{"id":2441493,"date":"2019-03-08T19:44:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-09T02:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/news\/tony-vagneur-one-day-that-means-lifetime-between-father-and-son\/"},"modified":"2019-03-08T19:44:00","modified_gmt":"2019-03-09T02:44:00","slug":"tony-vagneur-one-day-that-means-lifetime-between-father-and-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/tony-vagneur-one-day-that-means-lifetime-between-father-and-son\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Vagneur: One day that means lifetime between father and son"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We were about a mile from the house, in the flat bottom of Woody Creek Canyon. We\u2019d just loaded about a ton of hay on the sled and were headed to the pasture by the corrals, near the house. \u201cLet me drive, dad,\u201d was my attitude on the cerulean blue-sky day, to which my father replied, \u201cNo, it\u2019s a little tricky here and I don\u2019t want to take a chance on getting stuck.\u201d<\/p>\n

I bristled at the rejection, figuring my driving of a team of horses was as good as anyone\u2019s, but let it slide, wisely. Being around on the occasional weekend didn\u2019t help my credibility with those who worked the ranch every day, and even though young at 12 or 13, I\u2019d learned to respect the reality.<\/p>\n

The reality was that the hired man and my dad had been hauling out of that hay stack every day for a while and had packed down a trail, a sleigh road, so to speak, that through successive snowstorms and travel, had become higher than the untracked, deep snow on either side. Not much, but enough.<\/p>\n

If the teamster didn\u2019t pay attention, particularly with a loaded sled, the whole apparatus could easily slide off the packed portion, either side, and would be immediately stuck. A loaded sleigh was too heavy for the horses to pull out, so the hay bales would have to be tossed off, making the sled light enough for the horses to pull out and get repositioned on the trail. Then it had to be reloaded.<\/p>\n

Thirty, 40 bales of hay and deep snow. That was a sweat job, for sure. Yep, damned glad my dad didn\u2019t give me the opportunity to create such a scenario. The very next week, it happened to Dad and the hired hand. My dad was glad he hadn\u2019t given me that opportunity, either.<\/p>\n

Every once in a while, you see a write-up in some western magazine about ranchers who still feed their cows with a team of horses. And why wouldn\u2019t they? My god, it\u2019s quiet, it\u2019s peaceful, the air is fresh and the camaraderie between animals and men is remarkable.<\/p>\n

One man can feed a large herd of cattle, and it really helps if his team and he are on the same wavelength. Voice commands are imperative, although the horses usually know what needs to be done next. If a rancher feeds two or three loads of hay to a herd every day, the team generally knows after the final trip that it\u2019s time to head home. They really can count, in some way that horses have.<\/p>\n

Several years after the above rejection, my dad invited me to help feed the cattle one weekend. He wanted to show me a new place he\u2019d found for a part of the herd, and seemed rather excited about it.<\/p>\n

He harnessed the team while I continued my reluctance to get out of bed any sooner than necessary, and before long, we were headed out the door. Dad dressed as I\u2019ll always remember him: red wool coat with a hidden game pouch in the back and blue jeans tucked into a pair of yellow insulated rubber boots.<\/p>\n

\u201cDamn, dad, where\u2019d you find that coat?\u201d I remarked, knowing I\u2019d lost track of it somehow. It had been a gift to me from a close family friend. \u201cYou left it on the steps to the attic,\u201d he replied, \u201cand it\u2019s too good a coat to leave lying around.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, wow, he looked so good and natural in it, I couldn\u2019t object; the best I could do was envy him for his good taste.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d pushed the mother cows up on what we called the Homestead Mesa, directly above the house. My grandfather had homesteaded that land, along with three other mesas, about 600 acres worth. Dotted with sage and oak brush, the homestead mesa wasn\u2019t much good for anything but summer grazing and was discovered by my dad, through some sort of serendipity after a lifetime of ranching, to be the perfect place to winter feed mother cows.<\/p>\n

It was about a half-mile from the \u201cmaternity ward\u201d corral, easy herding distance away for soon-to calve mothers, protected from the wind by all of the western-edge oak brush, plenty of open space for the cows to feed and with water close by. For my dad, who was working alone that winter, it was three miles closer to the house than the traditional feed ground. The homestead cabin my grandfather had built, before my dad or I had been born, stood sentry over the mesa.<\/p>\n

Whatever it was, I don\u2019t know, I\u2019d never seen him that pleased with what he had going on. He smiled a lot, talked a lot and really included me in. It was a day, so many years ago, that means so much to me today. My dad, I wonder if he ever knew how much he meant to me.<\/p>\n

Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at ajv@sopris.net<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We were about a mile from the house, in the flat bottom of Woody Creek Canyon. We\u2019d just loaded about a ton of hay on the sled and were headed to the pasture by the corrals, near the house. \u201cLet me drive, dad,\u201d was my attitude on the cerulean blue-sky day, to which my father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2441493","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-15 02:27:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2441493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2441493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2441493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2441493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}