My Ranching Life in Colorado - Part III

By Argie Peroulis (Argyro Trochalis Peroulis)

My best memories are of working at the ranch. Memories of my daughter Bia always make me smile. I spent a lot of time with Bia at the ranch, where we laughed and had so much fun together.

The best summer I remember was at our ranch. We were baptizing our granddaughters Chrissy and Alexei, the daughters of my Bia and her husband, Cardenio. We all put so much work in getting the ranch ready for this celebration. We cleaned all the flower beds, planted beautiful flowers, and cleaned everything we could clean. We did all the cooking by ourselves, and our wonderful neighbors furnished tents and tables and set these up in our yard. The neighbors were fed multiple times from that barbeque and told us we should have a barbeque every year.

I can also make myself miserable because Andy is gone but I am making the best of it. When I am upset, I go up to the ranch and I always feel better and happier. I have noticed this about my daughters as well. Maybe because there is solitude and no close neighbors at the ranch, I enjoy the quiet even more. I have not ever slept at the ranch by myself-ever-and probably never will. The memories of people knocking on our door late at night, most lost, (before cell phones) is present in my mind and it is a little scary.

There is an apple tree in the yard at the ranch that the girls planted when Bia died. It is getting just as big as the old willow tree we have out there. I may have an outdoor table made from the old tree and leave the roots.

The land is measured in animal units, not acres. In years past, we trailed our sheep from our summer ranch to this seemingly barren ground because there is less snow there, so the sheep can find food. The sheep love the salt sage that grows in little lumps on the ground. This food was supplemented with alfalfa pellets and corn which were thrown from gunny sacks by two ranch hands from a two-ton pickup truck. Andy believed that the alfalfa pellets made the ewes’ milk better for their baby lambs born in the spring. The rams were separated from the ewes until breeding time in December, so by May, there were many pregnant ewes among our flocks.

When you move a bunch of sheep by foot (trailing) to the lambing ground in the Spring, you can miss two or three sheep and not know where they are. Once we got a phone call from a nearby rancher at our winter range telling us that they had 3-4 pregnant ewes of ours. The ewes stayed together and had two lambs each by that rancher’s corral.

There was a cowboy who lived near our winter range, named Ike. Ike was the original cowboy, with a western shirt, kerchief, jeans, and a cowboy hat. He was a rugged guy. That was his only outfit, even when the weather was below zero and so bitterly cold. We would take two trucks from Craig and leave one at Ike’s place. He would go to the winter range with our pickup and feed the ewes every day. Poor Ike got cancer and became very ill. Ike told us “I took care of cattle and when they were sick, I shot them, and I will do the same if I get to that point.” Ike took his own life. This caring man was a real cowboy and our friend.

Another memory I have of the winter range is when we would leave the yearlings there until about the first of June. For some reason, I was trailing these yearlings with the herder, Lloyd Chavez, down to the lambing grounds. It was the 20th of May and raining hard. I had three-year old Bia with me and Stella. Andy had eight-year-old Toni with him. By the time Andy got to the Ranch, one foot of snow had fallen. Andy told Toni to stay in truck. He went and shut off the water because otherwise, the irrigation ditches would overfill.

I hooked up the sheep camp and started driving toward Highway 13. The camp started spinning its wheels in the mud and the rain was coming down faster and heavier. It was raining so hard I could not see the road for stretches of time. As I was waiting for Lloyd to come and put chains on our pickup, I looked down the stretch of road onto Highway 13 and saw a truck with its lights on coming our way. The truck turned the corner, and it was Andy! Lloyd saw Andy’s truck with its lights and came down from where he was with the yearlings. Andy told Lloyd that they would leave the yearlings there because they could not be moved any further. Andy then said, “Let’s go down to Drifters Restaurant to have breakfast.” That made all of us so happy!

We had sheep which were stolen or lost too. This would happen at either the summer or winter ranges. Andy could not cover all the grazing land with just a herder or two, so he would rent an airplane to fly over the grazing lands and spot the sheep with our “AP” brand. Once he knew the location, the sheep could be trailed back.

We branded our sheep every time they were sheared with a special paint. We also had ear tags for all our livestock. Once a small bunch of our sheep were stolen because we never were able to find them. This is a punishable offense. Ranchers always have the right to inspect other ranchers’ corrals for missing sheep.

Coyotes are predators year-round too. We have bears during the summer and sometimes mountain lions that attack and kill our sheep in the high country. If you have sheep killed by predators, you must take a government trapper to where the kill took place to get reimbursed. Sometimes, this is harder to do than other times. Reimbursement has always been a mixed bag. If livestock prices are high, it is okay, but if not, it is a loss. Wolves can annihilate an entire carcass and sometimes eat the bones as well. This is especially the case in Wyoming and will be problematic here in Colorado now with the new 2023 law reintroducing wolves.

The other problem aside from predators are competent workers. Very few people want to work on a ranch because ranch work is so physically draining. For this reason, every year introduces more labor shortages. Bringing immigrants from other countries to work was never a problem for us, but today, once a herder has a green card, the temptation to leave the herd and never be heard from again is huge. Leaving a sheep camp imperils both the sheep’s safety and welfare because the ranch owner won’t know the herder has disappeared until potentially weeks later. This is very stressful for today’s ranchers. A lot of ranches have survived by becoming seasonal operations with dude ranches in the summer and sleigh rides and snowmobiling in the winter, or hunting outfitters in the fall. Although this is a good business, it is the tourist and hospitality industry and not the ranching business.

My great grandchildren will not know what ranching means or what a ranch life meant. This saddens me very much.