“Moving the sheep” is our family’s understated idiom for the 30-mile trek that we and the sheep make each fall from the high mountain pastures back to our home place for winter. It’s one of the biggest events in our ranching calendar and marks a turning point in the year as well. The fall sheep drive coincides with the shortening of days and the nip in the air which remind us that the long warm days of summer are coming to an end for another year.
This yearly overland trek from our summer grazing grounds high in the mountains back home to our winter pastures in Tierra Amarilla is a significant undertaking, but one that we look forward to because it gives us an opportunity to connect with our animals, with the land, and with each other. Friends, children, and even grandchildren from all across the US gather for the two-day affair to lend a hand.
Some help with the herding on horseback or on foot and others drive the trucks and trailers and work as flaggers, protecting the herders and the sheep from traffic while we’re on the roads. Moving down the mountainside with the sheep, we revel in the exquisite beauty of a northern New Mexico autumn, full of brilliant blue skies and bright yellow aspen groves.
As with many things at Shepherd’s Lamb, our fall sheep drive is a happy mix of the traditional and the modern. Though we use our cell phones to communicate and lunch arrives in a pickup truck, we’re also reenacting a seasonal movement of livestock that has been part of the rhythm of life for pastoral peoples around the world for thousands of years, a way of grazing livestock that involves a seasonal movement of the animals between summer and winter pastures to take advantage of seasonal variations in feed and temperature within the local region. We’re proud to share that tradition of a largely-forgotten way of life with our children, grandchildren, and with you.
