Here in the high country we have passed another milestone. We’ve had a couple of nights in a row where the low temperature went below freezing.
As a kid who was born in Hollywood and raised in a SoCal orange orchard, any night below freezing seems like winter to me. I know better now, of course, and take nights like the last couple in stride as part of autumn.
Like it or not, this is the end of the growing season here. It began when nighttime lows stopped going below freezing in the spring.
From bitter experience, local farmers know the only crops you can reliably grow hereabouts are fast-developing grasses - basically fodder for animals - and some of the grains. Most years the irrigated fields will produce two cuttings of hay or alfalfa.
It is remarkable how the locals here and in the Swiss alps do the same agriculture. Both feed grasses to livestock.
At a somewhat lower elevation in Idaho 50 miles west of here, most of the nation’s potatoes are grown. Being about 1000 feet lower makes the necessary difference.
My valley was once a dairying center but no longer. Now cow-calf beef operations predominate along with more than a few large remudas of horses. There is even one commercial herd of bison raised for meat.
Interestingly, we also raise elk for market here, though nobody speaks of it in those terms. Both the state and the Feds feed hay to wild elk in winter.
The area then makes money off the hunting licenses and dudes coming in from out of state paying outfitters big money to take them on horseback into the national forests to shoot an elk. Locals hunt elk too, for meat. A bull elk will feed a family most of the winter, and the meat isn’t bad.
The electrician who wired my new house 25 years ago told me he made as much money as an outfitter as he did the other ten months of the year as an electrician. Guiding fishing and hunting is a local occupational niche, albeit not one you can do year round.
The public schools no longer have the first day of hunting season as a holiday, as the seasons have gotten too complicated with special times for bow hunters, cross bow and maybe even for smooth bore muskets.
Roughly a week from now we head south to winter in the desert north of Las Vegas. It is mostly warm and dry and my neighbors golf all winter, cursing at the Canada geese who have also migrated south and love the water hazards and greens’ grass.