California Branding Season

California Branding Season = Cowboy Social Hour

California Branding Season is so much more than working cattle – it the “social season” of the Western lifestyle! Ranching and cowboying can be an isolating job just as photography and other creative entrepreneurship can be isolating. You spend your days alone, checking on calves (emails), water troughs (blog posts), and fixing fence lines (editing). So when you finally get to go to town and see your friends, it’s a big deal. Branding season can kind of be like cowboy prom or feel a lot like a California Cattleman’s convention! You show off your new custom-made chaps or saddle and the young horse you’re bringing along through the ranks. Riding a finished bridle horse in the branding the pen is kind of like the equivalent of Prom King or Queen and everybody wants to know how its bred and what ranch it came off of.

Since branding season is so much work, it requires many hands to get the job done efficiently. Cows and calves need to be handled with care and quickly in order to minimize stress on the animals. It’s a wonder more cowboys and cowgirls aren’t stunt doubles in Hollywood with the amount of athleticism and finesse it takes to work in a branding pen.

A typical branding day starts before the dawn. If you’re part of the gathering crew you get up and make a pot of coffee that can slap you in the face from 5 yards away. Go saddle your horse and help gather the holding field in an unspoken football play formation because it’s too early for words and everyone knows their jobs anyways. Right about the time the gathering crew comes in and is halfway through sorting the calves off the cows, the rest of the help for the day shows up with horses saddled and hot coffee in Yeti thermos’s. This is 2018 after all and a double insulated tumbler with 32 oz of Starbucks quick brew is critical.

The chatting and catching up begins and everyone gets ready to work. Ropers and ground crew rotate throughout the day and horses are switched to keep from getting too tired. It can be hot and dusty or muddy and brisk depending on the amount of rainfall California has seen that year. Regardless, the work gets done with laughter, camaraderie and ideally rocky mountain oyster or jalapeño popper appetizers being passed around. When all the calves are doctored, branded and returned to their mothers, it’s lunchtime. An amazing home-cooked meal prepared most likely over an open flame that would put some of Emeril Lagasse’s restaurants to shame. The herd is settled and turned back out as the trailers start to pull out. See you next branding friends!

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