Foothill Agrarian: Transhumance in the 21st Century

transhumance (noun): the seasonal migration of livestock, and the people who tend them, between lowlands and adjacent mountains. (Dictionary.com).

Over the last several summers, I've had the opportunity to work with a sheep outfit from the San Joaquin Valley that still practices transhumant grazing. These sheep lamb on alfalfa stubble and in the hills adjacent to the Valley in October and November. Once the lambs are weaned in the spring and the forage quality starts to decline, the ewes are trucked to the desert near Virginia City, Nevada, where the feed is strong and the rams are turned in. In mid-July, the sheep are trucked again, this time to the mountain meadows and sagebrush steppe north of Truckee, on the Tahoe National Forest. And just this last weekend, I had the privilege of helping this outfit load the now-heavily-pregnant ewes at their corrals near Hobart Mills for the trip back to the San Joaquin Valley - another annual cycle complete.

Taking a break the evening before load-out.

Crossing under Highway 89

In some ways, I suppose, our little sheep operation is also transhumant, at least on a micro scale. While our sheep are rarely more than 8 miles from our home, we winter (and lamb out) on foothill rangeland several hundred feet lower in elevation - enough lower, in fact, that the grass starts growing 10-14 days earlier than it does at home. Once we're done lambing in early April, we move back up closer to Auburn, onto our irrigated pasture - where the ewes and lambs will graze until weaning (and where the lambs will graze until fall). Like the larger outfit, we're following the green (in our case, the green means irrigated pasture just a few miles up the road).

While I have done a bit of reading (both academic and otherwise) about transhumance, much of my own understanding of transhumance comes from the stories others have told me - which is itself a characteristic of this system. Transhumance probably pre-dates written language; it certainly pre-dates the printing press! And anyone who's been around a sheepherder knows that storytelling is part of the job - perhaps it comes from working alone for much of the year!

In an era of technology and mechanization, transhumant grazing may seem anachronistic. Rather than harvesting feed (or buying feed harvested by someone else) and taking it to the livestock, we're taking the livestock to the forage. This can be hard work, and often involves lengthy periods of working alone. And yet even in this modern era, I find the notion of matching our production system with the changing seasons and the landscape, of matching our management with what Mother Nature provides, to be relevant both economically and ecologically.

The corrals at daybreak.

Starting to load.

There's always a ewe looking back...

Livestock guardian dogs developed in transhumant grazing
systems - only the dogs who stayed with the flocks
were allowed to reproduce!

Insurance - a few rams stay with each band through the summer
to ensure that the ewes are bred.

My friend Chooch, who manages the operation I helped last weekend, tells stories about staying in the historic old sheep camp in the midst of the operation's Forest Service allotment. This weekend, I learned about the hams that the rancher who built the camp used to hang in the cold box at the camp - along with lambs that the camp tender would butcher to feed the herders. Several years ago, Chooch showed me the scale seals at the scale house at the corrals we shipped out of - the earliest visible sticker was from 1928. He told me that at that time, the lambs would have been shipped from those corrals by rail.

Pat Shanley, an Auburn old-timer we rented pasture from for a couple of years, had similar stories about sheep and cattle going to the mountains. I learned from Pat that there had been another set of corrals along the transcontinental railroad tracks at Cisco Grove (now an exit on Interstate 80) - ranchers would ship their lambs to market in the fall before beginning the long walk back to their winter range in the Sacramento Valley. Pat, who was in his 90s when he passed away several years ago, could remember as a kid hearing the belled sheep being herded up Baxter Grade to the north of his family's ranch each spring. "Usually the Basque herder would have a bottle lamb he couldn't wait to give me," Pat said, "but he always wanted it back when he came through in the fall - I guess he just wanted me to do the work."

Another friend from Lincoln, Bob Wiswell, told me about riding a mule from the home ranch in Lincoln behind his family's sheep - they trailed them through downtown Auburn, up the Foresthill Divide, and into the high country every spring. "I sure hated riding that mule," he told me. Recently, I learned about another family who trailed sheep into the Royal Gorge area west of Truckee. According to the story, they would burn their sheep range every fall when they left, a practice they learned from the Native Americans who were in those mountains before them. The practice, which kept the feed in great condition and reduced the danger of wildfire, was ended in the 1970s.

In Tuolumne County, where I grew up, the transhumant tradition mostly centered around cattle (at least by the time I came along - I've seen photos of sheep in those mountains, too). Many of the foothill ranches around Sonora, Jamestown, and Columbia (and even a few interlopers from neighboring Calaveras County) had Forest Service grazing permits on Sonora and Ebbett's Passes. By the time I knew these families, most of them were trucking their cattle to the mountains, but I do remember the stories about cattle being herded up Highways 108 and 4. And most of these families put bells on their cattle - a sound I still associate with the High Sierra.

Very few operations still trail their livestock between summer and winter range in our part of the world. More people, more fragmentation, and more traffic have made trucking a more attractive option. But even with the use of trucks, much of the preparatory work remains the same. Last Thursday, while I was in the mountains collecting trail cameras for my livestock guardian dog research, I ran into Chooch on the Tahoe National Forest. His herders were staging their bands (1,000+ head of sheep) to come into the corrals over the weekend - the first band was due to ship on Friday morning. This first band was crossing under Highway 89 at Prosser Creek and heading into the corrals, where they would wait overnight. The next band would follow the same route on Friday afternoon (to ship Saturday), and the last band would come into the corrals on Saturday afternoon. This may seem like a simple bit of organization - until you realize that each herder had to make sure his thousand ewes had plenty of forage to graze up until they arrived at the corrals. Trailing the sheep all the way home, I would imagine, would present an entirely different set of logistical challenges!

In our micro-transhumant operation, I dream of walking our sheep between winter pasture and summer pasture (about 5 miles by road), and from our spring pasture to our home place for shearing (about 3 miles). Maybe someday, but my limited experience moving sheep across Mt. Vernon Road or along Shanley Road (near our summer pastures), or even on the private roads in the gated community where we graze in the winter, make me reluctant to give up my truck and trailer. Almost everyone who has to stop to let our sheep pass gets out and takes photos - but the occasional jerk who's in a hurry can ruin my day. Even at our small scale, we've had people refuse to wait until we had sheep off the road - fortunately, we've not had dogs or sheep injured, but I'm always worried about the possibility. And even at our scale, we have to pay attention to logistics - where can we load, where can we unload?

Transhumance is both a production system and a culture - I'll end with a story that really drove this home for me. My friend Rex Whittle, whose family ranches near Angels Camp and still takes cows to the mountains, was in the California Agricultural Leadership Program several years after I completed the two-year fellowship in the 1990s. As I recall, Rex's international trip for the program included a stop in Mongolia, where he stayed with a family of nomadic herders. On a trip that include stops in some of the world's greatest cities, Rex told me, "Even though we didn't speak each other's language, I think I felt most at home in that yurt - it felt like being in cow camp." I felt the same way shipping ewes with Chooch this weekend.