Archive for the ‘Cattle ranching’ Category

Hello Winter!

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Winter has arrived at Echo Valley, and with it comes a photographer's paradise!

As the cold front hit most of BC, we experienced an extreme dip in the thermometer; but still no wind or rain, just beauiful sunshine, glistening snowflakes, starry skies and crisp fresh air.

A winter wonderland!

Baan Thai

Joy watching over the cows below - the view from outside the lower creekside cabin.

I love everything about this place! There are different perspectives everywhere you go!

Every day is a new visual masterpiece!

The lonely lanterns

The original ranch cabin

Benji doing his rounds ...

Many spectacular nights nearing and passing the blue moon

Cows are always curious, no matter what the weather may bring

... and friendly too

It will be fun to see what spring brings from a bovine perspective

Norm and Nan enjoying a walk with the dogs visiting and treating the animals

I ventured to town only to be enthralled by the beautiful winter scenes on Jesmond Road

last year's fire makes for a dramatic winterscape

The charred trees create interesting contrasts amongst the glistening snow

Even Ashcroft has snow! Now this is rare!

A nice view of the Lookout Lodge and the lower trout pond from the lower horse corral

Every horse has time for a visit during feeding

What a wonderful and vast environment for horses to play!

A stable with a view!

Nothing better than endless freedom to roam

Alpenglow

Winter Solstice is only a few weeks away. I could not think of a better place to experience the change of seasons in Canada! And I look at the EV stars every night and thank them for giving me this opportunity. Beauty is found in most places, however it sometimes requires some searching.

But here, all we have to do is open our eyes :)

Never a dull moment!

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

January 1st 2010 –> January 2nd 2010

There is never a dull moment when you have cattle on your ranch!

No sooner had we delivered two cows and twenty Black Angus calves to Echo Valley Ranch the “fun” started when seven of the smaller calves managed to squeeze under the fence by the watering trough, through a gate that had been left open by Brian, and started their wandering around looking for their cow mum.

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Delivering calves to Echo Valley Ranch

Friday, January 1st, 2010

December 30th 2009

In addition to being a guest ranch and spa, Echo Valley Ranch is also designated as being a cattle ranch with a one hundred head cow/calf permit and a 10,000 acre Crown Land lease attached to the property to serve as open range grazing for the herd. For those that do not know, a one hundred head permit equates to 85 bred cows resulting in 85 cow/calf pairs, ten heifers and five bulls. That adds up to 185 animals if every cow “takes” and you do not lose any of them. This is what we started off with as city slickers back nineteen years ago and we did not have a clue as to how to manage such an operation. We had a real cowboy to help us however, Glen Brady, a true blue Native who knew exactly what to do so all was well.

Four years ago we sold our herd primarily because the restrictions placed on the import of cattle by the USA made it just about impossible to be in the ranching business; it was not so much a matter of the USA putting a ban on the import of Canadian beef (dead or alive), because one cow in Alberta was found to have the mad cow disease, it was because most of the BC cattle were slaughtered/processed in the USA, and Canada not having sufficient capacity to fulfill that function for themselves! I discovered this when my idea of getting all of the local ranchers together and selling good beef directly to our own supermarkets was blown out of the water – there was no place in BC that could process the beef for us!!

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