Cattle ranch near Amarillo

On Wednesday I headed west near Amarillo, Texas. (Or, as the locals call it, Amarilla--and be sure to say it with a southern-like drawl.) It was about a five hour drive. I rented a car so that I wouldn't have to borrow anyone's car overnight.

I was afraid that the entire drive would be boring, like this:
But it was actually a nice drive. About an hour into it, I noticed that the dirt had turned red.
Oh, and be sure to notice how yellow, brown, and dead things are in all of the photos. I'm not sure if I've already mentioned this or not, but Texas is in a major drought right now. In fact, 75% of the state is in the highest possible level of drought. It's the driest summer on record since they starting keeping records in the 1880's! Some of the farms I've visited have not had any rain since last September! I drove by numerous creeks and ponds that were bone dry. The water level of some of the lakes is down by five feet. The state has actually warned boaters to be careful because they might hit rocks in places where their boats previously had no problems. Some people's water wells are even starting to go dry. The drought is an issue that has come up in much of my research.

Luckily, the scenery got a little more interesting as my drive went on.
And you gotta love it when you stop at a rest stop and see a sign like this
I didn't see any rattlesnakes. I'm mostly relieved about that... but there is a part of me that was hoping I would see one... from a distance, of course. :)

The purpose of my trip was to interview some ranchers. They have about 6,000 acres with cattle, and they invite tourists to come stay overnight at the ranch to ride horses and basically pretend to be cowboys. Here are a couple photos from the ranch. They told me that in a normal year, the ground would be covered in green grass.
After the interview, they drove me around the property for a tour. Here are some of the cows. The one on the far right is mooing at me.
They have had to supplement lots of hay for their cows since there isn't any grass for them to eat. Of course, since the demand for hay has gone up, the prices have skyrocketed, too. Many ranchers are having to sell off some of their cattle because they can't afford to feed them.

I had thought about staying overnight at the ranch, but... it's a working cattle ranch. (In other words, they raise cows to be slaughtered.) I would definitely have been served a steak for dinner. And telling the owners of a cattle ranch that you're a vegetarian would not have helped to build camaraderie with them! So, instead, I drove to Lubbock for the night, stopping first at Palo Duro Canyon.

Posting this blog entry was my reward for finishing the transcription for this interview. (It was only a 36 minute interview, but it took almost five hours to type up! Ugh!) I'll post again to reward myself when I finish my field notes from this interview. (The field notes are basically descriptions of everything that I saw and things that they said when the audio recorder wasn't turned on.) The next post will be about the Canyon, and it was absolutely gorgeous, so feel free to cheer me along. Trust me, you won't want to wait long to see those photos.