We are rapidly emerging from our slow season. The work is beginning to pick up its pace a little, which means that the horses hooves must be trimmed in preparation of our Spring roundup. That the corral be checked to make certain that everything is in proper working order and repaired if necessary. That the water system is readied for use ( the tanks need to be cleaned and filled). That fences be checked and repaired as needed. So everything is about normal except the amount of moisture in the ground that the pastures need to grow. We want snow or rain and plenty of it, but we have seen little, at least not on that broad scale that benefits the ranch – the broad scale of the grass.
We have water on a narrow scale. We can fill the water tanks from the wells. That is not a problem. We have water a-plenty at the house, at Erney’s and my apartments and anywhere else at ranch headquarters. We have springs that seep and bubble out of the hillsides all winter long and sometimes dry up when the massive Cottonwood trees, the Plum thickets and the brushy draws wake from their winter dormancy, leaf out, and suck up enormous amounts of water. We have a spring that runs through the horse corral and one that runs off the bluff down into one of the buffalo pastures. The buffalo use it frequently if they are in that pasture. In these respects the water on the narrow scale is just what we want.
There are a couple of springs, however, that cause us problems, that require some creative problem solving, that have required creativity from those who came before us on this property. These springs cause two problems, one of which (drainage ditch erosion) is fairly well solved. It had to be solved. Stock trailers loaded with horses were dropping their wheels into the edge of the ditch; so I collected pickup after pickup load of fairly large stones and filled the ditch. Water could still seep through; silting would still occur, smoothing out the passage over the stones, and trailers would have an easier and safer passage.
The second problem: a spring that appears in the driveway as it comes down the hill and around a bend. In the Winter the water comes to the surface and freezes, more water seeps over the ice and also freezes, forming and ice flow across the driveway. In the Spring the ice melts and the roadbed then contains several wheel-bogging soft spots that never improve with use. So Erney and I have embarked on a simple plan (we think simple is good) for a solution, having not a shred certainty that the plan will work. We have been gathering fairly large stones and placing them in the soft spots and then covering them with gravel. We then drive over these spots forcing the stones down; so we add more stones and more gravel, hoping eventually to have an area through which the water can seep and yet be sufficiently smooth and solid on the surface for the traffic that comes into and goes out of this ranch. Sometimes small improvements make a big difference in an operation.