Brands. The return address for 3 million livestock in Colorado.
Chris Whitney grabbed a pair of worn leather gloves from his back pocket, pulled them on with his teeth and stoked the campfire and the red-hot branding irons which read Lazy T Reverse F. The young calves were restless and noisy. Whitney looked across the Uncompaghre Valley at the towering snow-capped peaks of the Cimarrons and San Juans. It would be his last spring roundup at his family’s ranch in Ridgway, Colorado, before he...
An Irish Storyteller
In the town of Ballybay, in the County of Monaghan, four roads converge beside Lough Mór. The Dromore River meanders south of this Irish town. Tommy Makem, The Godfather of Irish Music, sang about a young lass in Ballybay who had a wooden leg to which she tied a string and played it like a fiddle. Along Clones Road sat an old nursing home where another storyteller was born in 1951. A nun wrapped the infant, Mick Bolger, in a blanket...
Cowboy rhymes with thyme
Cowboys driving cattle after the Civil War cooked on hot, smoky coals and recited homemade poetry. They flavored their beans with molasses and stories. The chuckwagon was the kitchen cabinet. Poems were the entertainment. Mix in some rain and dust, add a heavy dose of lonesome, and a pinch of Irish storytelling, Scottish seafaring, Mexican horsemanship and African improvisation and you have the original recipe. John...
A Mount Evans fixture
Karl Snyder has been driving from Boulder, Colorado (5,430 ft above sea level) to the top of Mount Evans (14,264 feet ASL) to shoot photographs ever since he got his first driver’s license way back when. The Forest Service rangers know him. The staff at the Echo Lake Lodge know him. And anyone who has searched the Internet for information on the trip up the highest paved road in North America knows his website. Coming out of the...
Pursuing marriage
Lisa Anderson asks her young adult listeners why they aren’t pursuing marriage, questioning their dating styles, their cohabitation and their infatuation with their careers, trying to give them a vision for marriage and help them understand that it is critical to their future. Anderson sees her role as encouraging her 39,000 listeners to move beyond “adultescence”, an ambiguous developmental stage between adolescence and adulthood....