Our early visits


When I was growing up we made trips to McBride once or twice a year.  Mostly these were day trips but there was at least one overnight campout.  It was a challenge to get to the canyon.  We had to enter the ranch — Bivins Coldwater Cattle Company back then — and navigate the dirt ranch roads to the ranch house.  I say navigate because if there had been rain at the very least the roads would be rutted and there could even be benign-looking but treacherous puddles concealing mud that would suck a vehicle in right down to the axel.  Our family car was a low-slung Pontiac entirely unsuitable for off-roading.

We would stop by the ranch house and let them know we were going to McBride Canyon so they wouldn’t try to roust us as they would any non-Rockwell descendants.  The steep road down into the canyon was a thrill going down but Dad usually made everybody walk up the hill when it was time to leave.  It was hard for the car to get traction and maybe he didn’t want any distractions while he coaxed it up the hill.  Coming and going he had to dodge rocks sticking up out of the ground which were big enough to tear a hole in an oil pan.

At that time the ranch used the canyon as a sort of bull pen.  There were usually half a dozen or so Hereford bulls in the area but we didn’t see them.  During the day they would move out of the canyon into the floodplain of the Canadian river to graze.  In the evening, though, they would stroll back into the canyon to access the water in the little stream that flowed part way down the canyon.  On our campout we just slept on the ground.  The fire had died down and we were in our sleeping bags when the bulls started coming through the area.  They were bellowing back and forth to each other in the dark and Dad, who could mimic their bellows, joined the conversation.  His bellow must have sounded like a new bull to the others and peaked their interest.  Dad got a bellowing match going with one of the bulls and kept it up until it was practically on top of us.  As much as I wanted to, I was too small to strangle him.

The bulls kept the vegetation down enough to make it easier to hike around the canyon than it is today.  The creek bed was wide and sandy and it was fun to dam up the little creek, which often was no more than a trickle, until it gave up entirely and disappeared into the sand.  It was easy to see from the vegetation hung up on the sides of trees well removed from the creek bed what a torrent the creek became during heavy rains.

Farther up the creek there was “the falls” where the water ran over the side of the caprock and into a small pool deep enough for swimming, or least splashing around, on a warm day.  Though it was only a drop of a couple of feet, it still qualified as a water fall in our minds and a hike to the falls was the high point of a trip to McBride Canyon.

Though many have since been removed to protect the public from falling trees and limbs, the canyon was full of huge cottonwoods in those days.  They provided shade and were picturesque as their massive trunks rose sometimes 50 feet before the first huge limbs.  Later during that period a tornado toppled several of the behemoths, or so I was told.  Something knocked them down and a tornado would be the most likely culprit.

Early the next morning after one of our sleep overs, my dog Butch and I took a stroll down the road to see what we could see.  On the way back there was a rattlesnake crossing the road.  I loaded up my trusty, um, snake shooter and let it have it right in the side.  It took offense, slithered off the road to the brush at the side and kept up a vigorous buzz.  Butch and I covered the hundred yards or so to our campsite in nothing flat to inform Dad of our encounter.  Dad grew up in rattlesnake country and had many encounters with them as a boy.  His policy was kill them, simple as that, and he followed that policy with this one.  I’ve since learned to, as much as possible, live and let live.