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Horses Montana Ranch Snow Work

First Montana Thaw and Website Updates

After the horrible winter weather we had in December, January was pretty mild. We had a couple below zero weeks, but there wasn’t any snow or wind or anything else that would be considered “bad weather.”

I finally was getting used to all the snow. I was hoping to get 3-6 feet drifts, like we got last January… and it starts to thaw… Normally it doesn’t thaw until March or April, but our south-facing hill has been without snow for weeks already.

I saw the sun setting and decided to take a ride up our hill to see what kind of pictures I could get.

In this first one you can see the Mission Mountains and a series of sledding paths that we created in December and January. 😉

Ashton Anna Home and Montana Mountains

Here’s a shot of our house and Bo, the extremely “skiddish” Wild Mustang.

Ashton Anna Home and Montana Mountains

Here’s Jett (Carol’s other wild mustang) in his new head shot with a nice backdrop.

Continue reading “First Montana Thaw and Website Updates”
Categories
Animals Chickens Ducks Horses Mocha Ranch Rosco

A Winter Morning

We woke up this morning as we always do, and we went out to feed the animals. This time I brought a camera to take pictures of all of the ridiculous animals.

Because of the weather, we’ve been keeping the below three horses in the “large paddock.” Today, we let them out to run around in the field. They ran around for a good 10 minutes.
Ashton Anna's Horses

Ashton Anna's Horses
From left to right is Maple, Onora and Aspen.

While I was out in the pasture I took a picture of our house in the snow:
Ashton Anna's House

Continue reading “A Winter Morning”
Categories
Snow

Snowman v1.0

Donald and Amber made our first snowman of the year. Hopefully there will be many more to come:

Ashton Anna's Snowman
Anna got a “Make Your Own Snowman Kit” from Diana Henderson for Christmas, and Anna knitted a scarf to match. Here’s a picture of the builders standing next to their creation so you can see how “ginormous” the snowman really is:
Ashton Anna's Snowman
(This was before they added the arms.)

Enjoy,
Ashton Anna

Categories
Snow Trips & Activities

Sledding in Montana

We have had 3 to 4 feet of snow fall here in Montana so far this Winter. Right now there is about a foot of snow on the ground. And since I’ve never gone sledding for more than a couple of feet, we went out and hit our neighbor’s hill. Anna purchased a sweet snow tube at the beginning of last summer, and we had some 1 person tubes we used on the river. Here’s Anna and Ashton in our river tube:

Ashton Anna Sledding

We’d estimate that this slope is 300 feet long. Here’s a video of some of the crazy slopes we took:

Then we got tired of hiking that ridiculous hill, so we had Cory pull us behind his old Toyota Land Cruiser.

Cory and his Land Cruiser

Happy New Year,
Ashton Anna

Categories
Animals Cows

1/2 a Cow

First off, if you didn’t know, our neighborhood is awesome. Everyone is very down to earth and nice. One of our neighbors, raises cows. Yes, it’s the same neighbor that herds his cows in front of our house. Our horses have gotten better about the cows now that they’ve seen them a number of times, but they still need some work.

Anyway, to get on with the story, we decided to purchase half of a small cow from this neighbor. We talked about it last winter, and last Thursday (day before Halloween), we get a call saying, “Your half a cow is ready to be butchered. How would you like it cut.” We didn’t have any sort of warning, but it was too late to do anything else, so we told them what we wanted, and today (Monday), Anna went and picked up 3 heavy boxes full of meat.

Here’s some pictures of the tiny fridge that Anna purchased filled with most of the meat (about 30lbs had to go into the kitchen freezer):

Freezer Closed
Freezer Open
Freezer full of cow

We got:
81.85lbs of Ground Beef
106.84lbs of steaks, roasts, ribs, etc.
Totaling 188.69lbs of Beef

The cost of the 1/2 cow including butchering came to about $723 (approx. $3.83/lb). Which not a scream of a deal, but the cow is grown on the pasture right next to my house, so it’s 58x better than what you would by in the store. =)

(Random side note: We just realized recently that both Anna and I (Ashton) have “O” Blood Type, which thrives on meat. Good thing, too.)

That’s all from the Farm today,
Ashton Anna