Paul Marchant

Old Man Winter has really been in the business of making winter this year. Within a two-week period, we had a couple of storms that have dumped around 2 feet of snow in the valley, 30- to 40-mph winds to blow it into 6-foot drifts across the road and a five-day stretch where the high temperature was -10ºF.

The fall of 2016 was an extraordinary season in the stretch of country in south-central Idaho that I call home. After a dry summer, where we saw nary a drop of rain from the first of June through September, the heavens opened and we got nearly a year’s worth of moisture in the months of October and November.

 By I’ve traveled around the country a fair amount in the last few years. I’m not on the road every week, but I’ve been around enough to develop a certain taste for where I choose to lay my weary head at night when I’m in Denver or Fort Worth, Missoula or Salmon.

Sometimes I have a tough time figuring out exactly what I should write in a column. This time of year, however, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to deciding on a topic. The challenge is in trying to present a fresh perspective on a topic that may have been written about and discussed ad nauseam.

In my world, early fall is usually a season full of optimism and hope. It’s a time when I find it easy to cast my gaze forward to a bright future on the near horizon.

It’s been several years since I paid someone else to shoe my horses. That’s a chore I always do for myself. The main reasons for this are twofold: because I’m cheap and because I can.