Dennisranch

I decided to show you part of what I did today. I finally got started on the “grandkids” saddle. This is a youth saddle with a 12 inch seat, so it will fit littler riders on up to pretty good sized. I know a few guys who could actually fit in this! For reference, I ride a saddle with a 15 and 1/2 inch seat. 16 inch is pretty normal. So this saddle will be 3/4 sized.

I hope to do quite a bit of tooling and carving on this so that it will be somewhat of a show piece saddle. When the grandkids get to come out to ride with grampa, they will ride in style! 🙂

Here is the saddletree with the first cap on top of the horn and the gullet piece partially glued.

Here is the fork cover, laying upside down. I have glue on the front turnback and will pound it down when the glue is ready. The vee part will have holes punched into both sides and be laced together with a decorative type braid.

Here the horn cap is glued on and waiting for hand sewing. The gullet cover is glued on.

Here the horncap is sewn on and the fork cover is glued on.

Here’s what I ended up with. Gullet covered, fork covered and horn with horncap on and sewed.

Here is a pattern I drew out sometime back, that I hope to use on this saddle. I’ll have to practice with it on a scrap piece of leather first to make sure it will look good on leather. I made mirror images of this pattern in 3 sizes to fit on different parts of the saddle.

This is a picture of a neighboring rancher. This was taken a year ago at his son’s branding. He was 83 years old and still roping and dragging calves to the fire. I hope I can do the same at his age.

Here’s a picture of a tired girl and her watchful watchdog, tanke at the Artist Ride last year. Guess it was a late night the night before! 🙂

Went and fixed the fence the cattle tore down yesterday and found the cow with the missing calf. She had found her calf and jumped back in with the other cows. I just love a good momma cow! 🙂

I also saddled up and went and got a sore footed heifer and put her back in the pasture where she belonged.

The storm blew through yesterday evening and we didn’t have any fires. Hopefully we won’t this summer. After last summer, we are due for a break!

Now if we can just get some good rains throughout the west where it is dry, so we can stop the fires before they start.

Keep you fingers crossed!

Here’s another picture from the Artist ride last year. it was foggy one morning sao I strolled around camp and took a few pic’s. this looks like it could have been taken 130 years ago.

And here’s Tate on Kid when we branded last year. You could hardly see anything in this picture until I went to messing with it.

Cooler weather today and got a small storm that came through this evening. We got a little rain. More to the south of us.

Cindy and I drove down and were looking for a new calf and seeing if the calf and mother got back together. We had yearlings scattered all over. Flies got to biting them and pushed them thru’ a fence. So tomorrow I’ll go fix fence, and then ride and put the cattle back and then go looking for a cow and a calf. Fun, fun!

I just love rain. 🙂

Oh, and I loaded up my firefighting equipment in the back of the pickup. Been a few around the country, so I thought it was best to be prepared. Bad one down near Hot Springs. Lost one guy and quite a few houses.

When ever I gety a few minutes, I have been going back and fiddling around with my photo’s. Any that are too dark or don’t look to good, I see if I can make them batter. These are all from that. The first one is one Kass took of me and Beaver when we branded last summer.

This is one I took at the Artist Ride. I think it looks a lot better now.

Another Artist Ride picture.

I worked a gig up in the Black Hills last night. I got to play along with Hank Harris and Kenny Putnam. They are both great. Kenny was playing the fiddle and had never heard any of the songs I performed, but he is so good that he would just jump in and make the song better. Man! I wish I had talent like that.

Oh well, I bet he can’t build a saddle! 🙂

Yearlings and visitors.

Here’s a picture of the yearling that running in our far north pasture. They belong to two different gentlemen.

Here’s a funky picture of some of the yearlings up north.

These two young men came out today to look at the yearling that are being summered here. The young man on your left side in the picture, owns some of these cattle. The other young man is his brother. They both seemed to enjoy riding out and around the cattle. We also drove down and I doctored a yearling heifer with footrot, using the crossboy and medi-dart. The younger fellow got it all on video on his camera. It was quite fun to do and to watch!

Hot one out there and supposed to stay this way until Sunday. Supposed to get up to 100 on Saturday.

Here’s a couple of pix of the TV cabnet with the doors Chance made.

Sorry Pixie, horse tomorrow maybe.

Happy Independence day from our horser to yours!

I wish I had something sufficiently patriotic to post on here, for a picture, but I don’t. Tho’ if I had taken my camera with me today, I could have taken a picture of a white horse, someone had added red and blue too. Now that is a patriotic horse!

Bu the way, we only found a few fish foolish enough to take our bait today. But we still had some fun!

Peekaboo, I see you!

I probably won’t post anything tomorrow as Tyler, Tris and I are going to go down and meet up with Tate and Gabe and go and see if we can find some fish to bite on my fly line.

Hope you have a patriotic 4th of July! 🙂

Say a prayer for all of our current soldiers and those who have died so we have the right to celebrate this 4th. They are the ones who have made it possible for us to live in this country with the freedoms that we have. If this isn’t such a great country, why do so many want to live here? 🙂