The Winecup Ranch is one of the iconic ranches in my home country. Situated near the Idaho-Utah line, it’s home to the Bedke family, and as near as I can tell, the fifth (or maybe sixth) generation of cowboys and cowgirls are now being raised there. Now, I’m not in on all the family secrets, but from what I can see, the family has been pretty successful at keeping the peace among themselves with each progressive generation. That in itself is a grand accomplishment, something to which anyone who’s ever been involved in any sort of farm and ranch succession planning can attest.
Mitch and Spencer are cousins and in the generation of which I speak. I coached them on the Oakley High School JV basketball team way back in the day. It doesn’t seem all that long ago, but they’re both in their 30s now, so it’s been a season or two, I suppose. I don’t know the management structure of the Winecup, but both young men are fairly handy cowboys and stockmen, and the folks in the older generation seem to place some trust in their capabilities in each of the twin ranching realms of buckarooing and decision-making. I know that seems like an unholy pairing, but it’s a high desert reality.
In the current iteration of winter, it’s been pretty kind to us. It’s been an open winter, so far, which has allowed folks in our country to delay feeding hay for an extra week or two. But that wasn’t the case a couple of years ago. Deep snows came fairly early in November and the feed in the stackyards started to dwindle in pretty short order. The boys at the Winecup were well into calving that year, praying for the weather to break so they could hopefully turn out on some grass before the hay ran out. But winter just kept hanging on, and it was evident that they’d need to haul some hay up to the ranch, a prospect that, on many levels, struck fear into the hearts of the heroes of this story.
The dirt roads from Oakley up to the Winecup are terrible on their best days, no matter the season, but in the early spring there aren’t enough dirty cuss words to accurately describe the mess they become. The travel is bearable in the early morning hours when everything is still frozen, but once the sun thaws the frost out of the ground, it’s pure misery. The prospect of hauling hay up to the ranch is a daunting thought.
Such was the situation Mitch and Spencer found themselves in. At first, they hauled a few pickup loads of hay to the ranch, but it soon became apparent that they needed a new plan. But what to do? They’d had Bart, their reliable farmer friend and hay broker from down in the valley, haul a load or two up a couple years earlier. They were a bit apprehensive about calling him because the last time they’d coaxed him into hauling hay up that road, he’d sunk his trailer up to the axles in the soft roadbed. You can bet there’s a good story to that. Nevertheless, they were in a bind, and the road had been shored up and fixed in the intervening years. So Spencer made the call.
Bart was a little uneasy, but he’s nothing if not reliable, and he can’t help but be eager to help someone in need. Mitch and Spencer assured him that all would go well. They’d take every precaution. Together they made a plan. On the appointed day, Bart left his place in the valley at three o’clock in the morning in order to make the hour-and-half trip up to the ranch. Behind his semi cab, he pulled triple trailers as he snaked his way up the frozen Trapper Creek Road. To his surprise and delight, he made his way to the ranch without incident and found the two cowboys waiting for him at the gate in the pre-sunrise darkness of the early spring morning.
The loud rush from his air brakes startled some sleeping birds in the nearby trees as he jumped out of the cab to confer with Spencer and Mitch. Spencer laid out the plan. All Bart needed to do was pull through the gate and make a wide turn on the gentle slope and come back to the gate where he could unload. The ground was frozen, so there shouldn’t be a problem. All was going according to plan as he made the turn. The first trailer stayed true and followed the truck around the bend. Same story with the second trailer. None of the actors in the story gave a thought to any potential wreck at that point. But their optimism was shattered as the third trailer came around the bend on the slope and its tire rolled over a rock sticking up no more than 3 inches out of the frozen ground.
It all seemed to happen in slow motion, but it happened, nonetheless. The trailer tipped, and like a doomed ship in the North Atlantic, slowly rolled over. As it rolled, it tipped the second trailer, and likewise the first and finally the truck itself. All Mitch and Spencer could do was watch the train wreck unfold before them. As they stood there, mouths agape, Bart calmly sauntered back to them and shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, that’s not exactly how we planned it,” he deadpanned. Then, without so much as a discouraged curse, he set to work to fix the mess. Of course, it took most of the entire day to clean it all up, but somehow they got it done, and the cows got fed, not only that day but every day until turnout later that spring.
When Spencer told me that story, the telling came not from a kid, but from someone with some maturity honed by time and experience. His takeaway was that just a little rock, unseen in the frozen dirt, can waylay the best-laid plans. But even more important than the pebble that may cause the tragedy is the fortitude, work and patience that can almost always right the ship.
