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Posts published by “Brad Wiley”

The Friday Evening Jamborees

Last week’s Floodgate story mentioned that the gyppo logging company working for Masonite Corporation in the seventies, Shuster Enterprises (!), provided its crews with transportation to jobsite, important for those living on the Ukiah side…

First New Year, Floodgate Bar

New Year's Eve, 1971-2, my consort and my first in Anderson Valley.  We had moved here from San Francisco on April Fools Day, been in residence for nine months, had made a few friends among the…

More Valley Vistas

Down at the Deep End the Valley's vistas become more telescopic as the flatland gives way to rolling hills, tightening ridges framing the more evident tree-lined River until it disappears into the woods west of…

Peachland

Over the decades it wasn't just helping Sam Prather manage his sheep bands that introduced me to other ridgetops around The Valley. Sometimes it was other activities both agricultural and social, driving, for example, up…

Anderson Valley Vistas

Sometime in the nineteen seventies, after I had started running my own sheep band at the home ranch, Sam Prather and I began exploring a partnership to purchase and run a larger band somewhere suitable in…

Sheep Farming with Sammy

Running sheep on the hillsides framing Anderson Valley provides the herder with a way of seeing Anderson Valley very different than from your car as you check up on the neighbors on your way to…

Counts Counts: Voting in Navarro, 1972

One day last summer I was showing a recent Valley settler neighbor the historic sights of Navarro town and reminiscing about "the good old days." Part of the tour, of course was up Wendling Soda…

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