Round Up Part one

Last Saturday I discovered that I don't function very well at four fifteen in the morning. My alarm went off and I didn't even move. Lenore had to wake me up. I pretty much dragged myself out of the house and onto the road. The first hour of the drive up to Island Mountain Ranch was pretty easy driving north on Highway 101. After turning off Highway 101 onto Bell Springs Road the rest was mostly pure dust for two hours of one lane roads a I was following one of the cowboys rigs into the ranch. I hung back as far as I could but there is a maze of roads once you turn off of Bell springs road onto the Adanac ranch and I didn't want to get lost. At one point we did hold back too far and we missed a turn and got lost. With a little back tracking we figured it out. The sweeping views of the Eel River were spectacular. We arrived at Island Mountain Ranch with out any fanfare. There were quite a few cowboy rigs scattered around on the pastureland below the corrals with the most common rig being a fifth wheel livestock trailer with a good sized pick up and the requisite cattle dog. The group of cowboys I was with got right to work unloading their horses and jumping right in helping to separate the calves and unbranded cattle from the rest of the herd. Following that they were selecting about ten calves at a time into the branding pen. Here a team of two riders would rope the calf. One mounted cowboy was the header and one was the heeler. Once they were roped the ground crew of two to five people would rush in to push down the calf so that it could be branded, dehorned and castrated if it was a male. We worked until one before heading up to the main ranch house for a generous lunch. I had a fantastic time photographing the event. Part two tomorrow. God's love and blessings to all, chris All images created with a Canon 7D and a Canon 28-135 IS lens