Corral Repair

As with most corrals, you don't fix things until they're broke. Well, once the snow left, we found some breaks on the Caballo Creek Corrals. 

This post drew the immediate attention. It couldn't have been our cows, but something caused this bad boy to just give out.

With all our ducks in a row, I grabbed my right-hand man Ernie and we set out to repair what needed fixing.

Once we got the gate unbolted from the old post we were able to start digging it up.

Only to discover that it was partially concreted in.

So we tied Whitehorse to it and gave it a tug.

With a little persuasion, she came out.

With an open hole it didn't take too much digging to get ready for the new post.

Once set we tamped it in. In a pinch, a shovel handle will work in place of a tamping bar. 

Then we tied two guy wires to the new post for extra support before reattaching the gate. 

Next up was the catch pen latch. I'm sure the holes lined up when it was first built but they don't anymore. 

So we took the sawsall and cut them longer and bent them down.

Then cut them off.

Muy Bien. 

There was one more gate that the hinges pulled out on. They were just lag bolted in, so we put bolts all the way through. 

Let's ranch.

I told Ernie that we should be in and out of there in a couple hours. After all, all we had to do is set a new post and button up a thing or two. A half a day later we were back home. You just never know what all a job is going to entail, so you better be prepared. I can tolerate quite a bit, but dysfunctional gates around a corral drive me crazy. No longer a problem here. It won't be long and we'll be branding critters. We're ready.