Photo update

Here are a few shots of what's been going on around here the last week.

 

We weaned yesterday, and it's 101 degrees today. Earliest and hottest round of weaning that I can remember.

 

 

 

We pulled bulls. Not this one, he isn't ours. But I thought he made a nice picture sitting under his own private tree, swatting flies and watching traffic.

 Here are our bulls, getting their pecking order re-established for the winter.

 And here they are about to continue their argument from the previous photo after we showed them where the water is.

 My wonderful grandmother turned 90. Here she is with all her grandchildren. The weekend before her party, we threw a surprise party for my mom. It's been an August of celebrating around here : )

I finally saw a part of the fire that burned to within a half mile of my aunt and uncle's home, and was much closer to some of their neighbors homes and buildings, as you can see here. This fire burned over 63,300 acres in the Black Hills of northeastern Wyoming.

Fire in the West

Please keep the west in your prayers as we deal with numerous fires that are causing loss of land, homes and lives. These photos were taken today in Weston County, Wyoming, and is burning the land of people I know personally. It is also headed in the general direction of my uncle's ranch. Countless people are in this same situation, and the weather isn't looking to give us any favors in the near future.

Fire Pictures

That's my brother, and the other guy on the hose is part of the family whose place the fire was on when I took this. Water was sometimes hard to come by (they ran all the cisterns on this ranch dry).

We topped the hill to this sight - flames around six feet tall. Unfortunately this grader was pushing the dirt the wrong way, you want the pile to the outside of the flames, but he still slowed things down. There were multiple blades and dozers on this fire to help contain it.

There goes our neighbor in a county six-by-six. We followed him across the fire line and went to work spraying water on the flames.

The guy you see here is another member of the family whose place was on fire. While the majority of the outside help was problematic and unhelpful, our local/county fire fighters and ranchers attacked the flames whole heartedly, as they have been doing all week on dozens of fires across the county.

A heat cyclone.

A flame being sucked up in the heat cyclone.

One Hot Situation

We have experienced an onslaught of range fires in my part of Wyoming over the last week. So many fires were blazing at once that our county's resources couldn't keep up with them. So, the fire district made the decision to call in paid resources (not our local paid people that were helping all they could), and relinquish control of the fires to the state of Wyoming.

The result was a disastrous loss of grass, endangerment of people, and frustration to local landowners.

See that guy in the picture? See him watching the Niobrara County guys and local ranchers do all the cleanup work? He was parked in that very spot when the fire was being put out also. His pickup had a sticker on the door that said, "Wyoming Forestry," and he was getting paid to stand there, watching a rancher's land burn up before him, offering no assistance when his very job was to help extinguish the flames.

That was a much too common sight over the last week. We learned today that these paid resources make at or above $28/hour, and their pickups are paid between $60 and $170 an hour. Why would they want the fire to go out?

We heard there were over 200 of them swarming around our county. How much money is that over a three-day period?!!?

It became apparent early on in when they entered our county that they had no intention of extinguishing any flames very fast. No, that burning grass was making them a nice, fat paycheck. They would park in the black and sleep and drive along fire-lines and watch the fire creep over it without even stopping. They would watch local ranchers and fire fighters almost burn up and not even bat an eye, let alone help. They would refuse to share water, and ask everyone to give theirs up to them.

Then they get to leave, collect that nice, fat paycheck, and move on to encourage the destruction of someone else livelihood. Meanwhile, the people left in their wake are faced with a financial crisis. Their grass is gone, fences gone, and they aren't getting a paycheck to fix it. They have to live with, and correct, this disaster brought on by human mismanagement.

This is wrong, and infuriating. Getting rich off the destruction of someone else's livelihood, when you were specifically hired to stop the destruction, is sick and wrong.

I personally witnessed numerous incidents that left me speechless over the last few days in regard to these paid resources. Their absolute negligence in doing their job was astounding, and resulted in losses that might even outweigh their paychecks.

When you're sitting in the dark, watching your next door neighbor's land burn up in flames that are 6-8 feet tall, and you see headlights on the next ridge, you assume that person will be there to stop the fire in that direction. What we've all learned in Niobrara County this week is you better radio and see if it's someone you know, and if it's not, you better assume he's going to do everything he can to fan the flames instead of extinguish them, regardless of the resulting loss in grass, homes, life or anything else.

When you call in additional resources, it's because you truly need them, not because you want to make the situation worse. Those that did aid in the efforts were truly appreciated, but they were far and few between.
What is our country coming to?