The Our Hike gals were in Auburn, CA, in the Sierra foothills the other day. The day before they met a real live cowboy in the hills:

Our morning started out having coffee with Cowboy Ed and talking about what it’s like to be a cowboy in the Sierras. This guy works so hard that it’s crazy. He’s got cows all over the place and he’s in the middle of rounding them up now. So he’s up before the crack of dawn and off with his horse of choice and his three dogs. He’s got some sad stories about the cows when the fire came through in 2001. He really loves his cows, and having 600 of them, he still knows them all. It’s amazing. He said during the fire, the cows were getting away okay – they just kept moving away, until the firefighters had to light a backfire, which is common in fighting wildfires, so when the fire gets there, it stops because there’s nothing left to burn. So the cows got trapped. Some ended up in a narrow canyon with no way out, and some came walking out from ground so hot that their hooves were burned off. He had to put some down, and you could just see as he talked about it how it bothered him . He just stared kind of blankly, put his head down, and explained how it just put a scar on him to see that. I felt pretty bad for him. He’s a neat guy, and the way he talks to both his dogs and his horses is so gentle. I just have a lot of respect for him – and he knows SO much about the land out here. The plants, the animals, the weather… it’s like he’s just part of it.

So people develop an affection for cows… how about that.