The Idaho Rancher's Wife

The Ranch From the Wife's Perspective

Loving the Open Range

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I’m a Montana girl.  The small ranching town I grew up in was just a little valley, cross crossed with streams and rivers. Something very VERY different from where we are ranching now.  Everything was green. All the time. That may be exaggeration, but really I remember that there was so much green-ness. So many meadows, so many hay fields. There were little groves of trees everywhere.  Really so much green!  And then there were the skies.  I love the fresh and blue open skies. The clear mornings that renew each morning with a new sunrise. The sunsets were made with cord that illustrated that God truly is an artist. And the clarity of the nighttime sky allowed you to see even the most distant stars.  Whenever I go home I just drink it all in.  

Here we have a few trees. Unless you count the sage brush, which some if them are big enough you could consider them to be trees. Actually, I love the safe brush. The smells that come from when you move cows through them or when it’s raining.  
It’s this lifestyle that let’s me have those open skies, the green-ness, and the fresh air. 
It’s amazing to me how we can be all a part of the same industry but do it so differently. We can raise cattle in this errid, dry dessert just as well as my family did in the fertile river plains. Just very differently. Very differently. 
Sometimes the differences get me a little homesick for the way we did things. You may take the girl out of Montana, but you can never take Montana out of the girl. So the days when we go out on the wide open range it satisfies the little Montana girl inside of me. Like last week when we dropped the cows off to Locomotive. It was that time of year to haul the cows down south. The kids and I hopped on the semi with The Rancher for a day out. We were only there for the few minutes to unload but they were wonderful moments. 
Although some of the open range is a little bland, the skies can be amazing. You can see for miles with the beautiful blue mountains in the back grounds and the dazzling blue colors.  The open skies and fresh air take me back to my big sky country.  I guess where ever you are, you find little bits of home. 

Mother Nature’s Desert Treasures

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The desert of Locomotive is a place of itself. It doesn’t seem to follow any of Mother Nature’s rules. It has it’s own freak storms, crazy winds and weird weather. 
Today is the day we get to haul some of the cows to Locomotive to spend the next few month and I’m reminded again of some of the strange and cool things Mother Nature has put out there
Like some of the intense rock work out there. There are places where the wind gets whipping so hard it has carved around and through the rocks. Of courses that been over hundreds and hundreds and HUNDREDS of years. There’s a small cliff (it can hardly be called a cliff… But for lack of abetter term… Meh…) that has a sorts if Who-Ville look to it. It has silly windows and what could look like odd doors. Splash a little paint on it and you would have jumped into Sr. Seuss’ world!
This year we have had an incredible amount of juniper berries. Like loads and buckets and smatterings of berries. Why?  The old timers were telling us that it meant we would have a record snowfall and the trees were preparing for it. I don’t know if that was right, since we have had like no snow, but maybe it was all the moisture last fall. Either way it’s cool to see so many berries. 
One of my favorite oddities to check our is the wildfire aftermath. 50 Years ago (I’m totally guessing here) there were some crazy fires burning through these ceder hills. The fire must have burned hot and fast because it looks like they started  up on fire , burned out and just fell apart. I love the natural, abstract art Mother Nature made from it. 
We may be running on the desert- the dry barren desert.  But every once in a while we find our own little treasures, provided by Mother Nature herself. It’s the desert’s own kind of unique beauty. 

Feeding as a Family

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Feeding- the pass time of winter.  If there is one thing you can guarantee we will be doing this time of year it is putting the hay out.  The tedious redundancy gets to The Rancher.  He just feels like it eats up his time, doing the same thing over and over.  Hmmm… He wouldn’t make a good house wife (I’m pretty sure I have said that one before).  Having to cook and clean up after people over and over…  I’d love it if feeding only took two hours of my whole day.

Despite the fact that feed isn’t The Rancher’s favorite ranch chore, it may be one of mine.  Lately Rancher Sr. has been gone on the weekends quite a bit while he supports Cowboy E in his last season of wrestling.  That means that The Rancher either gets to feed on his own or I jump into help.  I LOVE any opportunity to prove to my cowboy that he needs me, so of course I head out to help him. Really its more than that- I love to get out on the ranch, love to drive through the cows to see how they are doing, and I love the photography moments I get.  But more than that I love being able to take the kids out with us and work together as a family.

Living and working on the ranch is so much more than a job to us.  There is no separation between home life and work.  Sometimes that has its problems, but there are way more blessings that come that makes it worth it. The best take home of all this for this ranch momma is the memories we are making every day.  I love looking into the tractor seeing The Ranch Princess jabbering to her daddy.  I see her getting excited at the cows, the horses, and the few baby calves.  I can just hear her saying, at the top of her lungs, “Look daddy!  COWS!!” (actually its more like wook daddy, tows… so cute!)  While we drive between fields The Rancher’s Sidekick has picked up battling thumbs in an intense game of thumb war.  I’m pretty sure that he is cheating more and more each time, so maybe we should stop with that one…  He pals around with me on the 4 wheeler as we cut bale strings, begging to drive.  Even stomping the mice as they come out of the bales has become a fun memory!

Sure life on the ranch can be redudant.  Every year has the same seasons of calves, seasons of changing sprinklers, seasons of moving cows and seasons of working cows.  But the best part about life on the ranch is that we get to do it as a family and spice up the redudant moments by making memories.  We feed cows and enrich our souls.  That’s what we did today!

A Muddy Morning on the Ranch

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Are you tired of hearing about the weather? Everything we do goes back to the weather.  Too hot, too cold, too windy … Always something.  Not that I’m complaining, it’s just interesting what Mother Nature throws out there for us.
What’s our current weather issue?  If you can believe it, it’s the mud.  We are having splendidly warm temperatures and beautiful blue skies.  It’s so warm the ground isn’t really freezing.  Good or bad?  I dunno it just means that we sink down, down, down…  Deep down.  The warm weather in iteself isn’t too bad.  But the warm temps means that instead of getting snow we get rain.  Its been fabulous to have the rain.  We have loved the moisture… it’s the after math of the wonderful rain that is causing the problems. The ground has become so saturated (awesome!) that the rain doesn’t soak right in.  The puddles are lasting longer, the mud is soupier, and its actually running down the sides of the road.
Because I am the awesome wife that I am, I help feed cows whenever Rancher Sr. is gone (which has been more lately with Cowboy E’s crazy wrestling schedule).  With what has become the typical division of labor, I’m the one that gets to be out in the mud.  I open the gates, I cut the strings, I get to hang off the tractor and flipped in the mud.  Needless to say, I’m the one that goes home a complete mess.  What I do because I rock (just kidding)…
But really its ok, I’m over it.  We can handle the mud, the heaping stinking piles of poopy mud and the endless supply of mud following us where ever we go.  We can handle it because having the mud means that we do have rain and we do have warm weather.  Although its tough to deal with nows, we feel so blessed and watched over.  The rain is what we have been praying for for so long and its inspiring to see it finally come.  What better way to start the new year than to be in a muddy mess, blessed with rain?!

Counting Our Blessings, One Fat Cow at a Time

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Our Monday morning drive to check water- oh how I love it. When else do I get to sit and ride with kids constrained (I mean buckled, of course) and just take pictures. I hate those days when something comes up and we don’t get to go. Like all January…

Finally I got my turn to trip around Locomotive with my main man and small peeps. I came to a few conclusions- Locomotive is prettier with snow, we don’t have a lot of feed, and our cows are fat. Somehow the last two parts of that don’t seem to go together but it’s what’s happening down south. The few, but saving fall rains have done the good we needed to give our cows the nourishment for the winter. It may be dry and we still need rain, lots of rain, but we are counting our blessings. We have fat, healthy, pregnant cows- a wonderful beginning to our new year!

Not Letting the Drought Win

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There are few things ranchers depend on for their industry- cows/calves to sell, buyers to buy, and feed to fatten them up.  The first two are in pretty constant supply, feed on the other hand… Well that’s a little subjective…

There is always feed out there, but good quality feed at a good price can be hard to come by.  Why?  One word… DROUGHT.

The last few years we (and by “we” I collectively mean all or most ranchers) have been needing rain in a bad way.  Without rain grass, grain, alfalfa, hay, whatever won’t grow.  Pretty cut and dry (hehe, dry… that’s what we are right now!).

The other day we had our turn to check water in Locomotive on our BLM association ground and we took a turn through our private ground to check the feed.  Our private land in Locomotive is where we take our cows to calve out every winter, the turnout day coming up in just a few weeks.  But the sad truth is that its going to be a very different year for Locomotive.

Throughout the summer and fall we have been keeping an eye on our feed down south, hoping and praying the rain and sun to get to work to make grass that we need to winter the cows.  As the time has gotten closer and closer to moving cows out there we have realized we don’t have NEAR enough feed to winter all the cows there and keep the ground healthy.

Last year it was rough.  With years of drought, we finally grazed it down to its limit.  And we hate getting to that point.  We consider ourselves stewards of the land.  We care for it, trying to keep it flourishing in something more than tumble weed.  But without the rains and the tough soil we have struggled the last few years.  You can see in the pictures that the normal greenish brown is yellowish brown or even more greyish brown.  

So what’s a ranching family to do in a situation like this?  We could just take the cows down and not care.  But we care.  We want this land to sustain itself and our cows.  We need this land to sustain itself and our cows.  So we are keeping most of the cows home this winter.  We will take down the number of cows we think will make it on the range and keep the rest here.  That means The (poor) Rancher will have LOTS of cows to feed at home… bummer.  And we might have some tougher weather for our cows to calve in…  And we might have a little more sickness go through the calves since they won’t be spread out across the range.  But we are hoping that we can help the land to renew itself and be fruitful in the coming years.   This year will mean we get to put in a little more work, but protecting our land, something we CAN’T do without, is worth any effort.

So with a little less cows, a little more rain, maybe a few grass seeds, and a lot of faith we are trying to care for the land and not let this drought win.

A Midnight Bust

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I was looking back over the posts from last year.  Sort of reminiscing about what was happening this time last year and then just kept scrolling.  As I was going through, I realized that there are some stories that I never shared.  These are the stories that are worth telling.  You know that because they are the stories that I can still remember after so much time having past… 

I live by the theory of better late than never (you know that already for all of the times I’ve taken you back!).  Looking back this was a crazy, comical night but at the time it was frustrating, nerve racking and …  I guess any issue that begins after dark at the end of a long day is doomed to be a hair puller

We had just gotten out of the shower (I say we because we everyone had to go through my shower that night… Why do we have 2 bathroom when we only use mom’s?) when I heard the 4 wheeler buzzing around.  People usually don’t go for a moonlight ride so I knew something was up.  The Rancher slipped into something more fitting for the ranch then his jammies while I put the babies to bed.  Finally when I made it out to see what was happening (because The Rancher had been gone long enough for me to know that it was bad news- whatever it was) I learned that the most recent batch of weaned calves had escaped the corral and were heading in all sorts of directions.  They went up the highway, down the highway, to the shop, to the haystack and to the alfalfa… awesome… 

The Rancher and Rancher Sr. were buzzing around bringing in what calves they could find.  You see, finding black calves in the dark of a moonless night is tough to do.  You hear them before you ever see them and unless you have GREAT hearing you just might think you are getting around them but really you are heading straight out them.  When I first showed up I just waited for orders from the cowboys.  It was a long wait… So long I gave up waiting for their instruction and took it upon myself to guard the gate.  It didn’t take long for me to see that as many calves got brought in would wander out.  Not very productive… 

So I guarded the gate.  And it seemed to work.  The boys would whoop and holler and bring the calves and I would keep them from escaping.  Every so often there would be a handful that made their way to the gate and I was able to get them in (so proud of myself!  Earning so many rancher’s wife stripes!).  But the handfuls started getting bigger and more frequent and I began to realize that the blasted calves were hopping the fence and walking back to the gate.  I had been putting the same calves in over and over!  GREAT…  Rancher Sr. came in and as soon as I could I explained that we weren’t keeping them in… Making no progress.  So we got what calves we had and pushed them in the corral.  Finally safe.  Locked in.  j

We did this dance of getting the calves in the back pen, running to open the small man gate to the corral, pushing the calves to the gate avoiding the holes in the fence, and trying not to pee my pants every time they scare me as they come around the hay stack. 

Eventually the calves stopped coming and we figured we could call it a night.  All was left to do was lock the gates up good and PRAY that nothing spent the night in the alfalfa to bloat or on the road to get hit.  Come morning we found we were blessed to keep the calves in for the remainder of the night and the couple of strays that spent the night roaming didn’t die. 

Looking back on this Thursday night I remember what an exciting eventful fall night we shared when the calves had their midnight jail break.  You could almost say we had a romantic night with the only lights of the starry sky (and the few flashlights and 4 wheeler headlights) but I’m sure that’s not how The Rancher looks back on it.  A little anxiety and a lot of relief.  Maybe he won’t want to relive this Throwback Thursday memory!

 

Working Til the Cows Come Home

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Winter.  It has so many mixed emotions that come with it.  So many different emotions.  So many opposing emotions.  And when you have them all mixing in one house, it can get a little crazy.  Take my house, for example…

I love winter.  Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we got married in January, so I just have so many lovely memories in the midst of a blizzard.  Or it could be because I genuinally love winter activities- skiing, sledding, tubing, making snowmen… Yep, love it all.  I did grow up in Montana where it was likely that winter would begin before Halloween and end just as school was getting out, so winter was just a part of life- a BIG part of life.  I just might love winter, though, because life slows down when there are blizzards and snowy roads and heaven forbid, you think you better stay home!  Yep, I even love the dramatics that come with it.

My love and enthusiasm is shared by my kids, who PRAY for snow, sometimes even in the summer.  Its not likely to happen, but with the faith of these kids anything could happen.  The Ranch Princess has to take the snow in small doses, only as long as her bare hands can handle the cold because she REFUSES to keep gloves on.  But she still loves it.  And then there’s The Rancher’s Sidekick.  He thinks that just a skiff is enough to stop EVERYTHING and play.  He hangs on to every last bit of snow like its going out of style (actually, I guess its going even faster than that!) and we sled down the hill hitting as many patches of slush left.  Yes, we love winter and snow and all things cold…

But then there is The Rancher.  All of the sudden, he has grown old and decided, quite logically, that we can do without winter.  Winter and snow and all things cold aren’t that great for business.  I can understand that crazy blizzards are terrible to calve in and hard winters are hard on momma cows, but really… a little snow is cool right?  But there is another reason The Rancher doesn’t want winter and snow.  Its mostly, like 87.9%, because that means we have to feed cows.  Part of it is just because we want the hay to last as long as it can.  I get it, that’s how I feel about cooking dinner.  If I don’t do it, the groceries last longer, I’m so sure…  But in reality, he hates doing the same thing day after day.  Every morning he spends hours feeding all the cows and has to turn around and do the same thing day after day.  I’ve said it before, The Rancher would make a terrible house wife.

So The Rancher prays for winter and snow to evade us as long as possible to put off that dreaded day of feeding cows.  But eventually, the day comes.  Even without the snow to hurry it along, the day comes that the cows have just gone through all of the grass and the cows must come home.  The Rancher must have struck a good deal with the weather maker/grass grower because the last of the cows only came home a few weeks ago.  Those fat cows managed to stay a whole extra month longer than last year.  But home they did come and of course we helped (because we are the best help around!) and of course I took pictures and of course I’m gonna share them with you.

We could call this a sunset cattle drive.  When you start moving cows at 3:30 in the after noon at the beginning of January and have several miles to go, its likely that you won’t make it until the sun has set.  Especially if you have slow cows.  I guess they figured everything is supposed to run slower in January, like molasses… In the cowboys defense, this was the second group of cows they were moving for the day.  They figured that if the horses were loaded they might as well get a days work out of them.  So from the desert to the home ranch they moved cows, squished through the mud, and tightened up their cinches, working til the sun set and til the cows came home.

The Buckarette

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Hello again…

I’m just going to jump in and pretend that it hasn’t been forever since I have been here…

In fact, lets just pretend its August.  Yep, on this chilly January night I want you to pretend that its a blistering hot (I don’t know that it ever gets THAT hot here, but for dramatic effect- it works nicely) summer day.  Say like August 2nd in fact.

Why August 2nd?

Because something awesome happened August 1st- I got a new sister in law!  I love all my sisters, in laws and outlaws.  Everyone of them brings their own awesome-ness to the table.  In our Eliason family, EVERY girl is celebrated.  For so long there was only The Cattlewoman, raising 5 cowboys without any female to stand strong with.  Even the dogs were all boys!  I guess if you wanted to get picky, there have been thousands of female cows go through, but they don’t count… don’t count AT ALL.

As the first of the married-in-daughters, I told everyone that it was my right and privilege to approve their choices for wives before the question was even popped.  Unfortunately, they didn’t take me seriously and never asked if I was cool with their choices… But lucky for them they picked well.  So well, I don’t know that I could have done any better.  The Cowpoke knew that any girl from Montana would fit in just right (history has proven that!) and now The Buckaroo has found himself a fine cowgirl of his own.  She isn’t from Montana (but she does LOVE it) and that’s ok because she more than makes up for it with her sweet cowgirl skills, mad basketball skills, and awesome baking skills.

I’ll let The Buckaroo tell you how he wooed her so fast… that’s an exciting story of its own… The only thing I’ll divulge is that she was the perfect girl in his eyes- she could rope, rodeo, cook, and looked HOT.  But really, what else is there?!

I’d like to (finally…) introduce you to The Buckarette!  This girl was raised on the back of a horse and taught that she was the one that would get the work done.  Sound familiar?  Oh, ya.. like the rest of us.  There have been some great moments getting to know her over the last year.  Like when she came to the ranch for the first time for branding and out roped all of the boys.  Or when all she had for church shoes were her work boots and she didn’t even bat an eye.  Or when she, repeatedly, made the blind steer walk into the barn (not like IN the barn like.. “bam!” INTO the barn).  Or when she nearly out shot all the boys when we pulled out the clay pigeons.

Yep, she’s a girl after my own heart and I’m excited to share her story with ours too.  Of course you have already seen her here on The Blog, but she has officially been given a name- The Buckarette!

 

The Fun of Preg Checking Buffalo

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When I talk about our couple of days working buffalo, I usually only mention that we were preg checking them.  But it was really more than that.  At the ranch they only work the buffalo once a year.  Can you blame them?  I mean really, who wants the stress and working buffalo more than that?
 
With the whole herd gathered, everything goes through the chute.  We wean off all of the calves and sort the bulls from the heifers.  That means that they each get a tail lift… In some ways it can be kinda tricky trying to sex them.  So much hair…  And as it got darker the differences sure became hard to spot!  But there is an easy, unreliable way to ID gender- their horns.  Interestingly enough, the horns on the bulls grow wider… Random, I know.
 
And then we obviously preg the cows, cull the opens.  Its so interesting to see this herd and the range in ages and size.  We have young calves to old cows that have been in the herd for years.  But what they all have no matter what their age is, they are all so crazy.  Over and over they would have a problem with the cows tipping over backwards.  See, in their craziness, they try to jump out.  And they could if it was just a cow ally (buts its not anymore).  With the ally being tall enough and strong enough, they can’t jump over.  But it doesn’t keep them from trying, over and over again. And eventually, their top heavy head gets the best of them and they just topple over backwards.   It really is comical to see because its as if once they get up to the top, it all goes in slow motion while they try to NOT tip over.  They fling their hooves and wiggle their head.  But its inevitable… They tip over on their backs and CAN’T get up.  “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up…” (name that show?!).
 
Once they have tipped over the crew is gathered because it takes ALL of the men to get the upside down buffalo right side up.  After this happening so many times, they have got their system down.  They throw a rope around its head and pull, rolling it up.  It seems simple, but buffalo are heavy.  Super heavy!  Seriously, it takes 9 guys to do this!  And sometimes one has to get a little brave to jump down in the ally with the buffalo to get the rope on.  Exciting right?
 
They did get to pull over a good handful of buffalo, but fortunately nothing really happened.  Hardly anything to get your blood pumping.  We had one little incident where a calf managed to back out of the chute, right by me.  It was like preg checking cows all over again.  But that meant I new just what to do- grab the baby and run!  I had been recording numbers and standing right next to the chute when the little bugger psyched out the gate man and was able to back out.  We danced around the table, trying to keep something between us and the calf and at the first chance we jumped up on the cat walk.  The guys were prepared for something like this and pulled out some panels to herd the little buffalo back in.  And it did just saunter in and we went back to work, shortly acting as if it had never happened.
 
Preg checking was, once again, exciting this year!  Not enough to cause any really harm, but still enough to know your heart can be good and fast.    

About Me

Hello! I'm Allison, The Rancher's Wife! There's nothing I love more than being out on the ranch with my husband and kids. Join me for a look at what goes on here at the ranch and the life being a rancher's wife!

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