May 22, 2020
Jolyn Young
My cowboy husband, Jim, has been busy branding calves at various ranches this spring while I have been holding down the home place with our three small kids. He day works to pay our bills, and the idea was for me to stay home and shuttle our first grader back and forth to elementary school. […]
May 17, 2020
Jan Swan Wood
The dust and grime on my saddle finally got to me bad enough that I spent some time getting it cleaned up and put back in good condition a week or so ago. I had to strip all of the extra gear off of it before I could start, which included a rope, breast collar […]
May 13, 2020
Jolyn Young
I agonized over how to ride my horse when my first baby was born. Finding the time to catch, saddle, and ride a horse with a baby (or toddler) in tow proved to be one of the most difficult aspects of ranch motherhood for me. I loved to ride and wanted to continue that aspect […]
May 11, 2020
Mykal Kirkpatrick
Who could have ever predicted that we would see the impacts of COVID-19 in our lifetime? It has affected our social lives, financial security, food securities, educational systems, and our family life. For my family and many other ranching families, we choose to try to find the blessings from within. In particular, both of our kids are home from […]
May 7, 2020
Jan Swan Wood
It was late summer when I got a call from a guy asking me if I could go get a bull out of his cows and haul him to his place. The bull had a bad eye and he needed to doctor him, plus it was time to get him out of the cows. I […]
May 3, 2020
Rhonda Sedgwick Stearns
Hard times on Wyoming’s ‘baldheaded prairies’ in the Nineteen-teens and –twenties spawned entrepreneurs. Women kept chickens and sold eggs; or kept cows and sold milk, cream and butter, maybe even cheese. Where there was timber, ambitious men often cut posts to sell to homesteaders who had fences to build. Some ambitious men found a sense […]
April 30, 2020
Jan Swan Wood
The calf was up and had nursed when I made the evening gather of the springers. He was a giant! He was a Charolais cross and looked to weight in the 120 pound range or more. His mama was one of those short, stout Angus cows that raise a big calf every year, one of […]
April 26, 2020
Jolyn Young
Last week, I saddled my horse for the first time in two years. That seems like a long time off for a lifelong horse lover such as myself to forego riding, and it was. I used to ride horses for the public. I lope three-year-olds for a cutting horse trainer in Texas, and I cowboyed […]
April 24, 2020
Jan Swan Wood
The morning after I got my California mare home, it was still -28 degrees. The night before when we arrived I had put her in the barn with the borrowed blanket on, but had left the stall door open so she could go in and out and get a drink at the tank. She was […]
April 20, 2020
Mykal Kirkpatrick
In a perfect world, when people are doing their groundwork with a colt, they have gone through the steps to prepare him to have his feet picked up, handled, and eventually shod. Unfortunately, the horse world is far from perfect, and many times a horse has not been prepared properly, or may just be twitchy […]