What are you hoping to see at The High Lonesome Ranch?
What we’ve been seeing:
- Bear sightings up the Dry Fork Valley
- Brookside Gun Dogs
- Rolling thunder clouds and rejuvenating rain
One of these days how fast time flies will stop being a surprise. We hope your summer has been full of sunshine and fresh air just like ours. Meanwhile on the Ag side, the cows are moving up the Dry Fork Valley and that means more sightings of the Ranch’s resident black bears.
The bears are pretty shy so we often don’t have time to get photos of them before they retreat. And really, we prefer to look through our own eyes rather than a viewfinder or screen whenever possible on the Ranch. Firsthand experiences like this keep on giving as you get to tell and retell the story.
Proof around here can be seen at any Staff Meeting when discussion quickly moves to whether the mostly black-with-a-white-chest-blaze bear was seen in a new place, or if that one cinnamon bear was 400 or 450lbs. Almost double the size of your average black bear according to Colorado Parks & Wildlife information.
Our adventures start early in the morning to beat the summer heat and afternoon thunderstorms. Not only do we see bears and the sunrise, we also see Steve and his son Dillon, of Brookside Gun Dogs, training their pointers and flushers in the fields around Guest House or Pond House. For those moments, watching the dogs sustains our enthusiasm for the hunts in the off-season.
And just like that, the last couple of months have flown by and The High Lonesome Ranch has some plans for our wing-shooting season starting in September across new fields.
As always, it comes back to our Regenerative Agriculture and Cattle program to support the Land. This means new grasses and fields to hunt, cooperative efforts between Melissa, Dakota and Brookside, and anticipation for the future as all of this translates into native bird populations returning and a more enjoyable sporting experience.
Plenty of opportunities to look for those rainbows and silver linings as monsoon season seams to have started a little early this year here on the Western Slope of Colorado. The rain is a welcome change from the drought even as it presents new erosion issues in the burn scar areas left from the Pine Gulch Fire last year.
We look forward to the regrowth in our habitats, fisheries, structures, and grazing to come from these powerful natural processes.
As always, it comes back to our Regenerative Agriculture and Cattle program to support the Land. This means new grasses and fields to hunt, cooperative efforts between Melissa, Dakota and Brookside, and anticipation for the future as all of this translates into native bird populations returning and a more enjoyable sporting experience.
Plenty of opportunities to look for those rainbows and silver linings as monsoon season seams to have started a little early this year here on the Western Slope of Colorado. The rain is a welcome change from the drought even as it presents new erosion issues in the burn scar areas left from the Pine Gulch Fire last year.
We look forward to the regrowth in our habitats, fisheries, structures, and grazing to come from these powerful natural processes.
Facing these changes it is crucial that we have a team with a positive attitude and who know how to get stuff done. Last month we introduced you to Dakota and Melissa who run our Regenerative Ag program.
This month we want to introduce Daniel Lane, our Landscape & Maintenance Manager.
Dan is our go-to for questions on repairs, fixes, construction, welding, plumbing, trucks, tractors, archery, and just about anything or topic you might encounter out on the Ranch.
His responses usually have you asking yourself “why didn’t I think of that” because of their logic and simplicity. What he makes look so easy is not actually intuitive but practical years spent as a contractor, working on other ranches around the West, raising three active kids, participating in 4-H programs with them and as an instructor in multiple disciplines, and his own personal passions for the different activities that keep bringing us all back to these wild places.
Picture a more sophisticated Red Green who has significantly less need for duct tape and you might have an inkling of how he’s endeared himself to his coworkers and others around him.
Indeed he enjoys the work so much it can be difficult at times to get him to let one of his trainees do it. Or maybe like the rest of us, he’s happy for any excuse to be outside and not in the office. All kidding aside, the quality of work and work ethic he demonstrates are increasingly hard to come by these days.
Just a few of the reasons we’re glad Dan joined The High Lonesome Ranch Team last fall in the path of the Pine Gulch Fire (an event that might have daunted a less hearty soul) and if that isn’t enough proof of his Western Spirit tenacity and patience we’re not sure what is.
