Honey, it's time for some stripping!

The Wild West has an "open range" reality, where you need to put a fence up - not to keep your cattle or horses in, but to keep your neighbors cattle or horses OUT. A kind of Great Wall of China approach to "the 4 legs".

Ranchers are king here; have been since we drove the Apache on to "reservations". A lot of policy decisions and public spending (of your tax dollars) is dictated by those guys (gals?); a lot more than should be, most likely.

For instance, it seems like every time we go from private land to National Forest land there is a fence and a "cattle guard" - to keep "the free ranging" cattle from going on to that particular piece of public land (there is lots of private grazing on BLM public land, I do believe). I assume you and I paid for those fences and cattle guards.

I assume the dear reader is familiar with "cattle guards" - heavy metal "bars" running perpendicular to the vehicular direction of travel - which can give a cyclist quite an uncomfortable rumble, depending on spacing, tire size/pressure, etc. And, of course, cattle won't cross them for fear of stepping into "the abyss between bars" [kind of like WI snowmachiners!]

Most of the cattle guards that we have encountered on this trip have also had thin metal strips welded to the top of the top of the cattle guard, going IN the direction of vehicular travel. Maybe to give the big metal devices more structural integrity? Maybe to make it smoother for motor vehicles? We, however, began aiming for and riding those thin metal strips - to smooth out our ride. They're typically about 1 to maybe a max of 3 inches wide. Anyway, it's not really all that exciting; but to juice it up a bit we've taken to calling it "stripping". And don't worry mom, we're keeping our spandex on!

We've gotten pretty good at it, in fact. Heidi really impressed me when she hit one of the skinny strips, going uphill! She has also hit them "blind", riding behind me, in my draft, on downhills. When I say that she is a truly a gifted "stripper", you know what I mean!