The Long Summer Comes To An End.

This weekend we finally picked up the irrigation pipe after our first snow of the season. On Red Canyon Ranch the ritual of picking up the pipe puts the exclamation mark on summer’s finale. Ordinarily, we would have picked up pipe a month ago, but the autumn has been so warm there was no reason to, so we continued watering. The bison have been delighted to have green grass in November, which is definitely a rarity in this part of the country.

The bison are doing well, having produced twenty fine and healthy calves. We had great rain this year. Haven’t seen grass like this since 1996! Needless to say, the buffalo are fat and sassy. The other good news is that nobody—namely Michael—got run over by a buffalo this year. And we lost no calves to wolves, mountain lions, or bears! Though we’ve seen plenty of tracks around…

HERE AT RED CANYON RANCH…

We’ve had a beautiful spring here in northern Wyoming. After a really hard winter, where we spent five weeks riding the snowmobile in and out of the ranch to get to town, it’s such a relief to look out our windows and see newborn buffalo calves frolicking in tall green grass and wildflowers. All across Wyoming, we’re seeing bumper crops of wild onions. They taste so sweet this year. And it’s a complicated world out there, so we try to take the time to enjoy the smallest pleasures--picking wild onions in the early morning, harvesting the horse mint and watercress that grow along the creek, and watching the buffalo shed their heavy winter coats.

Buffalo have a thick woolly undercoat and when summer arrives, they look particularly scraggly, with strings of wool decorating their shoulders and hanging from their bellies. Many buffalo ranchers collect this wool and spin into one of the world’s finest cashmeres. We, however, leave it for the birds and mice to use as nesting material. We have a Phoebe who always nests on our porch, and her nest is composed of 50% buffalo wool. Those chicks will have a soft, warm place to grow up.

SUMMER NEWSLETTER, AUGUST 2014

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

We might have stepped thirty years back in time given Wyoming’s delightfully cool and wet spring. This July, however, has no equal in our memory with temperatures in the low eighties and patterns of rain every three or four days. Our high steppe environment is lush, bursting with greenery and seeds. We have birds, rabbits, packrats, and mice like we haven’t seen in years. The land seems to sigh, whispering, “Yes! This is the way it is supposed to be!”

Given the wonderful grass, the Red Canyon Ranch bison herd is looking sleek and sassy, the cows and calves covered with a healthy layer of fat and muscle. Our bulls, Tiber and Bow, are striding into breeding season with that masculine arrogance that only a male bison can project. Young Storm, our beloved Pia’s last bull calf, looks more like a coming two-year-old than a yearling. He, along with his sister Sage, remains Pia’s legacy to Red Canyon and ties us to her beautiful memory every time we see either of them.

IN MEMORY OF PIA, BUFFALO EXTRAORDINAIRE

HERE AT RED CANYON RANCH…

For everyone who has ever been kind enough to write inquiring about Pia and her health, we wanted you to know that she died today, April 11, 2014, at 1:32 P.M. She was the first orphaned buffalo calf we bottle-raised. She was our buffalo daughter.

This morning we found the herd and noticed she was missing. We knew something was really wrong. We've been giving her meloxicam for her joint pain for almost a year, but her condition has progressively gotten worse. When we went to look for her, we found her far away walking down the road in so much pain she could barely move. We tried to give her meloxicam and she refused to eat it. Next we tried to give her a shot of Banamine, and she refused to let us. It was as though she was saying, "Come on, guys, enough is enough."

HERE AT RED CANYON…

We woke at 4:00 a.m. to discover it was raining, our first rainstorm of the year. Starlight was shining through gaps in the clouds, and the air was fragrant with the mingled scents of wet earth and drenched junipers. What all that means is that, for the moment, spring has arrived.

The thing about northern Wyoming, however, is that you may have a lovely few days in March, but they are inevitably followed by subzero temperatures, so we never put away our down coats until the end of May. Still, green grass and wildflowers are erupting everywhere. The hills have a faintly green shade and the buffalo have started to shed their heavy winter coats.

THE RANCH

It’s a cold cloudy afternoon here, 38 degrees. We’ve seen several days of sub-zero temperatures this month, which means the buffalo are growing long thick coats. Out the window in front of us, they are using their heads as snow shovels to get to the grass beneath the crusted ice. If you listen, and the wind is just right, you can hear them talking to each other in deep-throated rumbles. Like the echo of thunder in your dreams, buffalo voices seem to call to human beings, as they have for hundreds of thousands of years, promising that springtime, warmth, and renewal are not too distant. It’s a comforting sound. Probably because somewhere deep in the human consciousness, their voices mean food is near, and you and your children are safe.