STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
David Brennan’s biceps bulged as big as softballs as he reached through the canvas slats lining the lavender trailer and pulled a 300-pound ewe towards him.
He tipped her on her back, holding her with his legs. Leaving her belly exposed and her four legs in the air, he began running an electric shear from her breast to her flank in fluid rhythmical fashion until she was pink and naked.
He opened a lime green door behind him and what had been a fur ball—er, wool ball—scampered out as he shoved the fleece on the floor out the other side of the trailer shed or what resembles an old boxcar converted into a shearing shed and painted lavender and green.
But there was no time to wipe his brow--not with 1,900 more sheep to shear.
“This makes the sheep shearing demonstration at the Trailing of the Sheep Festival look like small potatoes,” said Sun Valley resident Nancy Humphrey, as she watched the shearing in the trailer, which boasted bags of old clipping shears hanging on its scarred wooden panels.
This wild and wooly scene was repeated over and over again one day this past week as Cliff Hoopes moved his mobile sheep shearing operation onto a dusty pasture sporting the stubble of barley cultivated for premium MillerCoors beer.
Normally, John and Tom Peavey would have sheared their sheep at their Flat Top Ranch near Carey. But John Stevenson, son of two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, volunteered his Hillside Ranch near Silver Creek after much of the Flat Top Ranch was blackened by a wildfire that scorched 101 square miles of land east of Bellevue and Hailey in August.
Hoopes said his family started the company 130years ago. And sheep shearing DNA has continued to run in the Hoopes’ blood--his father Jimmie spent 61 years in the sheep shearing business, collectively shearing a couple million sheep during his lifetime and serving as president of the Sheep Shearer’s Union.
“My grandpa was the first contractor in the state of Utah,” said Hoopes. “We were especially busy when the United States entered the war a hundred years ago and the government started buying wool for its uniforms. We’ve sheared at the Little ranch, which was the biggest sheep ranch in the United States, and today we follow a circuit from our base in Fort Bridger, Wyo., to places like Virginia, City, Mont.”
The wooly buggers were herded into a pen, then funneled into a wooden chute that took them up a ramp into a on one side of the Hoopes Shed, marked by ranchers’ brands. One herder poked the slowpokes along with a cane while another waved an orange feed flag.
Seven shearers, fueled by snacks of Animal Crackers, were lined up inside the shed, working a 10-hour day amidst the racket of a generator and electric motors used to power the clippers.
When the sheep emerged out the ewe-sized doors into the pen below, a couple ranch hands grabbed them, checking them with ultrasound and vaccinating them for lice and other parasites.
The Peaveys shear each adult sheep once a year—1,900 of them in the fall and another 2,300 in the spring. It takes up to six weeks for the ewes to regain all the insulating wool they need to protect them against winter cold in California where they are headed.
But the shearing is essential to their wellbeing. Sheep with too much wool can overheat and die. Dirt in the wool attracts flies and maggots. And their wool can absorb a third of its weight in water from fall and winter rains, leaving them too heavy to move.
The other 2,300 sheep, which winter 75 miles south of Wells, Nev., keep their wool coat until spring allowing them to stay warm during winter.
As the freshly shorn fleece emerged from the shed, wool handlers fed it into a hydraulic press that compresses wool into 400- to 500-pound square packs. A tractor then picked up the bales, loading them into a truck and pushing them to the back with a blade.
“In the days before the hydraulic compressor, we used to have a man get in a sack that was seven or eight feet long,” said rancher John Peavey, who co-founded the Trailing of the Sheep Festival, which kicks off this week. “He’d pull the wool in, stepping on it as he did. Eventually, he’d walk himself up the hill of fleece and out of the sack.”
“We can get twice as much wool in these square packs with the hydraulic press,” he added.
Typically, one sheep produces anywhere from two to 30 pounds of wool a year, with the average being 10, although the world record is 88 pounds.
One pound of wool can make 10 miles of yarn; 450 feet of the yarn is used to make the core of a baseball.
White wool more valuable because can be dyed, Peavey said. But there is a market for the black sheep of the family among craftspeople who like to make things with pure black wool.
Peavey will ship his wool to the Utah Wool Marketing Association co-op in Tooele, Utah, where it will be auctioned off.
“This wool is real fine,” he said. “None of these sheep will be on any dinner plates for a long time. But the sheep that do end up for dinner go through our Mountain States co-op. Atkinsons’ carries its Shepherd’s Pride label.
Aspiring sheep shearers can avail themselves of a three-day class at San Diego State University—even women are beginning to get into it, their lower center of gravity considered a plus. David Brennan has been shearing sheep since he was 16, having learned from a long-time shearer.
“It’s backbreaking work,” he said. “But it’s my work.”
DID YOU KNOW?
A New Zealander holds the world record for shearing 839 lambs in nine hours. A New Zealander-turned-Brit set the world record for shearing 731 ewes in nine hours.