Big Hollow Fire

On Saturday, we got cows trailed up the east mountain.  On the way home, Earl noticed a campfire-sized puff of smoke up in the hills a little bit out of town.  He called his brother who is on the volunteer fire dept. and told him but it was already too late.  This picture was taken about 40 minutes after it started.  The wind was blowing like crazy and combined with the DRY conditions, turned that little puff of smoke into a dragon.  I cannot put into words how extremely fast this fire moved.  There was honestly not any chance of ever catching it fast enough to get it under control and extinguished!

We were on the divide north of town on our way back from Nephi.

It was hard to get a picture of the fires during the day.  The wind whipped the smoke around so much that it made it hard to see where the fire lines were.  You tell when a cedar tree went up because there would be a big burst of flames shoot out and up and then a big ball of black smoke.  We had the Salt Creek fire in 2008 that burned all the way around the north and east of town and into the same area of this fire.  After the last fire and the wet year that we had last year, the grass up in the hills was waist high and DRY.  I don't think that anything is grazed up in there except the wildlife and they didn't even make a dent on the feed during the winter.

I stayed up watching the fire until about 2am.  The winds changed around midnight and forced it back towards town and I just couldn't stop watching.  This was the sun coming up through the smoke on Sunday morning.  Our house and the whole valley was filled with smoke but at least the wind had died down.

Earl's brother, Jess fought the fire all night.  They spent a successful but scary night trying to keep the fire from jumping the Big Hollow road.  I took these pictures around 12:45pm.  The wind had started up again like crazy and the fire did get across the road and went everywhere.  You can see on the right of the picture (above) where the fire originally started.

On the left, it is on the north side of Big Hollow.  We also heard in church that the Anderson's had lost about 80 ewes in the fire. 

The fire view from Chester.  I was amazed because from Fountain Green, we could only see one small area from the fire.  Here, you can tell that it had burned all the way across the  mountains towards Fairview.

The view from north of Fairview.  Jess was working the fire over by hilltop and was able to get Earl's dad's water truck out to Fairview before it burned.  Luckily, Warren moved his sheep on the mountain early this year. 

We went to Millburn on Sunday to see if some friends from Indianola needed help getting cows out.  They had ended up gathering and herding them out in the middle of the night and then had to evacuate their brand new house and leave the other herd and horses to fend for themselves.  I cannot believe how much havoc and destruction this fire caused and I am so grateful that nobody was hurt!

There was still smoke and small flareups all over our side of the mountain yesterday afternoon but then when it got dark, we could still see the fires dotted everywhere. 

 We are in desperate need of rain!  It was a super dry winter and we have not had any rain or moisture in over 2 months.  We are not going to be able to put up any of our meadow hay and have not had nearly enough pasture to feed.  Such is the life of a rancher....

Horses

Okay, so here is a quick update from our new addition.  We turned Twinkie and babe out on the hill and then one day went out and found.......

a  little red roan filly!!! 

 We are still trying to decide on a name but are kind of leaning toward Twizzler or Twizzy.

(It's kind of our thing to name horses after candy bars or treats.) 

On a sadder note, we also lost 2 horses this spring.  On March 1, we found Pepsi dead out on the hill.  She was, of course, our high dollar cutting horse and was totally and completely amazing!!   We had even had her bred this year.  It was a pretty sad loss.

Rooster (Twizzy's dad)

Last week, Earl and Kalon had got some bulls rounded up to go turn out with the cows.  Earl was hauling them in the front of the trailer with Willy and Rooster (Earl's 3 year old colt in training) in the back divider.  The bulls got to fighting and somehow broke open the middle divider gate in the trailer.  Then, the back gate broke and spilled everything out onto the highway.  Luckily, there were no cars behind them.  Willy ended up with a broken leg and we had to put him down.  It was horrible!!!  It's pretty tough to replace a good cow/kid horse!   Rooster was pretty banged up and we have been doctoring him up.  It will be a waiting game to see if he'll ever be the same.

This is Rooster's worst injury a week later...he has plenty more but this is the one we're worrying about.

So, we are out a saddle and 3 horses but as my dad said, "At least it stayed in the barn and not the house".  So true!  We have been blessed in so many other ways and if this is the worst loss that we face, then we will be okay!