Two Seasons and the Beginners Rodeo

Here, where the Great Basin tangles with the Colorado Plateau and the Mojave Desert, there are only two seasons: Desert Season and Mountain Season.  For the last 8 months, we have been riding the desert, but the short Mountain Season has started and it is time to crawl up out of the furnace and start enjoying the cool comforts of pine, aspen and meadow.

Going into the wilderness, one-on-one with my 8 year old son is paternal happiness at its best.  Getting there with pack mules is a test of will power and teaches some important life lessons.  Every time we saddle up, we have what we call the beginners rodeo, in which everybody is excited and full of energy until they settle in to the rhythm of the trail.   On this trip, it was the pup who wouldn't follow, and four spirited mules that wanted to move.  We finally had to tie the pup on top of Preston's pack mule, Minnie Pearl.  Minutes later, Minnie Pearl got loose and ran full steam back toward the truck, pup and pack in tow--then full speed back to where she left us. But we got it worked out.  Just like life, if you can stay in the saddle through the tricky phase of doing something new, things smooth out and find their place.   Then the frustrations are forgotten and the trip is mighty enjoyable.

As twilight settled over the meadow where we camped that evening, the mules alerted us to some deer that were grazing upon the fresh spring grass.  Ears forward, all four mules were fixated on the intruding deer, and our hearts pounded as we strained to see through the graying light to see what was coming our way.  When we finally crawled into our tent for the night, Preston asked me to wake him up early to go look for more deer. 

As soon as the horizon began to soften the next morning, we saddled the riding mules and headed towards Quaking Aspen Spring and the Comanche cabin.  The morning air smelled still and cool, laced with pine and sage.  Deer moved all around us while we rocked in our saddles.  As we came to the Kolob overlook, the stately red towers that form the Hand of God beckoned, come hither, from across the valley below.  

Here, where fatherhood tangles with boy and man, there are only two seasons: Formative Season and Independent Season.  Like summer in the high country, the Formative Season is short--sometimes stormy, but always beautiful.  I wouldn't trade one minute of the time I get with my kids during their formative years for lands or gold.  This boy is learning to be fiercely independent, and the long season of life where he will walk his own path is ahead of us... somewhere not too far off, at the end of summer.

The pup, Little Joe, riding on Minnie Pearl

White Rocks Meadow, Preston on Senator

Filet grilled in garlic and olive oil, Dutch Oven style, for breakfast

The Gusts came up 2nd day, Kolob in the background.

The Kolob Fingers from Pine Mountain

The Joy of Fatherhood

It was warm for the first time this year as we left the house, headed for an overnighter on the Arizona Strip. Both of us rode saddle mules, while leading a pack mule with camping gear and coolers full of ice cold drinks.  We rode far enough to find a starry night-sky.  Spring's green carpet covered the desert as a token of thanks for an extra wet winter.

My boy did a man's job getting our coolers safely to camp.  Minnie Pearl had her moments, so he learned what it means to get rope-burned hands.  He also laughed at me when I tried to catch her loose lead right as my molly lunged up a hill--leaving me in a backwards somersault into the soft dirt.  As we plodded along, he chortled his 7 year old conversation, and sang--mostly "Ride Cowboy Ride."  He says it is one of his favorites, and he thinks Riders of the Purple Sage sings it best.  His palpable sense of accomplishment when we wrapped it all up the next day animated my manhood .  Ahhhhhh... to be the Sire of fine sons and daughters.  There is no other privilege on Earth that compares.   And there is no high that stacks up to the Joy of Fatherhood.

So, will they have Bacon in Heaven?

Pretty much, the question we all ask at sometime or another, is...do they have Bacon in Heaven?  Perhaps, knowing the answer will help those souls who still haven't made up their minds to try for yon Glory.  So...we saddled the mules this weekend and headed up the hill, determined to find out once and for all, the answer to that  most important question.  And here are the pictures--they tell the story.  No photoshop here, just vivid proof that there IS pork in paradise.   Hmmnnn...come to think of it, we didn't see a bunch of virgins waiting for Achmed the Dead Terrorist either.

Thanks Natalie for smelling up facebook with your bacon bouquet.  This morning makes two days in a row!

Bacon!  Essential Nutrient, and the only way to fry eggs.

First Date

At first blush, this may appear to be off blog-topic. It is not. File this one under the consistent thread of parenting that adorns Longears and Sourdough. Tonight, I send Daughter Number One, who just made sweet sixteen, off on her first date. Dressed in a modest formal, she and her date join two other couples for a Preference dance at her high school. As she leaves the house, the thought strikes me, "I just sent my first daughter on her premier date and I'm totally comfortable with it." I must really take it for granted that she is on the right track. Poised, confident, graceful...Daughter Number One moves with purpose and is constantly up to something good. Suddenly, my shirt feels too tight. But the story doesn't end there.

While Daughter Number One is on her date, her Mom and I are first-time chaperones at a church dance for all the youngsters in our region. We enter the church and I begin to sweat. Twenty Six years have removed me from the teenaged dance scene. The dance hall is full of young people swaying oddly to music completely alien to my ears. Our instructions are to see that the young dancers adhere to standards of modesty and decency at the dance. One young lady dances into view, obviously stretching the rules with a revealing dress. I can ride herd on the girls at home if they stretch their modesty, but I'm not a very good cop in this foreign environment, so I look away as she repeatedly adjusts her uncomfortably, low cut top. The rest of the room is packed with youth dressed in their best Sunday-go-to-meetings.

The sea of youth gyrate in alternating cycles of chaos and synchronicity. They move at random mostly, then like a leaderless school of mackerel, the room becomes a unity of saltatory motion. I try to remember my own au courant swim to find my youthful purpose in life, but I have forgotten how to act in this water.

Milling around, I see Mom surrounded by a group of boys. She has their undivided attention, so I saunter over, trying not to collide with the graceful leaps and frenzied kicks of the dancers. Drawing near, she points to me saying, "and this is Kailee Gooch's dad." With all the fainting enthusiasm of teenage girls at an Elvis concert, they turn to me, grabbing my hand, one by one. "Really!? You are Kailee Gooch's dad!?" one boy cries. Another violently shakes my hand, "SO glad to meet you!" A third exclaims, "Kailee is the COOLEST person on Planet Earth!" In a flash of silver light, the mackerel reverse direction and I go from faceless chaperone to celebrity extraordinaire. Nothing in life has prepared me for the sudden, soul-piercing swell of parental emotion that floods the little I-am in my core. And Life's greatest mantle...Father, adorns my purpose.

She Rode a Stately Jack

I think a couple of my nieces will just never be satisfied to see the world through a pair of short ears again after the spectacular day we spent yesterday on the Red Mountain trail above Snow Canyon. Brother Mike and I took Sister Susie and her whole family to the scenic Kayenta overlook.

Sister Susie was nearly overcome with anxiety at the prospect of us putting her kids on mules and going somewhere a little fun. And she was a bit worried about her own fun as well. Mike and I have been grown up for so long, we had forgotten how much fun it is to torment a younger sister...

The video was shot in HD. Click "Watch on Youtube" and see it full screen for better quality--not sure why it is so grainy on the blog. A few of the photos are from the Christmas Eve ride to the Goblin pots and were added to complete the picture.

The Places we go with Jim: Base Jumping

For the past couple of years, I have tried with photos and words to describe some of the fantastic places I have been blessed to enjoy atop my mules. But with a new pocket sized wonder-of-a-camera, I can now shoot up to two hours of HD video. So for something a little different, I am going to post a few short videos that tell their own stories...

This is part one of a series I call, "The Places We Go With Jim." He rides his horse in places that few dare trod. We ride together often. They aren't all high angle like this one, but they are all beautiful. Enjoy a little base jumping here. Sometimes I wish I had a parachute just in case.

The Roar of the Mammoth

Rusty's bray is no heehaw. It is the tone clear, guttural call of the wild, and from the saddle, it penetrates the soul. So for something a little different, enjoy Rusty's signature cry from the saddle-eye view.

Merry Christmas! or The Desert sheds its water!

Eight inches of rain per year is about all we ever get around this dry desert. But this week, we got nearly 13 inches of rain in just 4 days--causing the second "100 year flood" in just 5 years.

We rode into the Goblin Pots above Snow Canyon today, knowing we were going to see some water. The sun was out and the rains had finished with us a full day earlier. But we didn't expect it to be THIS spectacular! Watching the desert shed 13 inches of rain from the Kayenta overlook was the chance of a lifetime.

Fort Pearce Wandering

Raiding parties of Ute and Navajo horsemen travelled in and out of the St George basin along the Fort Pearce wash during the Utah Blackhawk-Indian wars. The wash provided excellent cover for men on the sneak and was a source of water, although an unreliable one--especially during the warmer months of the year. The only dependable water along the Fort Pearce Wash upstream from St George is found in a brackish, spring-fed puddle about 15 miles away from the center of town.

During the 5 year war, which wasn't more than a series of raids, Mormon colonists built a stone fort overlooking the spring. Perched in an easily defended position, it gave the settlers a tremendous advantage against raiders during the summer months and other times of the year which saw extended periods without precipitation. Like most typical desert washes, it is dry until rains fall somewhere upstream, and then, it becomes a raging river, taking out everything in its path. Upstream for the Fort Pearce Wash includes a large portion of the Arizona Strip--so the flash floods can be substantial.

We decided to ride the old Ute raiding-trail to the fort today, leaving from home and working our way past the new airport and new highway that has gotten between us and the wilderness. It was 20 round-trip miles of linear contrast...nature verses progress, old pathways next to shiny new ones, and quiet hoof beats plodding against the fresh whine of tires on blacktop mixed with the frantic efforts of heavy equipment... crossing the trail of the ancients.

True Grit

The Eastern sky was just turning gray as we left the pavement and nearly all signs of civilization at the Arizona border Friday morning. Pulling heavy horse trailers full of livestock, Dan Snyder and I were headed South to his remote ranch on the nethermost reaches of the Arizona Strip. 78 miles of primitive dirt roads separate his summer pastures in the upper forested elevations above the Grand Canyon from the comforts of home in St George. It is a bone-jarring, equipment-eating drive that he makes nearly every weekend, to an inhospitable land from which generations of his family have scratched a living.

From the upper summer pastures of Pins Valley, Dan's grazing allotment runs another 10 miles South or so, as the crow flies, to the lower winter plateaus along the rim of the Grand Canyon below Molly's Nipple. But, we aren't crows, and the terrain turns 10 beautiful air miles into 30 punishing saddle miles. Getting there ain't easy. No one, in my humble opinion, runs their cattle in a more inaccessible corner of what is now the Parashaunt National Monument, than Dan Snyder.

I marvel at Dan and the others like him, who raise their cattle on the edges of the Grand Canyon. Water is the real rub. There isn't any, or so it seems until you realize that these gritty cattlemen can turn a seep on a distant ledge into a drip that flows through miles of plastic pipe to fill a tank for their cattle. Without those tanks and those little trickles of water, vast stretches of the Grand Canyon would be worthless to the tenacious cowboys of the Arizona Strip. Keeping the pipes flowing, and the tanks full is a constant battle. One vandal's bullet could drain a tank and kill an entire herd of cows; and nature lives to plug the piping that carries life's water from spring to tank. Dan often has to follow miles of shallow buried pipe, digging it up at intervals to find the source of blockages that dry his tanks. And patching leaky tanks is a herculean job because sand and mortar have to be hauled in, a little at a time.

They call it the Dan Sills trail, and it defines the grit of the man who moves his herd in and out of his winter range by pushing his cows down this very difficult, single file trail, and then, impossibly, back up each year. But Dan does it, often by himself. I've been there in the spring to help punch them up the hill, and getting the tired lead cow to start moving again way above you, from far below the lazier cows in back is futile. One long stretch of it is so steep, a man needs both feet and both hands just to negotiate the trail. This weekend, we came along to help him get his cows down to the Mud Springs cabin at the bottom of the Dan Sills trail. Later, he'll go back and push them further South to the next water tank on his allotment at the edge of the canyon. Denice Hughs who runs a bigger outfit that adjoins part of Dan's allotment, actually owns 40 private acres along the Dan Sills trail and often threatens his boys that he'll bequeath that 40 acres to them if they marry Dan Sills-women (or daughters-in-law that he doesn't like).

Brother Mike's wife decided that she wanted to go on a cattle drive and talked my wife and her son's girlfriend, Jessica, into going along with us. Three fairly pampered, and pretty girls riding some of the toughest country a person can ride made me a little nervous, but I'm always up for sharing the adventure. So they came, along with young Preston who usually does anyway. No offense, Dan, but that was the best trip down the Dan Sills trail I've seen yet. The sun was brighter, the air crisper, the birdsong prettier, the campfire warmer, and the prickly pear sweeter than I ever remember. In fact, I'll be picking the cactus spines out of my hands, lips, tongue and roof of my mouth for days to come.

Earlier this fall, after spending two days with Dan, repairing the water flow into one of his tanks, I watched him lean over, sweep some of the bigger floaters out of the way, and plunge his face down to his ears into the tepid water. Straining through his teeth and mustache he sucked up a belly full of the brackish water that had long been standing in the metal tank. It wasn't the first time I had seen him drink from his tanks--one day he did the same thing in a tank that had a dead rat floating on the far side from where he drew his drink. Seeing my grimace, he offered this thought in his uniquely gentle way, "Those water bugs swimming about down in there tells me the water isn't poison. If they can live on it, I can." Just call it True Grit.

Thanks Cindy for the great photos!