Passes & Canyons Blog

How the heck do we get through this herd?

If you’ve been around the West much you may have encountered this sort of thing yourself: There’s a sheep herder moving his flock, or maybe it’s a bunch of cowboys moving a herd of cattle to new pasture. Either way, they’re taking up the entire road and you’re kind of stuck.

It happened to Judy and the kids on a summer camping trip many years ago. They were going along this little-used road when they came upon sheep. Everywhere. The sheep herder was apologetic and said he’d get them moved out of their way as quickly as possible but Judy and the kids were fascinated watching the sheep dogs do their work. Take your time, they told him.

It also happened to the OFMC one year. We were heading northeast out of Chama, New Mexico, toward Antonito, Colorado, over Cumbres and La Manga Passes when we encountered a herd of cattle. The cowboys and their dogs were doing their best to keep the herd moving but they could not have been less concerned about this group of bikers being held up by the cattle.

We didn’t see that we had much option other than to wait, but that might have been a long wait. Not certain what to do, we did nothing for a bit. Then a guy in a large pick-up came up behind us, sized up the situation, and pulled past us and started blowing his horn as he came up on the cows’ rears. They started jostling and pushing the crowd away, opening up a path for the pick-up.

We were thrilled. Let’s go guys, make some noise!!

We did our best to fall in behind the truck, though it got further ahead of us after a while and the herd filled in the space. All of us were blowing our horns, the Harley boys were revving their engines as loudly as they could, and we just counted on the cattle to get out of our way, which they did, sort of.

So we’re shoving our way through the herd and John, who was leading, took to pulling some shenanigans. We didn’t get it at the time but he told us later that he would deliberately ride through a cow pie and then rev his engine to break traction and–hopefully, for him–throw chunks of the cow pie up onto those of us behind him. Nice guy, John. Fortunately for the rest of us, his plan didn’t work.

This was slow going, and a good number of cows left the road and started climbing up the hill on the left or down the slope on the right. The cowboys and dogs kept busy guiding them back to the herd. And we finally got through. That was one unexpected highlight to this trip.

Now every time I go over those passes I wonder if I’m going to run into another herd. And I try to identify the stretch along which it happened but you’re out in the forest, you know, and one stand of trees looks pretty much like any other stand of trees.

But it makes a great story.

Biker Quote for Today

“What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the journey.” — Ted Simon, Jupiter’s Travels