I talked with my brother a few days ago. He is the one who runs the ranch. He said they still had a couple of feet of snow on the ground and that people are still feeding with the teams and sleighs, so I went back to my old photos and pulled up some of a couple of winters ago. I am thinking these were taken 3 winters ago. The pictures are out of order but I hope you will enjoy them.
This is almost at the end of the process and he is hooking up the front pair of horses to the back pair of horses.
This shows them all hooked up to the sleigh, the hay loaded, and my brother in the drivers seat ready to pull out in the field and feed the hay off to the cows.
This is my brother and my son hooking the horses up to the wooden tongue that extends from the sleigh. Notice the piece of equipment in the background. This is used for stacking hay in the summer, digging up pipelines, digging holes to bury garbage, digging holes to bury animals, you name it it digs it.
I love this shot of my brother. The horses had gotten restless and he quietly moved to the front and was talking to them. Me I would have turned around and run the other way. I have never really liked the work horses. They are too big and scary!!
This is my son leading the work horse pair from the barn. They are put into the barn to have their harnesses put on them. That is my brother's dog in the background. He was accidently hit by a car this past summer.
My brother is fine tuning the harnesses. My son is holding the cross bar (not sure if that is the name) the hooks up to the harness bridles and then hooks onto the wooden tongue.
My son leading the second team for my brother to hook up. When you are loaded with a big load of hay you sometimes need 4 horses to pull the full load. The dog you see as the front of the picture is my brother's other dog. He is very old but can't stand to miss anything that is happening on the ranch.
This is another great picture of my brother doing what he does best. Ranch work. I love the snow covered mountains in the back ground. There is such a different beauty to the valley in the the winter. But you had better love the beauty because they get about 3 feet of snow and sometimes it gets down to 30-40 below zero!! The entire hook up process only takes about 30 minutes. Then it takes about 2 hours to feed. You feed the cattle out back and then take an hour trip through the field to feed the second set. When we were kids we would ski behind the sleigh or ride our metal saucers. My fondest memory of going to feed with my Dad on saturday was we would start through the field and then he would pull out the hard stick licorice that nibs used to make. Then he would pull out homemade jerky and widdle us of a piece. He always made them so thin and the tasted so good. Then when we came home mom always had a great lunch fixed!! Those were such great times. We had some real quality time with just our dad with him working right to the side of us, sharing goodies with us and just having a fun time. I still wish he would have made the slices of jerky thicker though!!!!
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