Now decorating our ranch with reds and gold

Stardate 101407

Yesterday with one of our horse owner/boarders - Kasey, Kittee and I rode the 10 mile loop of our local back country harvest roads/ rough trails that circles us high above Crouse Creek Canyon, around Lincton Mountain, and back to the ranch. We found this ride to be so beautiful that we had to do it again today, taking pictures.

It is hard to tell you here of the exhilaration of this weekend's rides, but I will try to share today's ride with you... cool autumn breezes, bright warm sunshine, clear blue skies, splashes of foliage color like blazing fires, hound dogs howling/chasing raccoons - spooking our horses, on and on... "A picture is worth a thousand words." So we will just share some pictures with you and hope it will bring you closer to the happenings around our ranch today.













This time of year the hunters are out, so we wear red as does the shades of the sumac foliage. This morning we had a horse spook episode, on Misty and Nugget that included a quarter mile run down the road with horses' heads high. It was not one of those turn on a dime and flee spooks, as we felt the horses getting nervous. We heard the dogs coming from a quarter of a mile away, with some crashing through the woods, but it still made a thrilling, fast ride to start the day. A good test for stay-in-the-saddle horsemanship... you know you just can't get a Sunday ride with an adrenalin rush like this, by sitting back on a bench seat with a wheel in your hands or watching TCM. After this episode the horses settled down, and we had a most enjoyable late morning ride out from the ranch for a couple of miles back up Cashe Hollow.
When we got to the top of the first long grade we rested in the shade of the walnut grove, enjoyed the great outdoors, then turn around and headed back for the ranch, the horses always know the way home...

Getting back to the ranch, it was after beer-thirty so we took a short break, to wet our whistles, wash down the trail dust and had a bite of lunch.











Right after lunch we began working with some more horses, as Kittee began with washing Derby's tail and prepping him for an afternoon photo opt session.

After Derby's tail washing, he and Justice had a photo session in the beautiful afternoon sun and then we took them out to pasture and arena to be horses.







Derby here on the left and Justice below.









Handsome group of fellas here, don't you think?

Derby making one of his best
Quarter Horse poses.

Justice and I squint with the wind in our eyes as we are working to stay ahead of the arena track dust.

Justice and I still have quite a bit of training work to do, before he is ready for the trail next year.

Kittee also took Derby for a ride around the back pasture, and a few nice fast cantering laps in the arena. After Kittee put Derby back out to pasture, she caught-up her Shaiela, groomed her, and did some bareback cantering on her around the back pasture and arena.
After Justice's workout everyone was ready to call it a day, we treated all the horses that had given us a ride with a spot of grain, and just kicked back and relaxed watching the geldings and goats feed on their evening hay rations and plums.After feeding the gelding herd, we moved up to the behind-the-house-yard and threw plums out into the pasture, and hand fed plums to the mare herd. Again Sheila proved herself to be the alpha mare/witch even being pregnant as she is.

So all in all we had another wonderful full two and a half day weekend of beautiful October weather, horseback riding, and polished off the weekend only using 6 horsepower of energy for three days. Oh the joy of riding around side-by-side with the wife on back country roads with responsive steering in our hands, fine leather seating under us, open roof above us, and cool fresh air on the face. In three days of riding we met a total of 3 vehicles on our northeast Oregon back roads.

By late afternoon, riding in the country all weekend we felt a need for aspirin and a drink of WWWW&BV, but these are the kind of aches that feel good. We know they are from a good weekend workout, and riding the back countryside with smiles on our faces.

Hope you will join us here sometime in beautiful October to ride together in our country RED's and gold.If you are not into horseback riding around our ranch country, we invite you to just come join us, enjoy our ranch setting, have a cup of tea, or sit back with a beer, or maybe we could just go to Walla Walla and visit a few of the 64 world class wineries and tasting rooms for a day. Yep, those folks on the Washington side of our river valley are becoming Californicated. Come any weekend and just relax, leave the driving to us.
Gitty-up.

Dale --- another weekend in the life at McKuster Ranch

12" of fresh snowfall, so let's just go trout fishing.

Stardate 105-807

Columbus Day Weekend... Kittee declares it to be a legal Custer Law Office (CLO) holiday.
At our Pendleton Back Country Horsemen meeting last Wednesday evening, Kittee and I were part of the club's formation to make a back county horseback ride into the Desolation Creek area of the North Fork John Day River area on Saturday. The Desolation Creek area is about 25-30 mile from nowhere in northeast Oregon, at the base of the Elkhorn Mountain Range. In the late 1800's it was a big gold mining area, and thereafter the film set for "Paint Your Wagon" -the movie. We have fished this area a number of times when I owned Blue Mountain Anglers, and we lived in PDT. Having moved to Milton-Freewater we, have not been out in that country for over 5 years and felt it was time to go see it again on horseback. It is beautiful country, generally with no one else in sight and we were eager to go back to do a horseback ride through the area.
Kittee took Friday off from CLO to cleanup/warm up our rides, Misty & Nugget, and help in the preparation for our ride of Saturday. We clean out Blue, the horse trailer, and got everything ready for a 6 a.m. departure on Saturday morning. Having petted all our horses, goats, outdoor cats it was after dark getting back to the house and we found a telephone message from Forrest (our PDT Back Country Horsemen point man who lives in Ukiah) saying that most of Friday there were deer/elk hunters coming out of the Desolation Creek area with a foot or more of fresh snow covering their rigs. He felt it would be best if we called off our plans to go into the Desolation Creek back country. We agreed... don't need to make a run into the high country pulling a trailer full of horses into 12 or more inches of fresh snow.

OH well, now what should we do for this weekend?
Let's ride horses; and go trout fishing in our backyard. So this is what we did...
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Saturday, we saddled up Bobby and Misty, and rode them around for a couple of hours in the back pasture and arena, then I saddled up Justice and while riding him, Kittee did a bareback ride on Shaiela and then saddled up Nugget. We then worked Justice (cue training) with Nugget in the lead. This seemed to work well for the balance of our day's ride/ training session.
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Sunday, we did almost a ditto of Saturday, except Kittee didn't ride Shaiela and spent most of her time riding Bobby hard and fast, while I worked with Justice. After working Bobby and Justice, we rode Misty and Nugget in a mild manner sort of way, just to keep them exercised.
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Monday, Kittee started the morning grooming and saddling Derby. Derby was in a good mind and had been begging us all weekend to give him some work to do, so Kittee did. First she started working him in the round pen, making the rounds and jumps. Then she put him under saddle, first time since Friday, July 13th, and worked him some more, then she eased into his saddle. Again, Derby worked and acted like a champion ranch horse... one handsome, wonderful fella. Did we mention that Derby is a prize quarter horse - great grandget of Poco Bueno and a strong, smooth ride? Did I mention that I love my horse?

While Kittee was working Derby in the round pen and paddock, I was prepping Justice for another training session. Justice is a very easy horse to handle, but a bit difficult to control. We bought Justice this past summer from a boarder, and we understood that he had been a camp stock horse. Justice is mostly or all Arabian, and we are finding that his camp behavior is rather bomb proof but he's still difficult in the bit. We are also finding that he is much like Kittee's Shaiela under saddle... when allowing him to be a real saddle horse in open space, he has Arabian horse attitude, loves to run, and has a very smooth ride.
Anyway, after getting Derby warmed up and Justice ready to ride, we headed for our riverside riding arena.
Kittee and I both rode Justice to continue developing his McKuster Ranch training.
Not only does Justice have a hard mouth, he likes to run sideways down the arena track; so we have some work to do with Justice.

After our arena workout with Justice and Derby, I saddled up Misty and Kittee slid onto Nugget and finished her day of riding going bareback on her 1000 lbs. playboy/#1 pet.

While riding Misty in the arena, Kittee rode around the back pasture with Nugget, enjoying a number of stops and this beautiful day's viewing of our countryside. As we completed our day of horseback riding both of our backs had a need for an Aleve, and an evening shot of WWWW&BV. But we were not yet finished with our day's activities so a beer and aspirin with lunch would have to do.

After our lunch break and having a few minutes to sit back and relax, Kittee had some client legal work to take care of and I prepped myself to do a little wet-wade trout fishing in the backyard.

Since Saturday there was rain/mostly cloudy weather in our holiday forecast. We didn't have a drop of wet here at the ranch the entire weekend. Monday afternoon it did cloud up a bit and the weather was perfect for casting a fly.

After Kittee got most of her client contact work done, we both eased back to the river. It was a beautiful golden autumn afternoon, with temperature in the upper 60°. We had been seeing October Caddis flying around the ranch for a couple of weeks, so an Elk Hair Caddis/Stimulator would be the order of the day.

While Kittee took a seat at Solitary Sanctuary, I went downstream to ease into the river. As I approached the easy river access/ jumping-in spot, there jumped up a nice 4-6 point buck that was sleeping beside the river. That was a beautiful sight as he ran downriver into the heavy river underbrush. Having entered the river I fished upstream, noticing a lot of small rises around all the newly placed fish structures we (CTUIR/BPA) had put into place 6 weeks ago. Using a #10 Orange Stimulator, I caught nothing for the first hundred yards or so, working upstream.

Even without making a hookup, it was a most beautiful afternoon, with a golden hue on the water/in the trees, 49° wet wading water temp, and anticipation of what was to come to my fly, it felt great. When I got to the second cross river weir structure and rootwads, I found what I was looking for. As I laid my fly next to the rootwad, just behind the rock structures there as a sipping snout that rose to the occasion. A nice 13" redband trout... oh for the joy of it all. Having carefully released this beauty, I climbed over the rocks, and fish the pool on the upriver side of the structure. This now is a wonderful trout habitat of knee deep to waist deep water for about 100+ yards upriver. Fishing through this stretch of water, I hooked up and released maybe a dozen nice little 7-8" trout. As I got to the upper end of our pasture property/our quick fishing trip takeout, I hooked another nice 12" redband. I walked this fella back downstream to relocate it in the new fish friendly portion of McKuster Ranch river run. With that, I had about an hour or so fishing time, caught some nice fish and decided to come out of the river, with quite chilled toes, and rejoined Kittee at Solitary Sanctuary.

We headed back to the house weaving our way through the gelding herd, and giving everyone a few strokes, and pulled Ollokot in for his evening feeding.

Walla Walla River Bluebutts... this is Walla Walla River Valley Bluebutt season and this weekend they were out in mass. These little bugs are about the size of a small common aphid and have a very fuzzy blue butt/posterior on them. We rarely see them when there is a breeze blowing as they are next to nothing in size, but in still air they are everywhere.These little guys appear at this time every year since we have lived here, and we have seen them nowhere else, but this valley.

As the sun had sank into the southwestern sky on Monday, we were ready to call it a day and had a most wonderful holiday weekend, that we hadn't gone anywhere to enjoy.A wonderful way not to burn fuel for three days, and just enjoy riding, resting, communing with The Great Spirit, with a little fishing around the ranch to top it all off. Let us know when you can join us sometime, we would be glad to have you here.

P.S. a couple of weeks ago Kittee took off her spurs. Yesterday after riding/doing training work with Justice, I decided to hangup my spurs next to my ole fishing buddy's picture here in the ranch office.All our riding partners now seem to be getting the hang of neck reining and leg pressure cues to follow our lead around the ranch, along the trails of northeast Oregon.

Happy Trails, tight lines, and wet dreams,
Dale --- a holiday weekend at McKuster Ranch