Water Troughs and Hay Bales

 My friend Andrea and her family are visiting, and they had a special request to go down and see the equipment yard. The kids were in heaven as soon as they got there, quickly scampering over old equipment to test it out and drive to exotic locales. Then they found the old water troughs and started bouncing around.

 The sound was fun, as well as jumping from one to the next.

 Then it was into the back of an old truck for an impromptu dance. Desert Boy and Desert Girl were having a delightful time with their new friends.

 Desert Girl took time out to drive an old bathtub.

 Meanwhile, the older kids were looking for the next fun piece of equipment.

 Before long, they spotted some freshly stacked hay and couldn't resist scampering to the top of it.

 We made it!

 Even Desert Girl had to give it a try.

 Then back to a tractor.

The light was getting dim and it was time to head back. But before we made it to the vehicle, one more challenge remained:

 The stair step pile of hay. Who could resist?
(Okay, I could, but that's because I was wearing shorts and flip flops and knew the scratchy hay would make me itch!)

 Desert Boy saw his friends up on the hay and immediately thought that would be fun to do. The only problem was that he was a little too small to climb up by himself.

 So he enlisted some help. What great teamwork!

 Time to pose for a photo at the top.

 Then time to give a shout and head on down.

Ah, the simple pleasures of life!

A Visit to the Old Junkyard

Although most of the old vehicles are in the big, nearly one-acre equipment yard on the ranch, that's not the only place they are. There's an old equipment yard (aka junkyard) that we explored a little bit when our truck was stuck and we had to walk back to get the backhoe. 

Because it's older, the vehicles in it are even more interesting, like this pink and white Buick Special. It has such wonderful lines.

Even with a mangled hood and brush growing up all around it, this old beauty manages to exude classiness.

Do you know what my favorite part of this car is? Go ahead and guess. In fact, you can (just barely) see it in the photo above.

My favorite part is this hood ornament. Isn't it just the coolest? I don't think I've ever seen one more interesting. I'm not quite sure why there's a plane as a hood ornament except to suggest the speediness of the car. Anyway, I'm sold. I would buy this car just for the hood ornament.

(Hint to automakers: start putting cool hood ornaments on cars and your sales will increase. Oh, yeah, and make them more fuel efficient, too.)

Not all the vehicles in the junkyard are so charismatic, like this old truck. Nevertheless, it has an interesting story. After its life as a regular truck ended, it was modified by turning the seat and steering wheel around. I'm not kidding. It became a homemade loader, with the steering in the rear. 

You can see it a little better in this photo. The part on the left used to be the hood and instrument panel, but then it became the backend. The hood used to be the cowl from a Cessna 172 that wrecked on a nearby road.

The story on the plane is better than the story of the truck. The pilot landed on a nearby road that led up the mountain. He tried to take off by going uphill, but the road was too steep. He couldn't gain enough elevation, and when he tried to turn, the wing caught the ground and flipped the plane. The pilot was fine and went on to wreck other planes and helicopters. He's still alive today and actually provides our high speed internet.

This Chevy Nomad has definitely seen better days. It was a good car, though, because even after it lost its usefulness as a station wagon, the lights, tires, and many parts were removed to use in other vehicles. 

Even the inside was gutted to use parts for other vehicles.

Some of the vehicles were hard to find because of all the brush, like this old Pontiac.

This car also has something extra-cool about it. You can see the hood clearly in the photo above, so you know it's not a hood ornament.

It's this Indian fuel cap. It's those extra details that make these cars so fun to explore!

Desert Destination: A Visit to the New Calf

As I mentioned a couple days ago, the first calf of the year was born last week. I just had to see it, so yesterday my husband, Desert Boy, Henry, and I loaded up in the truck and went out to take a visit. This calf was born premature by a couple weeks, but it looks like it's doing okay. Not great, but okay. The mother is a heifer, a first-time mother, so she doesn't really know what to do, and because she had her calf early, just as the other heifers were moved to the birthing field, she and the calf are on their own for a few days and seem a bit confused.

Here's the mom, a black baldy. The calf looks mostly black because the semen was from a black angus bull. The mama cow is watching us suspiciously, which is a good sign. Our plan was to take a quick peek at the calf and see how it's doing, and then get out of there. 

Except sometimes plans don't always go as you expect. In this case, we finally got a bunch of rain. That extra moisture, coupled with a ditch that's running to make sure the cow gets plenty of water, made the normally drivable road into a muddy mess. And we started spinning. So my husband put the truck into four wheel-drive. And we continued spinning. The mud flew on to the hood, onto the windows--it was now raining mud. And the tires kept digging deeper and deeper in the mud. 

Finally, I looked at my husband. "I don't think we're going anywhere."

He grinned. "I don't either."

Usually we're in a hurry to get somewhere, but this was a Sunday afternoon and we had had a relaxing day, so we stayed calm. We got out to take a look and saw that the tires were half-buried in mud. We didn't have a shovel, so we got a bunch of sticks and put them under the  tires. But we were in too deep. We needed to go for help.

Fortunately we had on our coats and boots, so we were prepared to go for a little walk. We headed off down the muddy road, along the edge of the field, towards the misty mountains. 

And we kept walking...

We needed to go across the field and towards the white specks on the right side of the photo, past Henry, who was having a grand old time. Our house is near the trees in the middle of the photo. What, you can't see the trees? They're a long way off. 

Desert Boy walked for a while, and then he wanted to be carried. When it was my turn, I put him up on my shoulders and he used my ears like reins. I told him he really wasn't supposed to pull on my ears.

The field we walked through was good walking. It had been planted with barley last spring. After it was harvested, it was planted with alfalfa. The short stalks are from the barley, and the mat-looking stuff is the baby alfalfa.

The Canada geese really like the field and their scat was everywhere. They sure can clean up any leftovers. Soon we crossed the field and came upon a treasure--an old junkyard. The main equipment yard is huge, but not everything is in it. This particular junkyard housed lots of older vehicles. I took quite a few pictures, but in this post will just show the station wagons to complement the post earlier this week.
This is a Chevrolet Nomad. Don't you just love the trim on the side? Because it's a four-door station wagon, we can surmise it was made between 1958 and 1961, and this was the top-of-the-line station wagon for Chevrolet. The original Nomad came out in 1955 as a two-door station wagon and was produced for three years. I am still scratching my head about two-door station wagons.

This station wagon with the cool fin taillights is a Studebaker. It was kind of hard to get a good look at it because of all the brush growing up around it, but it's probably from the 1950s and might be a Commander model. 

We spent quite a bit of time looking around the old junkyard. I must say, if you have to get stuck, it's quite an enjoyable experience if you have good weather, comfortable clothes and shoes, an interesting junkyard to meander through, and a camera to document the whole trip.

By the time we got the backhoe and took it back to the truck, it was getting pretty dark. But it only took a minute to pull the truck out, and then we were on our way.

The little calf was up and exploring her surroundings. Probably tomorrow she and her mom will be moved with the other heifers and hopefully they'll get more accustomed to being together and figure out what they're supposed to do. 

Station Wagons in the Equipment Yard

When I was a kid, it seemed that whenever my family went anywhere of any distance, we went in the station wagon. (If it wasn't far, we always walked or biked--something I want Desert Boy to do.) A station wagon wasn't the most popular car around, but it wasn't a real oddity, either. Nowadays, I hardly ever see station wagons. But not to fear, a quick visit to the ranch's equipment yard reveals some that have withstood the desert environment.

First we'll take a look at this blue Jeep Wagoneer. It looks like it can take a family anywhere with its boxy design and studly tires. 

The missing driver's door is just a minor inconvenience. My mom has great stories of her family's station wagon with holes in the floor so they could see the street going by underneath their feet. 

This Chevelle wagon doesn't look too bad. In addition to being able to carry a lot of people when it was running, it now has the great attraction of being able to hold  a lot of junk...hiccup...equipment in its retirement. The equipment yard isn't just a place to store old vehicles. It's also a place to store old hoses, engines, record players, boxes of unknown junk, bicycle carcasses, TVs, and heaven knows what else. I am always amazed. I am also a little careful when I look into these old vehicles. Some of them have packrat nests and I never know for sure what animal may scurry around in its new home, upset at being interrupted.

The front of the Chevelle doesn't look too great. That means it's time to scout the equipment yard some more and see if we can come up with a more colorful, more unusual station wagon. After all, one of the fun things about wandering the equipment yard is trying to find the weird things, the vehicles that no one makes anymore. The vehicles you wonder why they made in the first place.

And here's one of those weird vehicles, a GMC station wagon. Have you spotted what's so weird about it? Here's a clue if you haven't: a station wagon is supposed to carry a lot of people, right? So why would you make a station wagon with only three doors, two in the front and one in the back? If you want to get in the middle seat you have to climb over another seat! I have a feeling this model wasn't a top seller. If you missed earlier equipment yard posts, click the label "equipment yard" to catch up on the other fun vehicles hanging out down there.

John Deere 45W Forklift

Desert Boy is always happy to join me on forays to the equipment yard because it means he can practice his driving skills. On this day, he took quite a liking to this old John Deere tractor with the 45W forklift attachment. The tractor appears to still be in pretty good shape despite a light coating of rust.

I imagine the tractor was used to move hay to help feed the cows. 

On the back axle it says Deere on one side. I imagine it says John on the other, but it's covered in grease and I didn't have a rag with me. That metal sure looks solid, doesn't it?

One of the reasons Desert Boy likes to drive the old tractors is they just have so many fun parts. Gear shifters, levers, indicators, knobs, a big steering wheel, and even something to rest his short legs on. It just doesn't get much better.

I tried to look this tractor up on the internet to get more information about it, but didn't have much luck. So I'll have to keep digging to uncover the past of this tractor and what it did. For some reason I always leave the equipment yard with unanswered questions.