Wool, Bighorn, Canned Mutton, and the Goat Hair the Government Paid For

Estes Park Wool Market opens Saturday, plus Trail Ridge Road is open and the bighorn are at Sheep Lakes

The Mountain Thread | Estes Park Newsletter | June 11, 2026

How sheep, a century of loneliness, a meal millions of soldiers never forgave, and a subsidy for goat hair connect the Colorado high country to a building full of alpacas on Rooftop Way this weekend

What Did the High Country Look Like Before the Hikers Got Here?

Before the tourists. Before the national park. Before Trail Ridge Road and the timed entry reservations.

The high meadows above what became Rocky Mountain National Park were working ground. Spanish colonists had brought churro sheep north into the Colorado mountains centuries before American settlement. By the time ranchers were pushing into the high country in the 1870s and 1880s, flocks were already moving up the mountain valleys every summer, following the same routes through the same meadows that hikers cross today with trekking poles.

Tens of thousands of sheep worked their way through the Colorado Rockies each summer, watched over by men who were alone in the high country for months at a stretch. Most of them were recent immigrants. Basque men from the Pyrenees. Greek herders who had come looking for work. Young men sent up into the mountains with a dog, a flock, and a season to get through. One of them was a French Basque man named Dominique Laxalt, who came to Nevada to work in the sheep business. His son Robert later wrote about his father's experience in a 1957 memoir called Sweet Promised Land, recalling that his father had been sent into the desert with a dog and three thousand sheep, and that in the first months he had cried himself to sleep at night. Dominique Laxalt was sixteen years old when he started. That was not unusual.

To pass the time on long lonely summer days in the high country, Basque sheepherders carved into aspen trees. These carvings are called arborglyphs. Names. Dates. Hometowns. The church from the village they had left. Messages meant for the next herder who would pass through the same camp the following summer. Arborglyphs can be found across the West, especially in aspen groves throughout Idaho, Nevada, California, and Colorado, places once home to Basque and Hispanic sheepherding communities. The most documented Colorado concentrations are in the San Juan Mountains and the Sangre de Cristo range in the southern part of the state. If you have hiked through an aspen grove anywhere in the Colorado Rockies and noticed markings on the pale bark, you may have been reading something a lonely man wrote a hundred years ago and left for the next person who came through.

The NPS administrative history confirms that livestock grazing was heavy throughout the Estes Valley before and after the park was established in 1915. When domestic flocks moved through the mountain valleys, they carried diseases the native bighorn had never encountered.. Scabies. Pneumonia. Pathogens that were invisible to the animals carrying them and lethal to the animals that had no immunity.

The bighorn population inside what became Rocky Mountain National Park fell to around 150 animals by the mid-twentieth century. One hundred and fifty. In country that should have supported thousands.

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 reorganized the federal grazing system, requiring operators to own land to qualify for permits. The era of the itinerant herder moving open-range flocks through the high country was finished. The national park had been established in 1915. Grazing was phased out. The sheep left.

The bighorn, slowly and painfully, started coming back. It took reintroduction programs in the 1970s and 1980s to accelerate the recovery. Today roughly 300 to 400 bighorn live in and around the park. If you have driven up Trail Ridge Road in the spring you may have seen them near Sheep Lakes in Horseshoe Park, coming down for the minerals in the water. The NPS manages that corridor specifically to support them. The signs asking you not to stop your car in the road are not decorative.

What Did a Soldier's Bad Dinner Do to an Entire Industry?

The federal government declared wool a strategic material and created a subsidy program in 1954. The program eventually paid out nearly a billion dollars over just a five-year period in the 1990s. One-third of those payments went to producers of a fiber that, by the government's own admission, had never had any strategic value at all. What was that fiber and what animal does it come from?

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RMNP UPDATE

Trail Ridge Road is open to through travel. Timed Entry Reservations are required between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. For the latest status call 970-586-1222 or check nps.gov/romo.

Timed entry permits are also required for the Bear Lake Road Corridor between 5 a.m. and 6 p.m. A separate park entrance fee or pass is required in addition to any permit. Forty percent of permits are released at 7 p.m. MDT the night before your visit on Recreation.gov if you missed the earlier window. Timed entry runs through June 30.

Old Fall River Road is closed. It typically opens in early July. Check current status before planning around it.

Bear Lake Road is open year-round. Lower elevation trails are in good shape. Wildflowers are running strong on south-facing slopes. The afternoon thunderstorm pattern is now established above treeline. Start early, carry layers, and be off exposed terrain by early afternoon.

The bighorn sheep are active near Sheep Lakes in Horseshoe Park this time of year. Give them room. Stay on the pavement. Do not approach them.

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DID YOU KNOW? 

The U.S. sheep inventory peaked at approximately 49 million head in 1942 and fell to around 9 million by 1989, an 80 percent decline over four decades. The decline is attributed to changing American tastes after World War II, competition from synthetic fibers, and shifts in federal grazing policy. At the low point of the commodity wool market, some producers were burning their fleeces rather than selling them at a loss. IFLScience

The bighorn sheep population inside Rocky Mountain National Park fell to around 150 animals by the mid-twentieth century, largely due to diseases carried by domestic sheep that had grazed the same high meadows. Active reintroduction programs in the 1970s and 1980s helped bring the population back to the roughly 300 to 400 bighorn that live in and around the park today.

Arborglyphs, the carvings left by Basque and Hispanic sheepherders in aspen trees across the American West, can be found in aspen groves throughout Idaho, Nevada, California, and Colorado. The most documented Colorado concentrations are in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. The trees that hold these carvings are aging and researchers are working to document them before they are gone. Colorado Mountain Club

The National Wool Act of 1954 declared wool a strategic material and established a federal subsidy program. Wool was removed from the Pentagon's strategic materials list in 1960, but the subsidy program continued for decades. About one-third of payments went to mohair producers, even though mohair was acknowledged to have no strategic value when the program was finally wound down. Ournewenglandlegends

Buck's Joke Of The Day

Congress declared wool a strategic defense material in 1954.

They removed it from the Pentagon's strategic materials list in 1960.

The subsidy program kept running until the 1990s.

One-third of the money went to Angora goat farmers for mohair.

Mohair had never been strategic. Congress knew this.

(The federal government spent roughly forty years subsidizing goat hair for national security. The Angora goat community remains the only beneficiary of the Cold War that nobody ever wrote a book about.)

The fiber was mohair, produced by Angora goats. Although mohair never had strategic value, it was included in the National Wool Act of 1954 as an offshoot of the wool industry. Wool program subsidies cost an estimated $923 million over the 1994-98 period alone, with about one-third of those payments going to mohair producers. The program was wound down in the mid-1990s and briefly revived in the 2002 farm bill before being phased out again. Ournewenglandlegends

UNTIL NEXT WEEK

Moe came back in the afternoon and said he had looked up the arborglyph thing. He had found photographs of carvings in the San Juan Mountains, names and dates and a drawing of a church that a herder had carved into an aspen in 1931. He said the tree was still standing. He said it would not be standing much longer.

I told him that was why people were documenting them as fast as they could.

He said it was a lot of effort to preserve something most people would never go looking for.

I told him that was true of most things worth preserving.

The Wool Market opens Saturday morning at nine. The bighorn are at Sheep Lakes.The coffee is hot and the week is done.

Stay smart, stay safe, and leave the mountains with more thread than you arrived with.

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.- Buck Timber The Mountain Thread themountainthread.com/signup

This account draws from National Park Service records, the National Academy of Sciences report on the U.S. sheep industry, USDA agricultural records, NPR, the Boston Globe, and the documented history of the Colorado wool trade. The broad facts are solid. The mohair thing is real. Congress really did that.  - Buck

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