Climbing Mt Katahdin
Mount Katahdin is the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail and the highest point in the state of Maine. Ain’t never been there, they tell me it’s nice. Some day I hope to hike the whole AT and arrive at the summit of Mount Katahdin and see for myself.
This past weekend I climbed my own “Mount Katahdin” of sorts.
“Katahdin,” it turns out, is a breed of sheep and we have been interested to get some of our own to influence our flock genetics.
Katahdin are “hair sheep” and a “meat breed,” which means they are bigger and grow faster and produce more meat, and don’t have to be shorn one or multiple times per year like the “dual purpose” (i.e. fleece and meat) Shetlands that make up most of our flock like the one shown in the photo below.
Mojo, one of our Shetland wethers. (A wether is a castrated male sheep.)
Here’s our Katahdin “starter flock” settling into their new home in a section of our hay shed in the upper pasture:
New residents of Magpie Hollow: a ram (front), two ewes, and four babies.
What do you notice? They’re lily white. And they’re fluffy (rather than wooly). And they’re BIG. The ram in the foreground, Abraham, probly weighs almost 200 lbs. In contrast our lil Shetland ram Moh is under 100 lbs.
Moh, our diminutive curly-horned Shetland ram.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Our story actually begins in late November, 2023, when I was taking a pig to our local family-run abattoir for processing.
Uh oh! The tow hitch partially ripped off of the frame of my ‘95 Toyota Pickup.
While driving the windy road down our mountain hauling the livestock trailer transporting our piggo, this happened. Luckily, half the tow hitch held and I got the whole rig stopped and pulled off the side of the road without any major damages or casualties on the part of the piggo, or me for that matter.
The hero of this prequel drama was our friend Mike-the-Millwright, who towed the trailer with pig back home and graciously offered to weld the tow hitch back onto my truck frame.
Now - Mike’s skills as a welder are beyond reproach. He does this for a living in all manner of extremely challenging circumstances with a variety of materials and applications. But what you are welding is only as good as what you are welding to, and that was an uncertainty for the frame of this almost 30 year old small truck.
Fast-forward to late February 2024…
Not long ago we were tipped off on the short-timeline availability of some Katahdin sheep of good genetics put up for sale by friends of a recent podcast interviewee.
The trouble was, they were located way on the on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just south of Knoxville, TN. About a five-hour trip (one-way) over hilly terrain.
Would the old ‘yota make it? Would the hitch repair hold? Would the trailer - which had never been hauled more than 15 or 20 miles from home - break down on the narrow mountain roads, or worse, on the interstate? I guessed I would find out. You work with the equipment you have, not the equipment you want, right?
After five hours of white-knuckle driving and an hour and a half of sheep wrangling I had some Katahdins loaded and ready for the trip back to their new home in NC.
Ewes and ram in the trailer, babies in the dog kennel in the back of the truck. Heading home from Knoxville…
We rolled out around 4:30 or 5 PM from Knoxville for the trek home. Wow was that stressful. I will save you a detailed account of the psychological suffering because we made it - the trailer hitch did not rip off and there was no roadside carnage on our account. But it was a harrowing and exhausting experience for all involved!
Sheep (and me!) glad to be off the trailer, off of the highways and small mountain roads and in the new digs…
Next day getting used to new environs…
Love these critters!
It’s great to have the new additions to the menagerie here at Magpie Hollow.
To top it off, the next morning after the Tennessee trip one of our Shetland ewes gave birth to this cute little guy!
Our flock is really growing! We have three more girls that might give birth sometime in the next month. Two were born last year and were maybe too young to get pregnant this round, but we’ll see.