Saguache, CO. What was that noise? Was somebody going through childbirth? Or calf-birth? My herding dog, Coffee Girl, was all excited by the commotion, and rightly so. A cattle drive makes an enormous amount of noise. Whoa baby, here they come now. About a hundred of them.
They missed my dispersed campsite by 50 yards. But that's closer than it's ever been before.
At first I thought it was a ranch family doing an old-fashioned Western cattle drive. But the "boy voices" that I thought I'd "herd", turned out to be adult cowgirls.
Recently I had overheard a conversation between a local and a metropolitan tourist, in a coffee shop. When the tourist left, the local rolled his eyes and said to the other local, "You can always tell a tourist from the shorts." Feeling self-conscious about my tourist status, and not wanting to ruin the authenticity of the experience to the cattlemen, I hid behind rocks and bushes when photographing them.
As it turned out, they were perhaps dressed a little too fancy to be authentic. Maybe they were all the offspring of a multi-millionaire who owns a ranch in Colorado as a nostalgia-thing, or as a trophy property.
Ahh well, that's OK. I'm not criticizing them. I just like observing things closely and trying to explain things, based on that. And why shouldn't I observe closely; coyotes do.
At first it was easy to imagine my Kelpie being "envious" of the four border collies which were "working" the cattle. Presumably that means chasing outlying or straying cattle back towards the center. But they didn't really appear to be doing that. Clearly though, they were excited by the event.
Horses are rare and almost exotic animals in the post-western West, and few states are as post-western as Colorado. So this was a rare privilege. They are indeed beautiful and romantic creatures, and you don't have to be an affluent 13-year-old girl to feel that way. In fact, they have such large advantages over dogs in this terrain and climate, you almost have to feel sorry for the dogs. Wouldn't you prefer hooves to paws, all-body sweating to mere panting, coyote-proofness to vulnerability, and a large body mass to make you survive snakebite (presumably)?
As always, whenever I see a horse and a dog working together, I like to imagine a mountain biker and a dog as the modern reincarnation of the Western horse culture, just as the 'lone rider of the Plains, circa 1875' was the reincarnation of the knight-errant of the Middle Ages.
These cattlemen were lucky. If I had been a real tourist from the big city, they would have returned down the road to find me waving a protest sign: "Ban Everything on Public Lands, Except What I Like!"
They missed my dispersed campsite by 50 yards. But that's closer than it's ever been before.
At first I thought it was a ranch family doing an old-fashioned Western cattle drive. But the "boy voices" that I thought I'd "herd", turned out to be adult cowgirls.
Recently I had overheard a conversation between a local and a metropolitan tourist, in a coffee shop. When the tourist left, the local rolled his eyes and said to the other local, "You can always tell a tourist from the shorts." Feeling self-conscious about my tourist status, and not wanting to ruin the authenticity of the experience to the cattlemen, I hid behind rocks and bushes when photographing them.
As it turned out, they were perhaps dressed a little too fancy to be authentic. Maybe they were all the offspring of a multi-millionaire who owns a ranch in Colorado as a nostalgia-thing, or as a trophy property.
Ahh well, that's OK. I'm not criticizing them. I just like observing things closely and trying to explain things, based on that. And why shouldn't I observe closely; coyotes do.
At first it was easy to imagine my Kelpie being "envious" of the four border collies which were "working" the cattle. Presumably that means chasing outlying or straying cattle back towards the center. But they didn't really appear to be doing that. Clearly though, they were excited by the event.
Horses are rare and almost exotic animals in the post-western West, and few states are as post-western as Colorado. So this was a rare privilege. They are indeed beautiful and romantic creatures, and you don't have to be an affluent 13-year-old girl to feel that way. In fact, they have such large advantages over dogs in this terrain and climate, you almost have to feel sorry for the dogs. Wouldn't you prefer hooves to paws, all-body sweating to mere panting, coyote-proofness to vulnerability, and a large body mass to make you survive snakebite (presumably)?
As always, whenever I see a horse and a dog working together, I like to imagine a mountain biker and a dog as the modern reincarnation of the Western horse culture, just as the 'lone rider of the Plains, circa 1875' was the reincarnation of the knight-errant of the Middle Ages.
These cattlemen were lucky. If I had been a real tourist from the big city, they would have returned down the road to find me waving a protest sign: "Ban Everything on Public Lands, Except What I Like!"
Comments
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/man-wandering-around-california-3-113000929.html
They charge big bucks for tourists to ride the 70 mile 3-day drive. (Last I heard it was approaching 3 or 4 thousand dollars.)
Many of the tourists spend a fortune on what they consdier to be cowboy clothing, and the real wranglers always get a chuckle out of it. Most of the tourists can barely walk after the drive.