STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
The Rev. Kathleen Bean was a sheep rancher before she was ordained as a priest. And, when she became a priest, she had one thing she had been dying to do.
“After coming to the Trailing of the Sheep parade for years, I said, ‘When I get ordained, I’m going to bless the sheep,” said Bean, a priest at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Sun Valley.
True to her word, Bean took her place in the intersection of Ketchum’s Sun Valley Road and Main Street Sunday afternoon and held her ground as 1,200 wooly buggers surged past her.
“Bless you and all who care for you—the dogs, the ranchers,” she told them. “Be safe and healthy sheep.”
Thousands of people—many wearing lamb’s ears on their heads—lined the streets of Ketchum on a fall day so perfect that they felt more comfortable in cotton T-shirts than the American wool sweaters many had been wearing.
By mid-morning the 27th annual Trailing of the Sheep Festival had attracted visitors from every state but Mississippi, according to the pins they’d stuck in a map to show where people had come from. And they represented at least three dozen countries, including Russia, Japan, Iran, Israel, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland and Greenland.
Many of the paradegoers milled around, eating sheep cheese and checking out nifty wool products like wool bowl holders that keep someone from burning their hands when taking something out of the microwave.
Finally, they lined the streets for the parade, which is not a reenactment but a practice dating back to the early 1900s when two million sheep trailed through the Wood River Valley to and from summer pastures in the mountains. At one time Ketchum was second only to Sydney, Australia, in the number of sheep it shipped on the Union Pacific Railroad.
“I’ve been wanting to come to the festival for a long time, and I really love this part—the wagons, the horses, the sheep,” said TahNiba Naataanii, a Navajo sheep rancher and weaver who told of raising churro sheep during Friday’s Sheep Tales Gathering.
“I’ve always wanted to come. Finally, for my 70th birthday here I am,” added Christine Thomas-Flitcraft of Aurora, Ore.
Kaye Suzuki, a retired Forest Service employee from Ennis, Mont., is a regular at the festival and, in fact, helped put up miles of “Do Not Cross” tape along the streets to keep paradegoers safe from the struttin’ mutton.
She noted that well-managed sheep can be a boon for the environment.
“I would put more sheep on the forest. They love leafy spurge and other weeds. They’re ruminant so by the time the seeds get through them they basically sterile so they don’t spread weeds.”
Finally, the sheep arrived—well behaved, save a few who body surfed the backs of other sheep in their seeming desire to wow the crowds.
The band was one of at least 14 bands that trail north every spring and south every fall. These were part of the Faulkner Land & Livestock headed by John Faulkner a third -generation sheep rancher whose father moved to Gooding in 1933 with 25 sheep he purchased for a dollar each.
This band numbered about 1,200—a tenth of the 12,000 head of Columbia/Rambouillet the Faulkners own.
The flock paraded through the streets, not paying a bit of attention to the stop lights. Then they trailed down the bike path, turning just north of the Pegram bridge where they crossed a bridge that’s called the counting bridge because it’s narrow enough that herders can count their ewes there.
In a few days they’ll punch their tickets to either a spot along the Colorado River in Blythe, Calif., or Poston, Ariz.
They won’t stay away long.
They’ll lamb at Christmas and by March they will be heading back to Idaho. And the trailing will start all over again.