Man, that was good of you to post all that up! Those fellas were your typical hard working blue collar guy's you find trying to make a living here in British Columbia bush.People who have never been here don't realize you won't have to go far to get into the wilderness .Brad don't know if I told you that I shot my first moose up the Cariboo River, that country is real nice.
Lawrence
That's why I love it here. One of the sunniest places in all of Canada here in the BC interior (it was clear as a bell and sunny here today while you guys farther south were getting dumped on with snow!); an hour's drive east to where these videos were shot, and I'm into snowcapped mountains, huge old-growth 10'+ diameter Cedar trees, the third deepest lake on the continent... An hour to the west is near desert complete with sand dunes and cacti, and a couple hours farther west yet and I'm into the big mountains again.
I've looked at the Eastern US, or even southern Ontario and Quebec for that matter, on Google Earth and it just blows my mind how densely packed people are. I've talked to some Easterners who just can't fathom that when I leave town here heading north or south, I have to drive a solid hour / ~70 miles before I come to the next town of any significant size that's more than just a gas pump and corner store with a few dozen homes around it. And if I go west there's no town with more than maybe 500-odd residents for almost 500km until you get to Bella Coola at the coast! That's a crap highway to break down on!
I got the Gang Ranch section clipped out and uploaded a while ago:
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Ranching is the true root of our lifestyle up here; the forest industry has taken over economically but ranching started it all. After the railroad came through, Williams Lake was the largest cattle shipping center in the province. People think of cowboys now and they think of the NRA rodeos on TV in Las Vegas with thousands of spectators or the like - up here it's still done the old way; there are no big cattle feedlots really and they're allowed to range free on grazing leases in the tens of thousands of acres, and have to be herded back up in the fall before hunting season. So the working cowboy is still very real here; it's not at all my kind of lifestyle though. It was a real disaster here this summer with all the forest fires - you can see all the dead beetle-killed pine in the video there - because literally hundreds of miles of fencing was destroyed and there were thousands of cattle just roaming free and mixing together with other herds. Many ranchers even cut their fences to allow the animals to get away from the fire, hoping for the best. So there was a LOT of work for the cowboys when the fires finally got under control. Not to mention for the fence crews.
