My Time on The Drift - Day 1

Wednesday, June 22

If you are new to my blog, welcome! For the next week or more, I will be journaling our time on the Drift as we gather cattle from our Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands to our Forest Service (USFS) allotment. These are public lands we pay to use only during the summer months. This usually takes anywhere from 12-13 days depending on how our cattle and the cattle ahead of us move. If you look at a map, find Yellowpoint then Green River Lakes and that's the general idea of how far we need to trail.

This time of the year, we start gathering the cattle about 5:30 am.

Interested in reading past blog posts on our journey? Click here to read more, I think you'll enjoy it.

Today, we gathered the southern part of our 60,000-acre BLM allotment and luckily had a lot of help to do it. With 8 of us, we gathered and pushed the cattle past several of our solar water wells and towards the river bottom where we sorted and left our neighbor's cattle on their private ground. This works well because in a few days we will be doing a final sort on the cattle and it can be difficult if you have too many cattle. It turns into a long day and let's be honest, the help gets hot and tired and it's no fun for man or beast.

Even though I have ridden this allotment many times before, I always find new areas the cattle like to use more. Little pockets of better grass and quick trails to get to the next watering tank were found and hopefully, I can remember them for next year. Making the most out of gathering comes with wisdom, experience, knowledge of the land and cattle, and lots of long trotting too.

Today, I rode Biscuit, our ranch-raised gelding, and had Gyp along to help gather. He and I have several things in common - hard-headed a little out of shape and enjoys chasing cows. Stay tuned for more and don't forget to ask the folks who raise the food you eat questions and not Google...who knows what you'll find there. It's definitely not personal and generally not right.