Sheep Swarm!

Yesterday Wiley and I drove out to Dinosaur National Monument, in the very northwest corner of the state (the monument itself straddles Utah and Colorado). It was a nice drive, first through the mountains and Steamboat Springs and then into ranchin' land. I suspect it's the emptiest corner of Colorado, though I haven't been to the southeast yet... there was nothin' for nowhere for miles.

We stopped for a walkies in the town of Craig, where the local park was full of wooden sculptures. The style of several of them reminded me of an illustrated (and probably bootlegged) version I had of The Hobbit in Russian. Others were just odd:

I guess it's supposed to say something like "we hold the lives of the unborn in our hands" but between the flames at the bottom and the aggressive, to my eye, hand posture, I call it "Fetal Fist of Fury."

Anyway, Dinosaur National Monument itself started out as a bust. There are two roads in. The first one, which leads to a scenic canyon drive, was closed due to mud and snow. I'd checked the website the night before and it said which roads were closed - that wasn't one of them. Humph.

The visitor center for that entrance was also closed, but reading the notice board I saw that there had been a recent mountain lion "encounter" with a hiker and also that rabbits were testing positive for tularemia, poor things.

I drove to the second entrance, which is actually in Jensen, Utah, but the Temporary Visitor Center was already closed for the day. The actual Visitor Center, the one with all the fossils and cool stuff, has been closed indefinitely because of structural safety issues, which I knew from the website.

I decided we'd take a little drive and see whatever we could see, then head back home. I had the tent in the trunk, but the one campground that was open was full of RVs and river rafting groups. Yuck.

It was late afternoon and I was thinking "oh well, at least I saw the place and Wiley got to pee somewhere new."

Then it happened.

Near a private ranch that's smack dab in the middle of the monument, we encountered a sheep swarm.

A rancher's pickup (ahead on the road in photo above) just plowed through the sheep, and they moved aside, but I decided to turn around, since there wasn't anything that exciting to see ahead and I didn't want to risk running over any sheep.

I was just about to start backing up when all hell broke loose. Wiley had been staring intently but silently at the sheep (interesting note... he doesn't make a peep when he encounters livestock or deer, so something in his little head must identify them as non-dogs and non-squirrels). All of a sudden he went crazy barking...

...and so did the sheepdogs. Three of them, not little slinky border collies but big, brawny Anatolian shepherd-types (I don't know that they were Anatolians, but that's what they looked like... they were not as large as the dreaded Kavkazki Ovcharki, the bear-sized thugs I encountered in Russia). You know, the dogs bred over centuries to have a bony plate at the base of their skulls to fend off wolf attacks?

The three big shepherds surrounded the car, barking furiously. My first instinct was to roll up the windows in case Captain Adventure decided to do anything really stupid, like launch himself out of the car in a fit of deluded bad-assedness. I left mine rolled down because the dogs were not interested at all in me... it was the wolf-like berserker in my car that they wanted to get their paws on. (The shot below was through the window... sorry about the bird poop.)

I was trying to slowly do a U-turn without hitting any dogs or sheep when I heard a neigh.

Coming up behind me was an actual cowboy! Okay, technically not a cowboy, but sheepboy doesn't sound right. As soon as he arrived on the scene, the dogs sauntered off back to the herd.

He apologized for their menacing, saying "they're just doing their jobs." I said I knew, and I wasn't upset by them, it was the faux-savage dingbat barking in my backseat that I was worried about.

The light was really cool and the sheep wrangler just looked so cool on his horse, the canyons in the background, that I asked if I could take his picture. He said sure, and I said "smile!" to which he replied "it's really the horse that should smile."

I tried to get his name, but with Wiley still all crazied up (I imagine his side of the conversation was: "Lemme at 'em! I could take all three of them!"), the dialog went like this:

BARKBARKBARKBARKBARK

"What's your name?"

BARKBARKBARK

"-just like hokey-"

BARKBARKBARK

"What?"

BARKBARKBARK

"-work at Chew Ranch [actual name of private ranch]-"

BARKBARKBARK

"What? What was your name?"

BARKBARKBARK

"-rhymes with okey-dokey-"

BARKBARKBARK

I didn't want to keep asking, because there comes a time when it seems almost rude to do so, plus he had mentioned when apologizing (unnecessarily) for his dogs that they were just tired after a long day and I didn't want to hold them up. So I waved good-bye and thanked him and he shouted "drive safe" and mosied on.

The whole way back I was reminded of that Seinfeld episode where he can't remember a girl's name, only that it rhymes with a slang word, but not which slang word. In my head I was thinking "Pokey? Mokey? Gokey? Like Michael Gokey, a kid I went to grade school with who turned into a pot head and wouldn't it be funny if that was, after all these years and miles, Michael Gokey?"

In the end I could think of only one possible name, and even though it made no sense, I really liked it. So here's my shot of Loki the sheep wrangler: