Before the sun lifts itself over the Big Belts, you’re already awake.
Before the frost softens its grip, you’re already outside.
Before the roads are cleared, you’ve already fed, checked water, and run to town and back again.
Year after year, you face winter head-on.
You break ice and thaw water knowing you’ll be back tomorrow to do it again.
You work to mend what the wind and snow try to undo.
You keep things moving when trucks don’t want to start, and sometimes when you don’t either.
You accept that equipment failures rarely happen on warm days.
You work when the wind just won’t quit and show up anyway because the cows didn’t read the forecast.
Ranching asks for strength, but also demands patience.
You know how much of this work is unseen, unrecorded, and done simply because it needed to be.
You spend much of February and March – and often April – watching over calving cows and lambing ewes all hours of the night, until the moon feels more familiar than the sun.
You know the weight of responsibility that comes with caring for livestock through winter.
You’ve warmed newborns with numb hands, knowing effort doesn’t always mean outcome. You’ve done everything right and still lost some – and kept going anyway.
You step into work that didn’t start with you.
You inherit not just land but stories, responsibility, and the weight of what comes next.
You understand that ranching is rarely a one-generation story, or at least that’s the hope, and that this place is held in trust for the next set of hands.
You carry the weight of giving future generations more than memory, but a chance to steward this place.
You resist the pull to sell or divide, to trade calving season for regular work hours, an office chair, and indoor heat.
You refuse a future where fence lines give way to pavement and a mountain viewscape is replaced by rooftops.
As winter finally loosens its grip and the days grow longer, we acknowledge all that our ranch partners do.
Because of your stewardship, these places remain more than scenery – they remain living, working lands.
And because of you, the land is cared for by people who know it best.
Thank you.
Cassie Solberg grew up on her great-grandparent’s homestead near Denton, MT, spending much of her childhood farming and ranching alongside her parents. When she’s not lending a hand at her family’s farm and ranch, she is the communications coordinator at PPLT.
