We got our first branding of the year in over Easter weekend and as always, it was a family and friends affair. For us and a lot of area ranchers, springtime is the best time for visiting family and friends to help out. Calves are small and easy to handle and our first brandings usually line up pretty well with Easter school break.
For some of the folks who help us, it’s the first or only time during the year that they step foot on a ranch. Their annual rides horseback gathering a herd, giving shots or running hot irons end up being one of the highlights of their year. We know that because pictures of their adventures end up on their Christmas cards, and they join us year after year, and end up bringing their kids and grandkids. Through the years, their duds usually get less TV cowboy, and more practical and buckaroo.
We also have the invaluable assistance of people who have other day jobs, but are tried and true buckaroos at heart. Their skills are first rate and they very often teach us a thing or two. We could not do this without you guys.
These are also days when lawyers get to shed their suits and become ropers and run irons, county sheriffs cut and mark calves, firefighters and nurses give shots and adjust ropes, and engineers tend branding fires. The full time buckaroos take up the slack, keep everyone safe and the whole process moving in the right direction. Our crew ranged from six months to eighty three years and every one contributed something special.
We gambled that our weather would hold and we got lucky this year. We finished about 90 head of early calves and everyone then retired to our bunkhouse for supper. There, our second crew of volunteers greeted everyone. A retired radio station owner bbq’ed about 25 lbs of tri-tip to perfection. His wife along with my eighty-three year old force-of-nature mom and I had the rest of the meal ready for everyone. We happily fed about two dozen cold and dirty buckaroos who all squeezed in to our 150 year old bunkhouse, shared one bathroom and happily sat in folding chairs around crowded tables or ate their meal off their laps in front of the living room woodstove. All had big smiles, hearty laughs and free flowing stories of their epic day, branding calves and taming the west.
Some might argue that it’s more efficient to have a professional crew handle it all; but to a lot of us, nothing is more important than days like this to keep our way of life, alive. Reminding friends and family from every walk of life about what is best about the family ranch, keeps our traditions alive and thriving. Plus, a lot of our volunteers become pretty darn good hands over the years.
So to the hardworking full time buckaroos, the guys who long ago moved on from their first job on a ranch, the retirees, engineers, builders, lawyers, USDA managers, tech giants, teachers, nurses, restauranteurs, firefighters, sheriffs, mechanics, miners, executives and full time mamas who annually take the time to come out and help us brand our newest crop of calves, thank you. Trust me when I tell you that having you with us for one of our favorite events of the year is absolutely our pleasure and privilege. We just hope that you never stop coming.
Kris Stewart is a rancher in Paradise Valley, Nevada.