We woke at 5 am with a rooster at the
door of our tent crowing his heart out. The guys laughed at me
when I threw a pillow at him and yelled "Go Away!".
Minutes later several diesel trucks pulled into the campground
and someone was shouting orders a clank, clank, clank noise sounded
like someone was banging on pipes. I peeked out the window and
said "There are four cowboys building a steel fence six
feet from the back of our tent!" About 20 minutes later
a dozen cowboys on horseback came driving 900 head of yearling
cattle down the hill. The noise and confusion were immense. However,
the cows were terrified of so much civilization as this rustic
resort presented. They turned tail and ran back up the hill --
stampede fashion. The horses were lathered up, the cowboys were
yelling "hey! yaa!"and there was lots of confusion
and dust and whistling and mooing and lowing and the sound of
3600 or so hooves. We felt like we were in the middle of a John
Wayne movie. Imagine. As the cows ran off up the hill (leaving
many calling cards) the rancher came over and said "Sorry
to wake you up so early! The forest service said we had to take
them across this bridge to avoid polluting the river. Guess we're
going to have to swim them across now." We said "No
problem! Thanks for the western style entertainment! He dismounted,
handing the reins to a woman and drove away in one of the trucks.
She explained that she is his wife and they are from the FlatCreek
Ranch in Idaho. They told us about the drive and the intern cowboys
from Japan that are with them for a year long program. We packed
up and drove up the canyon to see the sun rising and a miles-long
single file string of cows and cowboys going up a canyon trail
to the ridge on the other side. Hopefully this paints a good
enough picture as our camera unfortunately broke the day before.
We bought a new camera in Twin Falls.