Our First Month At The Ranch
The idea of starting a cattle ranch in the 21st century is nearly an impossible dream.
A homestead or a farm, sure, but a Ranch?!? What even is a ranch?
If you look up the definition of a ranch in Websters Dictionary it is a “A large farm for raising horses, beef cattle, or sheep.” Which of course is not very clearly defined.
For me ranching is a way of life, it’s about working with the livestock and land in harmony with each other. It’s not about the number of acres or animals in your herd or flock.
So when we moved to Spray and started a “ranch” we were doing what we could with what we bring the 160 acres of irrigated farm land into something that I had dreamed would be come much bigger, not only in the number of acres we’d manage, but in the impact it would have on the ecosystem.
To most folks 160 acres would certainly qualify as a large farm, but not in the eyes of ranchers across the west. This was irrigated farm land, but I didn’t want to limit my thoughts and beliefs to what we could accomplish there, so to me and my family it was our ranch.
Pretty minimal in comparison to the 5,000+ acre ranches that my great-grandpa Patrick had passed on.
The challenges came early and often on our little ranch.
Our first week at the ranch a major wind storm came threw and destroyed two of our only sources of shade, our patio umbrella and our pop-up shade tent.
Then within a few days the earwigs over took our camper. I remember countless times one of us sucked an earwig up our straw. I still can’t believe Julie didn’t call it quits after that happened to her or one of the girls.
Instead of packing up and heading back to the safety of the city and my career, we took it in stride and quickly found out just how amazing the smallmouth bass fishing was on our property.
Even though our girls were young, they quickly started catching bass nearly every cast. The fishing really was amazing, the John Day River was actually ranked as one of the top small mouth bass fishing rivers west of the Mississippi River.
The river and bass fishing saved us and really was one of the great joys of that chapter in our life. The river was the perfect depth where the girls could advance their swimming skills, many times by hanging on the back of our trusty yellow lab Kenworth.
It wasn’t long before we started getting 100 degree days, between the heat, dust, earwigs and tiny size of the camper nobody was sleeping though. My dad had helped us setup a window air conditioner when we first setup camp, but the joys of cool air were quickly ruined by the easy access it created for even more earwigs.
Countless nights I’d wake up to someone screaming because an earwig was crawling across their face.
We really didn’t have any internet access and only one bar of cell service if any. So we’d typically dive the 3 miles into Spray to borrow internet from the Spray school or River Bend Motel. This is also where I’d work those 4 hours a day for my part time job as a Project Controls Analyst with ALIGO.
For whatever reason we never did a Google search on how to get rid of earwigs until a year or two later that we learned that you could use a tuna can or sardine can and fill it halfway up with vegetable oil to make an excellent earwig trap.
I’ll chalk that up to one of the many lessons learned and things I’d wish I’d known before we started our ranch.
There was no shade at our homesite so the scorching sun and lack of shade quickly became too much for us and we needed to relocate our camper. Our 160 acres was setup for farming so it had a large hay shed which made a great shade area for our camper, but the dust was absolutely awful there as it had a dirt floor. Almost nearly as important as the shade, there weren’t any earwigs under the hay shed.
After a few days of us living under the hay shed Olivia started getting sick. We thought she was starting to get a fever after a day or two and as luck would have it one of our neighbors Judy Fischer was walking by and we asked if we could borrow a thermometer from her. She gave it to us and we were very grateful as the store, yes there’s just one in Spray, had closed hours before.
Olivia fever was pretty low for the first 24 hours, but then jumped up to 104. Julie didn’t hesitate when she saw the spike in fever and we drove three hours to Bend OR to get Olivia to the ER.
It’s a very good thing that Julie didn’t hesitate because the doctors said that Olivia had developed pneumonia and they’d need to treat her overnight.
Fortunately we hadn’t yet brought any livestock to the property so we were able to regroup without having to bring Olivia back to the dusty little camper.
Julie and I decided we needed a better place to stay and we were so very fortunate that Julie’s cousin offered to rent her 5th wheel camper to us for the summer. It was amazing and we are forever grateful to Elizabeth for offering it to us.
So to wrap up our first month at the ranch we drove over to Boise Idaho and picked up our new home for the summer. A 40' camper with an all important bedroom door. We set it up under the hayshed and got back to fishing and chasing my dream of raising 5th generation ranchers.
Reliving the story of our first month in Spray gives me even more appreciation for just how much grace my wife Julie offered me during this time while I was chasing this dream with her and the girls.
Thanks babe. :)
Nate Campbell ~ Founder The Ranching Life
PS: I’ll be sharing more about our Ranching Life as well as the Ranching Life of other ranchers here on this blog. If you know of anyone who has a story to tell about their ranching journey, or if you’ve enjoyed our story, please comment below.
