the way, with stops in seven national parks and monuments.

Where: Colorado and Utah
When: June – October
Why: Throttle through the real Rocky Mountain and canyon country backroads on the perfect pair of wheels.

Stagecoach

The most well-heeled 19th-century stagecoach commuters would’ve dreamed of a ride like this, beginning and ending as it does at a Forbes-rated five-star luxury guest ranch nestled in a secluded valley in the heart of Big Sky Country. The Ranch at Rock Creek’s lineup of wilderness adventures includes horseback rides through 6,600 acres of rolling backcountry, mountain biking along 20 miles of scenic trails, and wading through freestone mountain streams with a fly-fishing rod. There’s also the rare opportunity to ride inside the plush upholstered cabin of a fully restored Wells Fargo stagecoach, pulled by two Belgian mares through a particularly beautiful patch of timeless Montana. A vehicular no-brainer for Western culture-seekers of all ages. During winter, the coach’s wood wheels are replaced with runners for horse-drawn sleigh rides — wool blankets, cocoa, and satisfied sighs included.

Where: Philipsburg, Montana
When: June 1 – September 1
Why: The Pony Express is long gone, but is there a nicer place to briefly pretend?

Amphibious Vehicle

Much as we love Seattle, rolling past Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, and the Space Needle on the usual tourist bus doesn’t scream off-road adventure — even if your guide is a clever punster in a plastic Viking hat named Clem Chowder. Ride the Ducks of Seattle covers all of those mandatory must-sees on the first leg of what appears to be a standard bus tour. On the second leg, you’re in for a surprise when the vehicle abruptly turns into a watercraft and drives straight into lovely Lake Union, gliding past houseboats, taking in sweet offshore skyline views, and providing a roadless reason to include at least one splashy city tour on this list.

Where: Seattle
When: Year-round
Why: For the sheer novelty of driving into a large urban lake on a fun city bus tour.

Hummer

You can admire only so much roadside saguaro in southern Arizona before lapsing into cruise-control mode. The cure: a reviving four-hour plunge into the area’s rugged outback in an H1 Hummer chauffeured by a Sonoran Desert naturalist. Leaving Scottsdale in the dust, Arizona Hummer Tours runs half-day adventures along old stagecoach trails, past desolate canyons, and through roadless desertscapes fit for an abnormally wide, resilient 4x4. Highlight stops along the way include visits to an old ghost town and 1,000-year-old Indian fort, indigenous wildlife sightings (tarantulas, scorpions, Gila monsters, coyotes, and more), and a desert sunset vista that could rejuvenate even the most desiccated spirit.

Where: Phoenix, Arizona
When: Year-round
Why: A rental car only gets you so far in the Valley of the Sun.

Pink Jeep

Red rock country doesn’t get much more fictitious-looking than Sedona — a feel-good magnet of glowing buttes, canyons, hoodoos, mesas, vortexes, and New Age-y storefronts that, amazingly, have not been color-enhanced in the slightest. Where else could a conspicuous fleet of Pink Jeep Tours vehicles have been launched, acquainting visitors with Sedona’s blindingly beautiful outback for the last half century in extremely color-enhanced 4x4s? Choose from several backcountry rides through some of the reddest rockscapes in the West — along with stops at Native art sites and Sinagua cliff dwellings that predate the earliest pink Wranglers by several centuries.

Where: Sedona, Arizona
When: Year-round
Why: Even the brightest 4x4 can’t upstage Sedona’s natural tones.

Mule

Not that we would suggest you shrink from the challenge of walking that vertical mile to the bottom of the Grand Canyon — and then (yep) all the way back up again. Just know that the 600,000-plus folks over the last 130 years who have opted to go on muleback have had few regrets about partnering up with the finest hiking companion on four legs. Book your mule at least a year in advance with park concessionaire Xanterra for the overnight ride from the park’s South Rim with an evening at historic Phantom Ranch on the canyon floor. For quieter North Rim mule trips, contact Canyon Trail Rides.

Where: Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
When: Year-round (South Rim), May 15 – October 15 (North Rim)
Why: Whose hooves look sturdier here? Yours or theirs?

Bobsled

Park City’s proudest property is Olympic Park, home of the 2002 Winter Olympics and a 1,335-meter, 15-curve luge-bobsled-skeleton track that still sees plenty of warp-speed action — and not just for the next crop of world-class sliding hopefuls. Also welcome here: Winter “Comet” Bobsled Ride thrill-seekers eager to climb inside an official three-passenger bobsled behind a certified pilot for an 80-mph, 5G “Comet” ride down one of the world’s fastest sliding tracks. After your adrenaline normalizes, you’ll never think of gravity in the same way again.

Where: Park City, Utah
When: December – April
Why: You don’t have to be a Winter Olympian to blast down an official bobsled track like a human missile.

Helicopter

Hovering in a helicopter with private panoramic views and noise-reducing headphones is something everyone should try at least once. One of our favorite places to splurge above the crowds: South Dakota’s Black Hills — home to millions of annual Mount Rushmore pilgrims, and a few lucky folks whirlybirding at presidential eye level. Custer-based Black Hills Aerial Adventures runs chopper trips in and around the country’s most iconic memorial. Its flagship, 24-mile Mount Rushmore Tour (out of the Crazy Horse Heliport) includes a memorable face-to-face meeting with the four presidents and a bonus flyby at Crazy Horse Memorial.

Where: Custer, South Dakota
When: May – October
Why: Greet the Mount Rushmore presidents and Crazy Horse at eye level.

Sea Kayak

Glide out of Roche Harbor on the quiet west side of Washington’s San Juan Island in a sea kayak. Paddle into the saltwater tidelands of the Salish Sea. And you’re home. Home, that is, to a natural marine land of seals, otters, sea lions, oystercatchers, great blue herons, bald eagles — and one of the top orca habitats within easy paddling distance from a gorgeous archipelago. Around 80 whales from three resident pods frequent the waters of the newly proposed “Killer Whale Sanctuary” in this sheltered saltwater wilderness featuring postcard-perfect Pacific Northwest isles in every direction. Head out for a half-day, 10-mile West Side Killer Whale Sanctuary Tour with San Juan Outfitters during prime orca-viewing summer months and you stand a reasonable chance of spying a 6-foot dorsal fin along the way.

Where: San Juan Island, Washington
When: July and August, for best orca viewing
Why: Best paddle through prime killer-whale territory.

Paraglider

Some serious aerial history has been logged off the 300-foot bluffs of Torrey Pines Gliderport, a storied launchpad just north of the tony shores of La Jolla near San Diego. A National Landmark of Soaring and registered Historic Place that’s home to some of the nation’s top paragliders and hang gliders, this is where Charles Lindbergh flew along the coast in a Bowlus sailplane in 1930, along with a who’s who of legendary local aviators (William Hawley Bowlus, Bud Perl, Bill Beuby) who have given this place its nickname: the “Kitty Hawk of the West.” Offering a full lineup of beginner to advanced paragliding classes and clinics, the Gliderport is also popular with first-time tandem riders coming to check this one off the list as a wide-eyed passenger.

Where: La Jolla, California
When: Year-round
Why: Launch your first flight in the
Kitty Hawk of the West.

Canoe

In his 12-chapter classic, Charles Kuralt’s America, the late, great CBS News icon and On the Road correspondent chose a favorite place to spend each month of a single year. July led him to Ely, Minnesota, and a cabin with a canoe in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness — home to more than a million acres of pristine lake country with almost no sign of human interference save the occasional Indian pictograph or faded portage footprint. “If it is absolute solitude you want, you have only to paddle far enough,” Kuralt wrote about northern Minnesota’s vast liquid landscape preserved to sustain the spirit of the French Voyageurs of 200 years ago. “You could keep this up, visiting a different lake every day, for a hundred years, and you still wouldn’t get to all the lakes.” Today, Ely and its neighboring Boundary Waters are still commonly called “The Canoe Capital of the World.” A quick “BWCA-Outfitters” Google search will lead you to more rental and tour operators than you could shake a paddle at.

Where: Ely, Minnesota
When: Summer – early fall
Why: Charles Kuralt would never steer you wrong.

1970s Australia Army Vehicle

Hiding off a lonely stretch of I-80 in southwestern Wyoming’s high desert that might otherwise still pass for Overland Trail country, Sweetwater County doesn’t draw the same tourism hordes as Jackson Hole, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone a few hundred miles north. But if you want to see the wild horses, this is your place. For 15 years, Green River Wild Horse Tours has been introducing visitors to one of the largest remaining populations of wild and feral horses roaming the West. Specifically on a vast sagebrush- and sandstone-blanketed swath of backcountry called Pilot Butte that interstate drivers whiz right past without a blink. The off-road vehicle: a 1970s all-terrain Austrian Pinzgauer military truck that almost always finds its herd.

Where: Green River, Wyoming
When: Late spring – early fall
Why: Roam the West’s most underappreciated wild-horse reserve.

Flightseeing Plane

Of course there are roads in Alaska. But in the nation’s largest, wildest corner, you won’t be doing much driving if you want to see brown bears up close on a remote beach in a national park (with Homer Air). Or gape down at the “Grand Canyon of the North” in Misty Fjords National Monument (with Misty Fjords Air). Or meet the fish in Lake Clark National Park & Preserve (with Lake Clark Air). Or land on a glacier in Denali National Park (with Talkeetna Air Taxi). Notice an upward trend here? In a state with hundreds of commercial airline operators, Alaska is flightseeing nirvana. Typically aboard a Cessna, Piper Navajo, or DeHavilland Beaver operated by a seasoned commercial bush pilot flying you about as far off the Delta and United Airlines grid as you can get in one big country. For a first glimpse of carriers offering a range of destinations and itineraries, visit the Alaska Air Carriers Association. 

Where: Coastal Alaska
When: May – late September
Why: Look 500 feet below you. See any roads?

Utility Terrain Vehicle (UTV)

Mention Moab to singletrack fans and the immediate connotation is two wheels, a good set of bicycle shocks, and the world-famous Slickrock Trail. Double-trackers opting for a gas pedal have their run of Utah’s red-rock recreation mecca, too — along hundreds of miles of old mining roads and 4x4 routes that feel specially designed for the latest Polaris or Kawasaki. Guided UTV tours cater to every off-road comfort level here, from beginner-friendly backcountry routes with names like Secret Spire and Chicken Corners to more adrenaline-pumping four-wheel drive experiences like the favorite Hell’s Revenge Trail. For rentals and tour outfitters, contact the Moab Information Center.

Where: Moab, Utah
When: March – October
Why: Four wheels are at least as fun as two in the Southwest’s prime red-rock ’n’ rolling adventure playground.

Crampon

Few voluntary endeavors are as humbling and exhilarating as climbing a big snowy mountain. Novice climbers can learn the ropes safely and thrillingly with the Bellingham-based American Alpine Institute, one of the country’s most respected climbing schools and guide services. AAI’s classic climbing 101 class — Alpinism I — is the six-day Alpine Mountaineering course in and around Washington’s North Cascades. Day 1 has students belaying and rappelling at an idyllic rock climbing site on the Pacific Coast, followed by five days of camping and mountaineering training on the glaciers of Mount Baker, with a final day summit push, conditions permitting. If you’ve caught the mountaineering bug after that, AAI leads trips even higher, in the Alps, Andes, and Himalayas.

Where: Bellingham and Mount Baker, Washington
When: May – September
Why: Learn the ropes of mountaineering with a top climbing school in the Cascades.

Back Country Skis Or Snowshoes

When the snow falls and the sun shines in Sun Valley (which it does in reliably equal measure at the West’s original ski resort), there’s no better place to snap on the cross-country boards, skins, or snowshoes and vanish into your own private Idaho. The Pioneers. The Smokies. The Sawtooths. Those magnificent mountain ranges ringing Sun Valley are secretly equipped with some of the finest backcountry ski trails and cozy rustic digs for multiday backcountry ski adventurers of all levels. Two favorite overnight hideaways here — Fishhook Yurt (comfy bunks, heating and cooking stoves, and a hot tub perched at 6,800 feet beside a trickling mountain creek) and Bench Hut (wood-fired sauna, powdery hills right outside the door, board games if you need them) — are just 4 miles apart on a set of hut-to-hut trails that don’t see any lift lines. Book through local outfitter and guide service Sun Valley Trekking.

Where: Sun Valley, Idaho
When: Winter
Why: Yurt euphoria in the Sawtooths.

From the 2018 May/June Issue. 

More Best of the West

Holiday Hotels
Visit These Iconic Western Towns
Christmas Villages

The post Best of the West: Go Wild appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Determined to keep their family ranch, Wyoming brothers Cody and Chase Lockhart have created a Jackson Hole niche: local beef.

Bruce Porter’s descendants imagine their ancestor gazing out at the Teton Mountains from the piece of earth he purchased in the 1930s, their family land in Jackson, Wyoming. For Porter’s great-grandsons, Cody and Chase Lockhart, the bounds of that rooted landscape motivated a new model of ranching.

When the youngest brother, Chase Lockhart, graduated from college in 2009, the family ranch pastures — bordered by Jackson Hole Community School, Smith’s Food and Drug, and Snow King Mountain Resort — were devoid of cattle. Five years earlier, in 2004, the family’s Lockhart Cattle Company was forced to euthanize its entire cattle herd because of brucellosis, a bacterial infection that can be contracted from elk, swine, or bison, among other animals.

“We lost close to 900 animals,” Chase recalls. “We had to file nonuse, because we had no cattle to put on our grazing permit in Grand Teton National Park. My family held the last remaining permit in the park, and our nonuse of the permit provided a reason for the park to close entirely to livestock grazing.”

Losing their grazing lease compelled Cody and Chase’s parents to reevaluate how to best use the family land. First, they chose to lease it out to other ranchers so the land would not stand idle. A few years later, hearing their sons’ request to run the ranch, they decided to hand over management to the next generation.

Initially, the brothers followed the agriculture model they knew: Raise registered Hereford cattle, grow quality hay, and sell bulls.

“It became clear that our small ranch would not be profitable doing this,” Chase says. “So we looked around at Jackson’s tourism industry. If half of the 5 million tourists eat hamburgers while they’re here, and if we could sell them a fifth of that hamburger, that’s still a lot of hamburger.”

Lockhart’s parents were skeptical that Lockhart beef could be sold solely direct to consumers within the valley.

“I think my parents’ doubts were merited,” Chase says. “Cody and I were young, and while the idea sounded fun, we didn’t know how to do it. Also, selling a ranch’s entire output of grass-finished beef to local customers hadn’t been done here.”

“It’s not like we ranch differently than our great-grandfather,” Cody adds. “The part that’s different is that we wanted to run the food supply chain at the end of the product cycle.”

Jackson is not known for manufacturing, but resident ranchers do produce beef. “It always seemed crazy to me that we raise beef here and ship it out for other people to eat, then we ship in beef for us to eat,” Chase says. “So we decided to sell Lockhart beef — that is born, raised, and butchered in our valley — for us to eat here.”

“Our ranch is in town,” Chase says. “I live in the main ranch house and it’s really convenient to our neighbor Smith’s grocery when I run out of coffee. We figured our location would help sell beef.”

Chase and Cody’s initial marketing plan was simple: Get people eating Lockhart beef. To do this, Chase and Cody hoofed around town giving free beef to restaurant chefs, holding taste tests at the farmers market, and inviting groups to the ranch for tours. In every conversation the brothers emphasized not only grass-finished beef’s flavor and quality, but also how Lockhart cattle never leave the valley from birth to butcher. Chase and Cody took any order for beef, no matter how small or difficult to fulfill.

“We would get an order for 50 tenderloins for a wedding next weekend,” Chase explains. “To get 50 tenderloins, we need to process 25 cattle. For a long time, I would tell people yes, and then get off the phone and swear.”

Now, eight years later, increased beef production allows the Lockhart brothers to keep a frozen inventory to meet such requests. Most customers want specialty cuts, like the restaurant that weekly purchases 30 pounds of high-quality beef — sirloin, tenderloin, eye of round — for tartare. One of the contracts that solidified the financial success of selling local was Signal Mountain Lodge, a concessionaire in Grand Teton National Park.

“The lodge sells an absurd amount of hamburgers,” Chase says. “The lodge orders 12,000 pounds of one-third-pound burger patties a year. I’m like, ‘36,000 patties coming up!’ ”

Lockhart beef is also sold at Jackson Whole Grocer & Cafe, which orders beef from an entire steer every week. The Lockharts have yet to secure a chain grocery store as a customer, though.

“We’ve tried,” Chase says with a shrug. “I even have a friend that works the meat counter at Albertsons. Corporate management doesn’t want to mess with me, wearing muddy cowboy boots, bringing whatever beef we have available. And at Smith’s, when our cows get out, they’re standing in that grocery store’s parking lot, which you would think would help marketing.”

He admits that it is harder for big customers to deal with small suppliers. If vacuum seals fail on a batch of meat, the Lockharts can’t immediately replace the order. “We’re not the Sysco truck with 60 more packages sitting on a shelf,” he says. “As a small business, we need to make sure that our quality is worth the extra effort.”

To add product value and pocket slim profit margins, the Lockhart brothers decided to control the whole supply chain. They learned of a wild game processor located 7 miles down the road from Lockhart ranch headquarters. The plant’s owner wanted to expand from a wild game processing business to a state-inspected facility for livestock. Lockhart Cattle Company purchased a partnership in the business to fund expansion, which also bought dedicated processing time for the company’s cattle.

This arrangement worked for a time. Increased demand for Lockhart beef meant cattle needed to be processed five days a week in the facility, which bumped other processing customers. Last year, Lockhart Cattle Company bought out its meat business partner. Now the constraint is that the Wyoming Department of Agriculture can only provide an inspector two days of the week, which limits the number of cattle handled in the facility.

As the business grows, Chase and Cody are continually reminded that ranching is the easy part. Now they must consider food safety regulations, shelf-life tracking, packaging, and labeling along with their needs for equipment such as the refrigerated trailer for beef deliveries.

“I still have trouble getting the label-maker to talk to the computer,” Chase says with exasperation.

“I’m the front office,” Cody jokes. “If it involves a phone or a computer, it’s my department. If it involves a horse or a John Deere, it’s normally Chase’s department.”

The Lockharts must have cattle ready to process every week of the year to provide fresh beef to customers. But Lockhart cows only calve once a year, in the spring. It takes at least 18 months to finish a bovine on a grass-only diet in a climate where winter lasts five to six months. There are often three generations of cattle grazing Lockhart pastures at once: the mother cow and its 2018 unweaned calf, the calf from 2017, and the 2016 model almost ready for processing.

“It takes significantly longer to grow a beef on grass its whole life than it does to finish a steer on a grain diet,” Cody says. “It’s a frustration to us that some ranchers finish their cattle on corn the month before processing but still market the beef as grass-fed. This is misleading marketing, and there’s no one to police that except for the consumer.”

To continue growing their ranch business, the brothers initially considered purchasing more cows, leasing more pasture, and breeding batches of cows to calve twice a year. “But we already spend a lot of time cowboying,” Chase says.

They nixed the idea because a bigger herd would mean hiring more hands. Instead, the Lockharts reached out to other small ranchers in the valley with a proposal: Lockhart Cattle Company would commit to purchase their calves at weaning if they are born and raised in Teton County with all-natural methods — no hormones or antibiotics — and on grass-only diets. Several ranchers have accepted the offer.

"It would be really easy to go buy 18-month-old cattle out of California, stick them on green grass here for the summer, and then sell them as local beef,” Chase says. “But we want our customers to drive by [the ranches] to watch the cattle and their whole life circle go around.”

The Lockhart brothers’ experiment to raise beef and sell it locally for neighbors and tourists to eat has proven to be a feasible model of ranching. While their family applauds and supports it, they know there are continuing challenges for beef producers in Teton County. The valley maintains a high cost of living, and employment wages are inflated by tourism. Land values continue to rise, and with the increase comes pressure on the Lockharts to develop their ranch for uses beyond agriculture. Developers have visions of skating rinks, soccer fields, community colleges.

“Jackson is rapidly growing and running out of places to put things,” Chase says.

He has no desire to take the money and start a ranch somewhere else with more room, though. “Jackson is where I grew up. My family and friends all live here. It’s home,” he says. “It’s where I want to hunt, fish, and ski. If I couldn’t ranch here, I’d probably quit ranching to continue living here.

“And as a lifetime Jackson local, I want us to find a way to protect open spaces that are quickly being developed. Agriculture seems like the best way to do that. I think open spaces are less likely to get developed if they aren’t just a scenic vista, if they’re actually a living, breathing benefactor to the community by producing food.”

From the June/July 2018 Issue.

More Living West

The Ranch at the Edge of the West
Western Homestead: Your Spring Checklist
Riders on the Storm

The post The Family Ranch appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Get the five-star treatment as we take a look at some of the best spas in the West. Let the healing begin.

People have been taking the waters, wrapping themselves in mud, and sweating in huts for centuries — not because it was trendy, but because this connection to the place and its local healing traditions made good sense. It still does. Here’s how some of our favorite spas of the West are going hyper-local by offering authentic treatments that speak to the uniqueness of the environment and what’s grown there.

Going Native

In the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Spa at Four Seasons Resort Rancho Encantado makes its luxurious home on the outskirts of Santa Fe, which was established in the early 1600s on the site of old Pueblo villages. In keeping with the city’s reputation as a healing spiritual vortex, the spa offers treatments that go beyond the physical realm. From its Spiritual Enhancement Menu, you can add a sage smudging ceremony (to remove negative energy) to your blue corn and honey massage in the new luxury tepee. Or in an adobe-walled treatment room, you can try the body scrub with locally grown lavender. Afterward, in the warming room, go for full-on chill time in one of the lounge chairs near the kiva fireplace, crackling with New Mexico pinyon wood.

Great Expectations

In a toast to Oregon’s wine region, in the middle of the Willamette Valley (500 wineries and counting), the spa at The Allison Inn & Spa offers “Pinotherapy,” a selection of treatments that feature the most favored grape of the area, pinot noir. Grapes are, after all, antioxidants. The Divine Wine facial includes a honey and wine mask and grape seed moisturizer; the Grape Seed Cure body treatment includes a crushed grape seed scrub to purify and exfoliate. Not completely relaxed yet? Order a Pinotini — a martini with a splash of you know what — from the bar.

Well Bee-ing

Honey has been considered a powerful healer since Egyptian times, and Miraval Arizona Resort & Spa near Tucson is tapping into that sweet natural magic by harvesting its own and offering two honey facials at its spa. Miraval is all about life in balance, and you can borrow some balance from the natural world of bees when you take the staff beekeeper’s interactive beekeeping class. Taste the spa’s own honey in the artisan bread served in the restaurant, made with Sonoran wheat and local rye. Sweet.

Desert Blooms

The dramatic spaciousness of the desert is on full display at Amangiri. Tucked away in a valley on 600 acres in southern Utah, where the flat-topped mesa rock formations rise and fall like so many prehistoric skyscrapers, the spa reflects the simplicity of its surroundings in its treatment menu. The Desert Calm exfoliates, then wraps you in Red Sedona clay to pull out the toxins before hydrating. There are other desert-themed therapies in-spa, but perhaps the most creative tie-in to the location is Tower Butte Yoga, which begins with a pre-dawn helicopter ride over Glen Canyon and Lake Powell and ends with a private yoga session at Tower Butte, overlooking Lake Powell 1,000 feet below.

Water, Water Everywhere

At Lake Austin Spa Resort, which sits on the banks of the Colorado River in the Texas Hill Country and offers stunning sunrise and sunset views, it’s all about the healing powers of water. Inspired by the book Blue Mind by Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, it has launched a water-centric series called “Ripple Effects: The Wellness of Water.” You can take water-based fitness classes in one of three pools, learn meditative floating techniques, get a hydrating full-body wrap, learn the Zen-like art of sculling, take a scenic yoga-and-breakfast boat cruise, or enjoy a sunset paddleboard class.

From the June/July 2018 Issue.

More Best of The West

Go Wild
Holiday Hotels
Visit These Iconic Western Towns 

The post Spas Of The West: Let The Healing Begin appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

A tragic death, a brand-new memorial rodeo, and the hearts of parents and cowboys everywhere.

Every day in the magazine business, a lot of press releases cross your desk looking for coverage and hundreds of things stream into your email inbox vying for attention. A couple of days ago, a colleague sent a press release that got not just my attention but also my heart.

The release detailed the first annual Hunter Norman Memorial Bulls & Ranch Broncs event honoring a young Western Slope rider killed in a one-car accident on May 6. I’ve reproduced the release in its entirety below so cowboys who want to enter and people who want to attend the June 23 event have all the information they need.

Following the release, I’ve shared a heartwarming and heartbreaking e-mail correspondence I had with the young man’s father.

1st Annual Hunter Norman Memorial Bulls & Ranch Broncs Honors Western Slope Rider

Grand Junction, Colorado (May 22, 2018) — The 1^st Annual Hunter Norman Memorial Bulls & Ranch Broncs debuts on Saturday, June 23, 2018, at 7 p.m. at the Mesa County Fairgrounds in Grand Junction, Colorado. The event pays tribute to and honors respected Western Slope ranch bronc rider Hunter Scott Norman, who passed away unexpectedly earlier this month. With an added guarantee of $3,000+ for ranch broncs and $2,500+ for bull riding, the event is anticipated to draw competitors from near and far.

Organizers of the memorial include family and longtime friends of the Fruita Monument High School Class of 2016 graduate Hunter Norman. This annual memorial helps the community celebrate the young cowboy’s life through his love and passion for ranch bronc riding and by putting on the best bronc and bull-riding event that has come to the area. Event organizer and two-time Colorado Bullfighter of the Year (2007, 2013) Tyler Williams and his wife, Crystal, have been engrained in the Western Slope community their whole lives and promise to put on an unforgettable annual event this year and for many years to come.

For those interested in competing in the 1^st Annual Hunter Norman Memorial Bulls & Ranch Broncs, details are as follows:

• $3,000+ added guarantee for Ranch Broncs (limited to 30 riders)
• $2,500+ added guarantee for Bull Riding (limited to 20 riders)
• Top 10 to Short-Go
• Payouts for 1^st, 2^nd& 3^rd places (plus other awards)
• Buckles, spurs, jackets, and a bronc halter awarded to high-point rider in Ranch Broncs
• Ranch Broncs Entry Fee – $200; Bull Riding Entry Fee – $150
• Half of entry fee must be paid before June 8, 2018 (cashier’s check, money order, or cash)
• Entry fees are nonrefundable

Special thanks to buckle sponsors Diamond Peak Cattle Company and Twin Butte Ranch. Special thanks to stock contractors Ty Farris, Lonny Lancaster, Bryan Flynn, and Wes Clegg of 7C Buckers. And special thanks to event sponsor Growing Spaces Greenhouses based in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

Ticket prices are $10 for adults (5 years old and over); $25 for family of four; $5 for Seniors (65 years and older); all children under 5 years old are free. The Mesa County Fairgrounds is located at 2785 US-50, Grand Junction, Colorado 81503. For more details on Mesa County Fairgrounds, visit their website at mesacounty.us/fairgrounds/events/ or call 970.255.7107.

For entry fee registrations and other details, please contact Tyler and Crystal Williams at 970.589.2369. For sponsorship opportunities, please contact Scott Norman at 970.471.5900. To donate to the event, please visit: gofundme.com/hunter-norman-memorial-rodeo2018.

A Conversation With a Surviving Parent

I corresponded with Hunter’s father, Scott Norman, who lives in Denver, to get a better sense of the young man the event honors.

Hunter as a Kid

Hunter was born in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and grew up in Avon, just outside of Vail. He was a super-active kid. He was an all-around athlete who participated competitively in hockey, football, baseball, basketball, and snowboarding. In addition, he took advantage of all that the Colorado mountains had to offer, including dirt biking, fly-fishing, mountain biking, and camping.

Hunter as a Cowboy

In hindsight, it seems that his love for horses had always been there, although quite honestly, we accidentally stumbled upon it. In the summer of 2004, I was self-employed as a mortgage broker, and as a single parent, I needed something to do with Hunter during the day. He convinced me to allow him to check out Spraddle Creek Ranch in Vail, a day-trip guest ranch that was run primarily by a group of cowboys who actively participated in the Beaver Creek Rodeo. After a few sessions at Spraddle Creek, Hunter was volunteering to clean horse stalls and saddle up horses for customers. Within a few weeks, his affinity for being in the saddle was apparent.

Hunter was a true cowboy who loved driving cattle in open space as well as chasing rodeos from town to town. He was a strong-willed young man who was surrounded by a group of exceptional hardworking young people — the kind you find in small-town America.

Hunter loved country music, but not the type you hear on popular country radio today. He was an old soul whose musical influences ranged from Tyler Childress to Ian Munsick to Tom T. Hall.

Hunter as a Bronc Rider

When Hunter was 14, he and I were living in the top of a renovated barn in Broomfield, Colorado, that was located on a horse-boarding facility. I was working full time out of house while simultaneously homeschooling him. Truth is, every time I tried to sit him down to do his schoolwork, I would find him in one of the indoor or outdoor arenas on the facility.

Not long after this, he introduced the idea of living with adult friends on the Western Slope, where he would have access to more complete facilities. After getting a commitment from him to continue his pursuit of a high school degree, I allowed him to move to the Western Slope to further pursue his passion for rodeo. At this time, he wanted to be a competitive roper, but he soon came to the realization that his true abilities in the saddle involved breaking horses. After countless hours in the practice pen, he first exited a chute in a competitive event in Parachute, Colorado, at the age of 15.

Thoughts About the Event Named for Hunter

It means everything to me. Even though his life was cut way too short, the impact that Hunter had on the Western Slope community was profound and is being reflected in this event. He found his true calling and passion in life at a very young age, and for this community to celebrate his life in this manner speaks volumes to the beliefs and values that have been engrained in the Western Slope for generations. Although I am heartbroken that he is gone, I am grateful that he spent the last five years of his life in this community doing what he loved.

More Living West

State Champion: Bill O'Neal
The Family Ranch
Best of the West: Go Wild

The post Honoring a Young Cowboy Taken Too Soon appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.

Job: Director of Agricultural Operations for Hearst Corporation; Location: California’s Central Coast.

Ben Higgins grew up in a longtime cattle-ranching family on the Hearst Ranch on the edge of San Luis Obispo on California’s Central Coast. His grandfather worked on the property as a cowboy in the 1950s and later leased a “pretty healthy portion” of it through the 1980s for grazing.

“I’m a Central Coast native with deep roots in the area,” Higgins says. “My Swiss-Italian family has been here since the early 1900s, raising cattle around the small coastal communities of Cayucos and Cambria. My 93-year-old grandfather was a cowboy on the Hearst Ranch in the 1950s and tells plenty of wild stories about the place. I grew up in San Luis Obispo and was sent to the family ranches as free labor on weekends and during the summer. At the time, it wasn’t much fun — getting up early, picking oranges, feeding cows. Now I look back with real appreciation, and look to give my daughters the same kind of upbringing.”

Despite his family’s involvement in the cattle business, Higgins never envisioned a career in production agriculture; his interests instead tended toward policy, law, and business. But after graduating from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, he found that the jobs he wanted were in Sacramento. There, he served four years as executive vice-president of the California Cattlemen’s Association, one of the largest agricultural trade organizations in the state. In 2006 he was appointed by the White House to serve as the state director of USDA Rural Development — “essentially a $500 million investment bank for California’s rural communities, with 20 offices and 150 employees,” he says.

For the past five years, he’s been with the Hearst Corporation as the director of agricultural operations. We caught up with Higgins on the California coast to talk about his job on one of the country’s most gorgeous and storied ranches.

Cowboys & Indians: When people think Hearst, they think Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, but you have a different perspective. What do you do as the agricultural director for Hearst?
Ben Higgins: I oversee all of the operations on this property, the 83,000-acre San Simeon ranch, and, in addition to that, the 73,000-acre Jack Ranch in the eastern San Luis Obispo and southern Monterey counties.

San Simeon, especially, is a very unique place. It’s 83,000 acres, 128 square miles, 18 miles of coastline, 309 miles of road. It takes about two days of driving to see the whole property. We extend basically from the little town of Cambria up to just south of Ragged Point all along Fort Hunter Liggett back to Lake Nacimiento. It’s an amazing, incredibly special place.

On our operations we produce three principal products. The main one is grass-fed beef.

C&I: What kind of cattle do you have? How many?
Higgins: Like most commercial cow-calf herds in California and throughout the country, it’s a mix. I call it a commercial crossbreed, but predominantly Angus. Mostly black-hided with a little bit of a Hereford influence that produces those white-faced calves. As for how many, [laughs] we haven’t done a head count this morning, but our cow herd consists of about 1,400 animals on the San Simeon property, about 1,300 on the Jack Ranch. Our Jack Ranch cattle inventory also includes 1,100 steers and heifers now being finished on grass for delivery in summer 2018 to Whole Foods Market. Grass-fed Hearst Ranch Beef is sold in 41 Southern California Whole Foods Market stores from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s a sizable operation and, truthfully speaking, we have a very small number of very high-quality, very seasoned individuals, our managers and cowboys on both ranches, to help take care of and look after these animals.

C&I: You use real cowboys?
Higgins: Absolutely. I have a ranch manager on each property, and they have their respective staffs, but you might refer to them as cowboys who are out there every day looking after our animals, looking for cows that might need help calving, animals that might need doctoring due to illness, and moving these animals around our different grazing areas on the property. Each of the ranches is segregated by fencing and other barriers into approximately two dozen different grazing areas on each ranch, and our cowboys are on a daily basis moving cattle between these areas to make sure that we are keeping our cattle healthy, protecting water quality, and at the same time efficiently utilizing the available natural forage without overgrazing.

C&I: What kind of wildlife do you have here?
Higgins: We’ve got a little bit of everything. All of the native species that you would expect, of course — blacktail deer, coyote, bobcat, mountain lions, raptors from red-tailed hawks to peregrine falcons to bald eagles. We occasionally see a California condor, although, honestly, that’s pretty rare. And we have some non-native species, too, remnants of William Randolph Hearst’s outdoor zoo, the most famous of which, of course, are the zebras that folks can see along Highway 1. We take an annual census, and I’d estimate right now we probably have about 140 on the property. These are completely wild animals. They do not know they are not on the Serengeti any longer. We don’t look after them, we don’t exhibit them for the sake of the tourists, and quite frankly we would have a very difficult time if we tried. They are very, very skittish. Each of the exotic species that we have on the ranch more or less has their own defined territories, and the zebras live almost exclusively on the southern end of the property near the highway. They enjoy commingling with our cattle down there.

C&I: How many cowboys do you have?
Higgins: On this property, San Simeon, we have our ranch manager, Dann Russell, and he has three full-time cowboys. At the Jack Ranch right now, we have our ranch manager, Keith Pascoe, and he has two full-time cowboys. We recently hired two more gentlemen for the Jack Ranch ... . Having just three guys over there for an operation spanning 73,000 acres — it’s quite a bit of ground.

C&I: On horseback or ... ?
Higgins: Horseback to the extent that we can. Obviously, all the cattle work is done horseback, and with dogs, especially during the gathers. Dogs are pretty essential because of the rugged terrain we have on both ranches and the need to find and move cattle that otherwise are not wanting to move. The dogs themselves are a mix, but the breeds you’re going to find very prominently are Australian shepherd, border collie, and you might see a Catahoula or something a little exotic in there as well. The guys are pretty adept dog trainers. A lot of the younger dogs see how the older dogs work and can garner a lot of that ability just through experience.

C&I: How about the horses?
Higgins: By the time we add them all up — the guys’ saddle horses, the veterans, the retirees we’ve put out to pasture, our broodmares and their colts, and our personal horses — we’ve probably got 50 horses on the ranch. And that’s something that’s very important to us — not just utilizing the horse in our day-to-day operations but breeding these horses and starting and training these horses for the guys right here on the ranch. That’s a practice that’s continued here on the ranch for many decades.

C&I: As much as it’s historic and steeped in tradition, it’s also innovative and very progressive. Tell us about conservation and renewable energy on the ranches.
Higgins: The second product that we produce on the ranches is conservation. The San Simeon property is protected, and has been protected since 2005, from any form of development by a perpetual conservation easement. That’s a recorded agreement with the state of California that essentially prohibits any kind of development or subdivision or intensive commercial use of this property. A lot of the large ranches in California and throughout the country have been cut up or developed into other uses. ... [M]y boss, Steve Hearst, the vice-president of [the] Western properties division for the corporate operation ... began working to develop and negotiate the conservation easement, which now protects this and will keep this property a working cattle ranch and wildlife habitat in perpetuity.

In 2015, on the 150th anniversary of George Hearst’s purchase of the San Simeon property and the 10th anniversary of the San Simeon conservation easement, we added a third product — renewable energy — to the ranches’ portfolio. First Solar is now building the 280-megawatt California Flats solar project at the Jack Ranch, covering about 3,000 acres of the property. All of this electricity — enough to power 100,000 homes — is going into the grid. Like the San Simeon conservation deal, Hearst’s goal is to provide an alternative source of revenue that subsidizes the cattle operation in lean years and insulates the ranch from development pressure. This has been a project many years in the making, with the first phase (130 megawatts) now in commercial operation, and the remaining 150 megawatts to be completed in late 2018.

C&I: It sounds like an around-the-clock operation. Do all the employees live on the ranch?
Higgins: Yes. These are 24/7 jobs. There are emergencies, whether it’s fire or flooding or whatever inclement weather we’re dealing with at the moment. We might have a fence down, cattle out where they’re not supposed to be, or other kinds of issues. Trespassers certainly are an issue on both properties. So I, and most of the other employees, live here on the ranches with our families. It’s a pretty special opportunity, and a pretty neat way that Hearst has done business, really, since the 19th century.

C&I: What do you like most about being here?
Higgins: That’s a really easy question to answer. My favorite, without a doubt, thing about being here and working here is showing this property to people for the first time. There’s certainly no bad views from my office, but to see the look on people’s faces when they’re experiencing it for the first time really reinforces to me what a special place this is and the awesome responsibility of being a steward here for the next generation.

From the July 2018 issue.

More Living West

The Family Ranch
Honoring a Young Cowboy Taken Too Soon
Best of the West: Go Wild

The post Real Westerner: Ben Higgins appeared first on Cowboys and Indians Magazine.