…are we not men? And still people worry for themselves and the world
Quickening the process
Quality Check
Let’s Run
Let’s Run
^ Peaking. Beautiful day. In the 50’s…trails are still muddy/slushy/ice…but pure fun
^ I was running down a dirt road…running on the edge where the grading makes a berm…riding the wave..caught a long piece of rusty barbed wire that was 1/2 buried in the berm grading. Hung me up…around an ankle then a leg…but luckily…didn’t trip me on my face. Got off easy with just a scratch.
^ The Forest Service has a contractor flying a helicopter over the Gila Wilderness (around the Gila River) shooting feral cattle this week. Got that part of the Forest closed. They’ll just leave the carcasses to the nature. Not feasible to pack the meat out.
These cattle (above) are free range…but off their State Trust allotment. They are not supposed to be on National Forest in this area. Somebody left a gate open or a fence needs mending.
* Nice sized bull blocking the trail…but he was chill…no problem herding him out of my way. There were 4 or 5 head in this bunch. Big fan of Bovine. Interesting conversationalist.
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moose eater
Well-known member
Looks like 500-lbs+ of nearly-free clean meat for lunch to me. Not like you'd have to pack him far to the road. He's more or less ON the road.
Mellow bull. In all my years…and all the places and cattle I’ve come into contact with…only came across one mean bull…one bull that was not giving the trail and not letting me pass. Backed away from that one…thought he was going to wreck me.
Yeah… a lot of meat will go to the ravens. The buzzards are still wintering further south. The areas where they are shooting them…no roads…the river bottom surrounded by steep walls. They are attempting not to shoot them into the river. If they do…ground personnel will pull them out. How I would like to see.
Guess it made national news. The feral cattle removal controversy. Think there’s a lawsuit from a rancher organization. The environmentalist are in favor of what the government is doing. If you can believe that.
moose eater
Well-known member
Yes, I commented on it elsewhere here. Brazen wanton waste in my opinion.
It's not wild game, per se', so any restrictions on slinging it out of the bush via chopper ought to be moot.
My guess is (based on stereotypical choppers used for such action) is that they're either flying a Robinson 44 or a Bell Ranger.. Either one of which could be used effectively to sling at least 2 whole quartered carcassses out of the bush at a time before they bone-soured; it'd be doable. Just need to do the field dressing and slinging of loads in between shooting..
They'd estimated 150 'feral' cattle to be culled (local ranchers had questioned the dubbing of them as 'feral'), and I had figured a rough estimate per each of 400+ lbs. of clean salvageable meat each, based on a drought year and free-range feed, likely away from premium grasses.
The poundage of waste is staggering. Acknowledging that a Bell Ranger up here is likely at least $2k/hour, and I haven't checked in years on the pricing for charter.
But that's a SHITLOAD of meat to let go to the buzzards, wolves, fox, coyote, mountain lions/cougars, magpies, gray jays, etc., especially during major inflation and some people scrambling for meals.
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No doubt. Good organic meat too. Gila Fed.
I believe the contractor is out of Texas where they use the ship to hunt feral hogs. Not sure. I don’t watch the news…so missed all the hoopla…but heard the Forest Service was preparing for protesters ….extra personnel being assigned to the closed trailheads and district office. Beef Country you know…
Cattle…they will climb mountains and get into places…very athletic animals. Great strength, size, agility…can live off the land…and crafty when they need to be. I’ve run a lot of “cattle trail” through brush and forest. They always go somewhere. Helpful to somebody like me…in that way.
moose eater
Well-known member
We've slaughtered and butchered a good number of angus/cross beef, but more moose.
The bull in the pic didn't look starved, and, if I saw correctly, he had a tag in one ear; something the Park Service/Forest Service had said was mostly absent on these critters, as well as absent brands, using those criteria as part of their determination that these were 'feral' cattle.
In that regard, the local ranchers are probably nearly as up in arms as the PETA people and other like minded.
Our moose can take a bit of time to transit from one valley to another, either for rut or for browse, and they live in the wilds with tall mountains sometimes, depending on where.
A crossbow or rifle, pick-up truck, a couple tarps, 5 or 6 sharp knives, a meat band saw, and 7-10 hours of labor would fill your freezer for over a year.
These cattle are not feral. They are coming off a grazing allotment (State Trust land)…there’s a fence that separates Forest Service land from the State land. They are not supposed to be grazing on there….but there are always stray cattle on this mountain.
The cattle in the Gila Wilderness…are all feral…been a problem for decades. Old grazing allotment cattle. I’ve seen plenty of tagged allotment cattle in other wildernesses in the west though. It’s almost a paradox to find a grazing allotment in a designated Wilderness Area…but it’s common. Cattle do a lot of damage in riparian areas…especially here in the high desert where water is not always a constant.
Then add to the fuckedness of the situation the reintroduction of the Mexican Grey Wolf program…and that battle between ranchers environmentalists and government. Fun stuff. Lines drawn.
moose eater
Well-known member
I planted trees in the Rockies, in the Red Faether Lakes area of the Roosevelt Nat'l Forest, around 1983 or so, during one trip from Alaska to Phoenix, in my old 1964 Ford F-100 short-bed, step-side pick-up truck, by way of Fort Collins, Colorado, where I stopped to visit old Forest Circus friends from SE Alaska; people I knew from the later 1970s, and to ultimately score a 1/4-lb of cubensis shrooms on campus there to send north to a now-deceased friend in Tok Jct. (gas tank investment).
I needed more cash for the rest of the trip to Phoenix and back home again, so a FS friend in Ft. Collins knew people at a nursery there who had a contract to plant trees in the RFL RNF area, and she got me a job on their crew, and I, in turn, got a job planting trees for the hitch-hiker I'd picked up near Great Falls, Montana, who owed me a bit of money from our time on the road.
In the mornings we'd climb into the bed of the flat-bed stake truck with our gear, lunches, water, and the hash pipe, and pass the pipe around as we drove to the place(s) we were planting that day.
More than once or twice the truck would suddenly be surrounded by cattle, with cowboys on horseback, slickers and all. Time travel, or so it seemed, from the back of a truck, with the hash burning away...
The cattle (and cowboys) belonged to ranchers who had leases in Nat'l Forest turf up there, allowing them to range their cattle in the National Forest..
It wasn't a hippie friendly area once you got out past Pouder (spelling?) Canyon. Small cowboy taverns in the middle of nowhere, where an earring in the left ear of a young male with a pony tail might result in contusions back in those days.
The reintroduction of the wolves isn't an offense in my opinion. We suburban homosapiens often want to harvest game we don't need, or there's a tough year for their normal food sources, deer, what ever, are down in numbers, and the wolves go looking for better vittles.
There was a project that became referenced as a study, though at least in the beginning wasn't an actual study, per se', that took place in the Kenai Moose Refuge on the Kenai Peninsula up here in the early 1970s, that found that due to the nature of wolves, how they determine pack size, and area of turf, etc., that wolf control as it's typically been practiced, often leads to more wolves, not fewer. I think that project was around 1974.
A former Canadian wolf biologist, Bobby Hayes (recently deceased), who studied and wrote extensively about wolves, (and also started and maintained/perpetuated the Kluane Bluegrass Festival in Haines Jct. Yukon Territory), aside from being a pretty fair guitar player and vocalist, as well as song-writer, spent many years chasing wolves by air and on snowshoes in the Yukon Territory, tagging, collaring, researching, etc..
His information is widely known and pretty well respected.
He also wrote a trilogy of quasi-fiction, covering a wolf family and its descendants, dated back to prehistoric time, utilizing some of the information he gleaned as a wolf biologist.
He and I had a couple conversations about such critters, as I had studied under also-now-deceased Doug Schammel at University of Alaska-Fairbanks in the ealry 1980s. It was Doug who taught me about the Kenai findings.
Probably as long of a novella as I ought to post here. Besides, my flute of Prosecco is warming.
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I read in the news (guess it ain't the paper anymore) that the 'herd', the majority of them, came from a big cattle ranch in the '70s. They've been living there since. Other strays have been joining the herd over the years. No one cared enough to bother with them until now now. Since they're invasive and not 'natural' they 'have' to slaughter them all. Somehow the environmentalists are convinced of this now, think they're doing the world the favor by making categories of what should or shouldn't run wild in the hills.
i think it's bullshit. There's cattle ranches all over those mountains. Before that, big horns and bison. Before that, mammoths and tapirs and camels and horses. The kind that does damage is the ranchers' cattle. There's studies that show that basically any forest in the world requires megafauna. Doesn't really matter what kind, as long as it's there and it's wild. You want condors back, and wolves, they need food. I think worrying about what's pure bred, or native, or non-native, but there has to be practicality. Those cows aren't hurting anyone, and if someone's hungry...
Getting off topic but an example is preserving these rare endangered sub-species. For instance the Asiatic lion population. There's one population left in one forest in India, pure bred. If it's hybridized it's no good. But there's only a few hundred of those cats left. And they came from a surviving population of something like a dozen. That's a hell of a genetic bottleneck. Inbred cats don't do well, I've seen it and it's not good. Over time the mutated, bad genes, will pile up while the good genes will slowly be replaced. They're guaranteeing it's extinction by not introducing a bit of African lion into the population.
Same situation with tigers, cheetahs, and other animals. We're reaching the point where ANY live animals, wild, is valuable. Not even enough land to preserve the sub-populations. Weird stuff, weird times.
i think it's bullshit. There's cattle ranches all over those mountains. Before that, big horns and bison. Before that, mammoths and tapirs and camels and horses. The kind that does damage is the ranchers' cattle. There's studies that show that basically any forest in the world requires megafauna. Doesn't really matter what kind, as long as it's there and it's wild. You want condors back, and wolves, they need food. I think worrying about what's pure bred, or native, or non-native, but there has to be practicality. Those cows aren't hurting anyone, and if someone's hungry...
Getting off topic but an example is preserving these rare endangered sub-species. For instance the Asiatic lion population. There's one population left in one forest in India, pure bred. If it's hybridized it's no good. But there's only a few hundred of those cats left. And they came from a surviving population of something like a dozen. That's a hell of a genetic bottleneck. Inbred cats don't do well, I've seen it and it's not good. Over time the mutated, bad genes, will pile up while the good genes will slowly be replaced. They're guaranteeing it's extinction by not introducing a bit of African lion into the population.
Same situation with tigers, cheetahs, and other animals. We're reaching the point where ANY live animals, wild, is valuable. Not even enough land to preserve the sub-populations. Weird stuff, weird times.
Hitting it…today is overcast…but warmish mid 50’s….tomorrow temps drop…winds and a little snow.
Powering mine road to the top…8100’ then trailing down…cutting out and off trailing through a wash.
^ Think this is petrified wood…
Some solid flows…body was strong
Powering mine road to the top…8100’ then trailing down…cutting out and off trailing through a wash.
^ Think this is petrified wood…
Some solid flows…body was strong
^ Powdered (mostly…until I got tired of chopping with a razor blade) and reformed into a cookie.
Ended up with a harvest total of : 92.6 grams of hash
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Mountains are gone today
^ 2022 Garden Hash Harvest in Totality
^ 2022 Garden Hash Harvest in Totality
All the bubble twisted artisan style. This stuff is jarred and into the fridge. Take it out and work it…for the next week…make sure it’s dry…but it’ll be kept in fridge storage.
* the dry sieved ball stays in a jar at room temperature. I don’t ball dry sieve and bubble together. The texture is different…
Hash takes extra care to keep it right and clean….storage wise and use wise. Fluctuating temps doesn’t help. The fridge keeps the bubble from sticking to everything it touches…whereas…the dry sieve is less an issue.
I’m of the mind…smoking hash…makes a mess. The smoke is clean…sure….real clean…like sunshine…but it’s a messy endeavor. The pipe gets worked.
* the dry sieved ball stays in a jar at room temperature. I don’t ball dry sieve and bubble together. The texture is different…
Hash takes extra care to keep it right and clean….storage wise and use wise. Fluctuating temps doesn’t help. The fridge keeps the bubble from sticking to everything it touches…whereas…the dry sieve is less an issue.
I’m of the mind…smoking hash…makes a mess. The smoke is clean…sure….real clean…like sunshine…but it’s a messy endeavor. The pipe gets worked.
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Taking a vacuum sealed ounce of Sister 23 out of storage. Ready for action.
