Moving Gravel and Flood Irrigation

Saturday, we moved gravel. It wasn't without purpose though. We run cattle on about 370,000 acres. 300,000 of those acres are leased from the BLM and we will use those mostly in the summer months only. 70,000 acres are deeded, and run up the middle of the valley, surrounding the 3 main homesites of lower clover, upper clover, and squaw. There is a fourth homesite, whitehouse, that is only used in the winter and it is at the base of the valley, 90 miles from the upper most point. I don't know much about it yet, haven't been there yet, so I'll have to tell you more about it later.

Of the 70,000 acres, most of it has controlled irrigation, and it seems like about 1/2 of it is here at squaw. Firman is our irrigation guy. He has control of the water flow from a reservoir higher up the valley. The reservoir feeds a series of canals, which feed a series of ditches running into the different fields or allotments we will be moving the yearlings through for the next few mo

nths. When Firman wants to "water" a field, he blocks the ditch off in various places with temporary dams made of irrigation tarps, wood and rock stabilizers, etc. The ditch overflows, flooding the field around it. He may move the dam several times in a day, so a good chunk of his time may be spent driving around from field to field, controlling the water flow. He waters the fields ahead of the cattle so they will be full of fresh alfalfa and grass when the cows get there.

One of the canals in one of the fields that has a dam with a culvert and a metal plate that raises and lowers to control the water flow needs repairs. Unfortunately, as you can see in the picture, the water just washed out the dirt on both sides of the culvert and is not "controlled".

This is where the gravel comes in. At some point in the future, there will be a project to dig out this whole area, and re-secure the culvert with fresh gravel.

About 1 mile from the ranch proper (where we live and where the barns are) is a gravel pit shared with the mines. (I'll talk about the mines another day). We drove the dump truck up to the gravel pit, loaded gravel, and took it about 2.5 miles out into the field where the repairs are needed. Not that exciting really, but I

took picture anyways. Apparently

the cows thought it was exciting though. They lined up along the fence and watched like that had never seen anything like it.

While we were out, we also came across a few cow skulls. Probably nothing noteworthy to most, but we have a plan, so we brought them home with us. The day before we left our property in Christmas Valley to head down to Nevada, we found a coyote skull on our property and Brian wired it to the post of the brand new gate he had just built. It is kind of neat, but very small and you can't hardly see it from the road. The next time we are there though, we'll add these two skulls, one on each side. It will be a good way to make a connection between these two extensions of our life.

We also received one final load of yearlings yesterday and Brian did a little bit of each of the roles, branding, vaccinating, and running the squeeze shoot. It actually got into the the upper 70's. It was a beautiful day. We finished the day off with a few fence repairs on the 4 wheeler, then watched 2 episodes of Bonanza on DVD before lights out. I had never seen a full episode

of Bonanza before. I don't think I really have any comments on it.