Playing catch up for the week!

This week has seen the temperatures soar to the upper fifties with welcome sunshine and snow melt. The bare ground has sure been a welcome sight around here. The past week has been a busy one and I am now playing catch up on this blog with these photos!

These mule deer have spent most of the winter enjoy a neighbor's haystack, in one of his distant pastures. I think they also travel about a half mile from there to another neighbor who actually feeds them. They are in better shape than many of the deer in our area due to their diet. This has been a hard winter on wildlife, horses, cattle and people here. It seems like we are in a perpetual winter, cold, lots of snow and lots of wind. We have all enjoyed the past week of spring like temps. 

The warm weather almost had "our" creek, Knutson Creek, running. It never did get going though before the latest cold weather arrived. Kena was reluctant to cross the creek due to the ice underneath it, I am sure. However, she had crossed it earlier to get where she was! This photo was taken on Thursday of this week. The bare ground is snow covered again after snow last night, although we have maybe just one inch of snow. We are forecast to have 2-4 inches tomorrow and heavier amounts later in the week. Thankfully no deep below zero temperatures though! I sure hope that by the end of March we see the end of winter, as we will start calving the first week of April.We do still get snow on occassion after that.

Ty, aka Ty the Kitty Guy, is seldom seen in the house in nice weather. When the cold and snow come, he goes out just for a few minutes and heads back in. He spends his time following the sunshine thru the house. This frosty morning, he was soaking up the sun while watching tv.

With the coming of nicer weather last weekend we went to a big bull sale. It was about two hours from where we live. We had never been to this particular bull sale, although we have some cattle from those bloodlines. My brother-in-law, a large animal vet, had always told us we had to take in this sale. He does most of this ranch's vet work and knows the cattle and the people very well. It was amazing to experience this sale. It attracted bull buyers from IA, TN, NE, SD, ND, MN, WI. We were told by "the vet", that at the start of the sale, there were 1000 people in the ranch's sale barn, it was standing room only. It was still completely full when we got there two hours after starting time!  They had 400 Angus bulls to sell and about 200 heifers. The top selling bull went for $275,000 and another for $250,000. (We own a bull who is a son of the $250,000 bull. But we sure didn't pay even a tiny fraction of that for him!) There were several others that went for over $100,000 and the average on all of the bulls was $10,472. While we were there we never saw a bull that sold for less than $6600! The average on the heifers was $8865. It was fun to observe but we didn't buy anything! The sign I took the photo of says it all, $$$$! This outfit does produce outstanding cattle and there is no doubt about that!

This sign is one we wish referred to oil activity on our place. They have been drilling a new well several miles from our place for the past month or so. The oil activity is picking up here, south of where the major North Dakota activity has been. Now if the company that leased from us will only get busy on our place and get us a well!

I took this photo of my favorite sign of all time a week ago when we still had a lot of snow cover. This sign has been up for over four years along I-94 just outside of Wibaux, MT. I am glad that it has had such longevity, it makes me smile every time I see it! I just had to share it!