Donald HofstetterFrom Don: They called them line shacks when I was a pup. They were built in the backcountry for the fence riders to stay in and were built to accommodate a number of people, which was good because we were a family of seven. My step-dad was one of thoe fence riders. He was a Basque from the Spanish side of the Pyrenees mountains and he worked the ranches all his life, right up until the day they put him into a nursing home. Most ranches were still using horse teams to pull feed wagons and, at least in our case, a buckboard. We used it to get from Big Springs across the nine miles to Pole Creek. We worked those lines, and also the lines at Battle Creek and Big Springs. A couple of summers we stayed at Big Springs, which was about 60 miles off the Grandview Highway. The meadows in those days were large and beautiful. Nature of all kinds could be seen any day. Outside the meadows were sagebrush and rock breaks. Those were the most interesting to me because of all the animals that like to den there. It was a great place to grow up and I became totally entranced by the world I lived in. I learned about the little things. Things like tracking a beetle for as far as he went the night before, and where the tracks end, he either buried himself in the soft loamy desert soil or something like a mouse ate him. As I grew up and started out on my own, I worked a ranch in Nevada but soon came back to Idaho and the high desert country I grew up in. In the course of time, I married and raised 5 of my own children and a good number of other people's. Don spent his last years with his wife Theresa, living in the interior of Alaska in the summer, and spending winters traveling and visiting his children and grandchildren in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, and Nevada. Don left this world in May 2018, leaving us with good memories and his stories. Read More Read Less