Corral Repair

Time marches on. Unfortunately, it takes its toll as it does. My father, grandfather, and their hired hand build our main working corrals in the 70s. So they are almost 50 years old. Parts of them are in good shape and parts are not. We decided to do some major repair work before we work the cows through them over the next few days.

My grandfather tells me that they looked all over trying to find large cedar posts to hang the gates on and finally found some in the canyon on our mesa pasture. This had to be quite the job to go cut them and haul them down to home. Sadly, these are a major part of the problem. They have been holding up heavy metal gates and are starting to either rot out or break. I was afraid that trying to sort cows through there in that condition would result in a gate flat on the ground and the cows in a mess.

Above, you can see that the cross pieces attaching the tops of the posts to each other are about to rot clear through and the large post on the right is getting thin towards the top from being broken once or twice. At this point, we had already taken down the gates and my brother was starting to tear the gate posts down. We had to remove the attached poles as well.

After they were removed we set our new posts. This time we decided to set metal pipe posts with caps welded on top. We cemented them in place. We then used 2 7/8” pipe for our new cross pieces. Our gates were in good shape so we could still use them.

Hanging those heavy gates was a little difficult, but we used the excavator and chains when we could. You might also notice that we had to reconstruct the pole for the power line that supplies water to our cattle. Once the gates were hung, we welded on angle iron to reattach our poles. It was about a three day process. It’s a good start to repairing these corrals and we get to put it to the test in a couple of days when we sort cows.

I hope you all had a Happy Halloween and that you are making progress on your fall projects, too. Remember that if you are interested in beef we have another delivery scheduled for December. Tell your friends that are here in Wyoming. Thanks for reading.

by Brandon Greet