Jane's Butte

On Tuesday, the weather that had improved on Monday held, and we were able to ride up to the top of Jane's Butte.


Jane's Butte dominates the view to the northwest of Homestead on the ranch and, for that reason, is iconic for those of us who have been to the O RO as guests. Riding to the top is one of my favorite rides and one I've done each of the three times I've been out on the ranch.


It also affords a great view across the Baca Float and into the western side of the ranch.

The top is juniper and century plants and grass - the horses sometimes climb up there on their own in search of food. We didn't see any this time, though. Just the horses we rode.


It's also a great place to shoot portraits, since the backdrop is so dramatic. We got Charlotte:


Jack:


Daniel (and Raven):


And I like taking pictures of the dried out stalks of the century plants. You can see the moon in this one:


Up close, it looks like this:

Monkeytown Panoramas

Here are the promised panoramas from Monkeytown Canyon. The shot above is a 180º panorama looking North; the shot below is a 90º panorama looking South-West towards where I took the northern shot.

Zarry's Ride

A very large composite of the shots that made up Zarry's bronc ride. Well worth viewing at full size.

Monkeytown Canyon

On Tuesday afternoon, we drove to the northwest corner of the Baca Float to Monkeytown Canyon. We parked at the southern end and walked out to the cliffs. I snapped this but also took some panoramas that I will post once I stitch them in Photoshop.


From there we drove around and into the canyon. The pasture there is where the working horses (the cowboys' horses) go on "vacation," as A Jane calls it.




Despite all the rain around Homestead and other parts of the ranch we visited, it was pretty dry down in Monkeytown. We found the horses. Two were under a tree by the car. The sorrel was fine, but the brown was lame in his front right foot. Jack said it was badly infected, which is not good news for the horse or the cowboy he's assigned to.




From there, we left the O RO and drove onto a neighboring ranch to get back into the part of Monkeytown pictured at the top. There, A Jane showed us petroglyphs that she said were 1000 years old:

Cowpunchers Reunion

On Saturday, we drove from the ranch to Williams for the Cowpunchers Reunion Rodeo. In spite of the rain we'd had, we managed to make it both there and back. It's worth saying that because of how much mud rain in this part of the country makes - and most of the roads are dirt this far out. Check out the back of the Suburban - that's dirt, not paint, and it's not just a thin layer, either.

The reunion rodeo was great fun. The arena was a sea of mud, but the rain held off while the events ran. The participants are working cowpunchers, rather than rodeo professionals, so things are a little different, a little less extreme, and a lot more "real."


The first event was a wild horse race. Unbroken horses were released from the bucking chutes under the announcer's box. Teams of three cowboys tried to saddle and ride a horse over to a barrel on the left of the stands.


The horses came out, the men grabbed at them, and promptly got pulled through the mud.


It wasn't pretty. But a few of the teams managed the saddle and managed the ride. Not very quickly, but they got it done.


The shear muddiness was astonishing.


After that, they dallied calves. A calf was released from a chute on the left side of the arena and a mounted cowboy rods the calf down and roped it.


He then dallied the rope around his saddle horn (wrapped it, rather than putting a slip-knot around the horn), dismounted, ran over to it, literally picked it up off the ground, and body-slammed it down in the mud.


Then he tied three of its feet together and his time was called. The fastest managed it in just over 14 seconds.


Then they had steer riding. Kids - under 12 years old - rode bucking steers. A couple of them were quite good at it. One got stepped on, but ended up being alright.


After the steer riding, they had an event called ribbon roping. A cowboy roped the head of a calf and his wife, girlfriend, or daughter ran to the roped calf, pulled a ribbon off of its tail, and ran back across a line to stop the timer. Three of the girls were daughters and were maybe 6 years old. They had a mugger who tackled the calf to hold it still while they went for the ribbon.


After that, they had the first round of bronco riding. Broncos make for dramatic pictures - especially when cowboys are crashing into the mud.


Here's one of the cowboys from the O RO in his way off the bronco. He got fouled on his way out of the chute - his knee hit the post and it knocked him off balance. He held on for several seconds, but each time the bronc bucked, it knocked him further off balance. Then he lost the rope and went over the bronc's head. He could have called for a re-ride, but was too shook up to think about it until it was too late.


I won't put all of the bronco pictures in this post, but you should click through on one of them to Picasa and see the lot of them. Tracy took the majority - we both got some great shots.


Between the two sections of bronco riding, they had wild cow milking. A cow was released from the shoot on the left, a cowboy ran it down and roped it.


Two other cowboys on the team then ran to the roped cow. One of them mugged it: grabbed horn and hugged the cow's head to his chest.


The other attempted to get a little milk into a container he was holding. He then ran to a circle chalked in the mud to stop the timer. It was quite amusing to watch.


After that were some lower-key team roping events (one roped the head, another the hind feet) and the rodeo wrapped up.

Rock formations on Mount Hope

Snapped these on the way down. A storm was blowing in.

AZ Sunset

Sunset over the hill separating Homestead from Headquarters, taken on our first night at the ranch.


An earlier shot, reflected in the pool.

Climbing Mount Hope

Two years ago Tracy and I tried to climb Mount Hope - but weren't able to make it to the top: I picked a lousy route and we ran out of water. This time, we tried again.


We parked in about the same spot - a good long way from the base of the northern face of the mountain. You can get an idea of the distance from the picture above. There are no trails - we just pick a direction that looks good. The route we took went past some cool rock formations - still far from the base of the mountain.



From there the route ran around clumps of junipers until the ground started to slope up. We walked up the slope to the pine tree in the upper right of the photo, then to the right of the tree.




After that, things became much more difficult. The scrub forced us to either walk straight up the mountain or left and down. Left was good - down not so much. We zigzagged up and over along the base of the cliffs on the right-hand peak until we actually met the cliffs. The going was very steep.




The cliffs were manageable on the edges, so I went that way. Tracy bushwhacked to the left of the cliffs, not wanting to climb them.




But we made it to the top. The views were spectacular - but with all the rain, it was actually a little hazy. Fairly rare for high desert!




More later. These are original iPhone 4 pictures. No retouching.

Quick Test from the Ranch

Just a quick post to test BlogPress since I have signal. Here's a shot of Mount Hope:




More to come later!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The Cliff Dives

On our second day at the O RO Ranch, Tracy and I went with Jack and Daniel to the Cliff Dives - a particular spot in a canyon on the ranch's southern border. You can see the cliffs (and the falls) in the photo above - they're in the lower-right-hand middle of the photo: that flat, brown-and-white patch in the green of the gorge between the canyon walls; it's easier to view if you follow the link over to Picasa.

Our descent to the Dives followed the fold in the canyon visible in the photo at top, stretching from the lower-left-hand corner to roughly below the cliffs; from there, we turned to our left and scrambled up the photo frame to the cliffs. The photo at right shows us on the "trail" - really, it was a rarely-flowing, rapidly-falling stream down from the plateau to the canyon floor that ran over large volcanic boulders. The terrain was difficult, but manageable. The morning was cool - that helped a lot: in spite of the coolness, we were hot by the time we'd made it halfway down the stream bed.

The vistas were gorgeous, both looking out across the canyon, as in this photo, as well as looking back up the way we had just come. Although one of the more beautiful spots on the ranch, it's remoteness and the difficulty of the hike make it rarely frequented. Jack guessed that (not counting Native Americans), we were among 10-20 people who had ever hiked down to that spot. Impossible to prove, but an impressive claim, nonetheless. And one did feel the isolation of the spot - much more strongly than I've experienced in the mountains around here.

Halfway down the stream bed, we came to a large slab of lava rock that had collected pools of water, either from the recent rains or the receding water from the stream bed (still audible in some places, deep under the rocks). The disks in the water in this photo are bubbles - not eggs of some sort, but simple air bubbles. Some combination of heating from the sun and trapped air in the porous rock must have caused the bubbles to form. In the direct sunlight, the effect was quite stunning, particularly with the golden background provided by the algae that had formed in the bottom of the pool. We saw only a couple of these pools - it struck me as odd that there were so few. Perhaps the conditions for them to form are fairly specific?

Down at the cliffs, it was almost like another world. With the constant availability of water, large deciduous trees (maples and the like) were in evidence - we never saw those up on the plains. The falls were gorgeous. The top of the cliff (just at the upper right of the frame) must be some 60 feet high - it was from there that Jack and Daniel jumped into the pool below (though they didn't dive from that height). We've pictures of them jumping - frozen in mid air and just as they hit the water; I'm going to try to composite a time history of a jump together and post that, so you can see the whole jump in one picture. Should be interesting.

Due to the variability in water level at the base of the cliffs (it had quite recently flooded some three or four feet higher than the level at which we saw it), the roots of some of the trees were magnificently twisted and exposed. This picture shows one of my favorites, just across from the flow of water exiting the pool at the base of the cliffs. Just off-frame, to the left, is another fall, shown below, fed by the flow. These photos made lugging my tripod down (and up!) the canyon wall well worth it (though actually, the lenses and camera bodies I carried weighed more than the tripod). A friend loaned my his Canon backpack (and a really nice lens) which made carrying everything possible (and even fairly comfortable). I highly recommend a good, compartmentalized pack if you're going to lug your camera on hikes!

The cliffs for which the spot is named are really just one set in a series of cliffs and falls that range from that point down the canyon floor. We didn't explore in that direction, but I did walk back far enough to take a photo of this second set of falls. The tree roots in the previous photo are just off frame in the upper middle, and the falls from the first photo are in the background at the top-right of the frame. There was no jumping from this cliff, by the way: the pool at the base of the fall is quite small - too small a target to make in a jump, even if were it deep enough.

We stayed down at the falls for most of the day and hiked some up stream - all the way to a fork in the canyon wall. (Jack boldly declared we were the first humans to ever set foot in that part of the ranch - I tend to think some Native Americans or Cowboys from time past have been there - but who knows? It was remote country, and not easily reached.) Before leaving we stood in front of the tripod and I got a picture of the four of us. Not sure what I did wrong, but the trees behind us are in focus, where we are not. I might have forgotten to turn autofocus back on....

On the way out, I took this picture - a better look at the canyon, since the sun was at my back. It's unfortunate that scale can't be easily conveyed in a photo such as this - the canyon is vast and imposing when you're there, but just looks... bland in a photo.