The Cold Hard Facts of Winter Riding
- December 14, 2024
- |
- Jan Swan Wood
Posted in: Featured, Ranch Life
It was probably about 20 years ago when I was day working regularly for a rancher in the area. We’d
done all the fall work, including trailing the cows home, preconditioning calves, preg checking, giving a
second round of shots to the calves, and then shipping the steer calves and light heifers. He had kept me pretty busy all that fall so I wasn’t surprised when he called me one evening and asked if I could come the next morning to help him gather the heifer calf pairs and sort off the calves.
I didn’t daywork as a hobby, I did it for the money, but this one nearly made me say an emphatic “no”.
It hadn’t been above 10 degrees for a week, the ground was slick with a thin layer of snow on top, and the wind was predicted to blow. His place lay in a river valley that was a wind tunnel when it blew out of the northwest, which is what it was forecasted to do. I sure wasn’t excited, but I assured him I would be there.
Of course, being an old rancher, he believed it was a mortal sin to ever start a gather after 8 a.m. Not
that it would warm up very much by waiting a bit, it sure couldn’t have hurt. It was well below zero when
I left the house to go saddle my horse. I was not excited.
The horse I picked for the day’s work was Lily and she was rock solid. I curried some ice off of her back, saddled her up and loaded her in the trailer. I’d started the diesel pickup before I saddled up so that it could be warmed up and ready to go. I put her bridle on the defroster vents so the bit could warm up,
and away we went.
The wind had remembered to come up by the time I drove the 20 miles to the ranch. I parked so that my trailer door would be held open by the wind, then put on my final layers of outerwear, face mask and
chopper mittens. I tucked the bit inside my coat before I got out, walked to the back of the trailer, then
opened the trailer door. I bridled Lily inside, then led her out of the trailer. She squinted into the wind as I
led her parallel to the back of the trailer, ducked under her neck, and using the dry trailer floor as a
mounting block, crawled on.
The advantage of the trailer as a mounting block was huge, as Lily was a solid 16 hands tall, plus had
double saddle pads due to her tall withers. I had on about four layers on the bottom half, maybe five on
top, plus snowpacks, and the aforementioned mittens. Grasping my romal reins in my clublike hands, I
rode her away from the trailer. She never made a bobble. Just as I knew she’d be, she was ready to go to work.
As I rode her toward the barn where the owner was getting mounted, I appreciated all of my layers,
plus the bull nose tapaderos with the sheepskin lining and oversize stirrups that allowed me to wear my
snowpacks. It sure wasn’t pretty, but I was ready for a winter day in the cold and wind. Nowhere did I see a photographer needing a cover photo for some shiney magazine, nor would I have cared if there had been one. My goal was to survive the day with no frozen parts.
Even more than all of my warm winter clothes, I appreciated that good mare that was just too honest to ever suggest she wasn’t ready to go do a day’s work. Even that day, with the thermometer at 0, windchill down around -20, she never faltered. I never doubted her for a moment either.
Related Posts:
Posted in: Featured, Ranch Life
About Jan Swan Wood
Jan was raised on a ranch in far western South Dakota. She grew up horseback working all descriptions of cattle, plus sheep and horses. After leaving home she pursued a post-graduate study of cowboying and dayworking in Nebraska, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota....