Sheepherders come off the range for reunion

FILLMORE—Ah, 22 years. Twenty-two winters, that is.

That’s how many years the Old Sheepherder’s Gathering, which brings together sheep owners, sheep herders, sheep shearers and truck drivers who haul sheep, among others, has been held on the frigid west desert of eastern Nevada and western Utah.

For the past two years, Abe Jensen, a leader in Friends of the Territorial Statehouse, has played a key role in keeping the nostalgic gathering alive.

The most recent gathering was held Saturday, March 1 on the Utah Territorial Statehouse property in Fillmore, Millard County. The 2025 gathering attracted 90 people, which Jensen described as an exceptional turnout.

The founder of the gathering is Denys Koyle, long-time owner (now retired) of the Border Inn in Baker, Nev., a combination motel, casino and restaurant on U.S. 6 just beyond the Utah-Nevada line.

U.S. 6 has been described as the “loneliest road in America.” But it passes through lush sagebrush, which sheep absolutely love, especially at times when the mountain grasses most Utah sheep graze on during the summer are covered with snow.

In fact, the Border Inn is at the center of an enormous winter grazing area stretching from Millard County, Utah almost to the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

For most of their history, the gatherings were held in January. Koyle started them to bring sheep people out of the cold for fellowship and cultural exchange. She also saw the potential for some off-season revenue for her business.

Terry Mahoney, a female rancher in Mt. Pleasant, Sanpete County, and her friend Kristine Johnson Lee, a sheep owner and the first female president of the Utah Wool Grower’s Association, who lives in West Mountain, Utah County, are among the few people who have attended every gathering.

Mahoney says most of the people at the first couple of gatherings were men. That might have been because the Border serves alcohol (what Nevada casino doesn’t?), and some of the wives were afraid the gathering would be a drinking event.

It didn’t go that direction. Within a few years, wives and children joined in. Attendance grew to a couple of hundred.

Once a group of sheep women, not from Baker, Nev., but Bakersfield, Calif., also a sheep-herding area, showed up.

“It caught on enough that the governor of Nevada came out one year,” Mahoney says. His state airplane put down on a landing strip at Baker Ranches, one of the largest ranching operations in the area. (The Bakers always show up for the sheepherder gathering.)

The agenda has changed a little over the years but not a lot. In all but the past two years, the gathering has run from Friday evening through Saturday evening.

For many years, a light dinner, including lamb stew, was served on Friday night. Then there was a combination story-telling session and talent show, followed by a dance.

One of the most energetic dancers at the early gatherings was Colleen Poulson, later Colleen Safrans, of Mt. Pleasant. Her husband didn’t come to the gatherings. “He was probably with the sheep,” Mahoney says.

“She would go over and ask the old guys to dance,” Mahoney says. “Some were so old she had to hold them up.”

One family who came to a number of gatherings were the Fairchilds, owners of Fairchild Shearing, LLC, of Buhl, Idaho. One of the founders of the company was Vernon Fairchild, who was well past 80 when he started coming. “He and Colleen put on quite a show,” Mahoney says.

For a number of years, Ray Okleberry (now deceased) of Goshen, in western Utah County, who had family roots in Fountain Green, cooked a sourdough pancake breakfast on Saturday morning.

During the day on Saturday, there were various information sessions or policy discussions, ranging from attempts by Las Vegas City to buy water rights from farmers and ranchers in eastern Nevada to a movie about the U.S. military being called in to rescue sheep during an exceptional snowstorm.

Founder Denys Koyle always bought the prize lamb from the Junior Livestock Show at the White Pine (Nevada) County Fair. The lamb became the ingredient for some of the meals, including a big dinner Saturday night.

During the first years, dinner was a buffet. That mushroomed into a four-course basque dinner that included beef as well as mutton, along with wine.

Storytelling and recitation of cowboy poetry has always been a staple, and the 2025 gathering was no exception.

Joe Frishknecht of Mayfield, Sanpete County, told the crowd there had been three times in his and his family’s years in the sheep business when a truck turned over spilling a load of sheep onto the road.

Once, he said, his family bought a semi truck load of lambs. The truck tipped over in Fairview Canyon. “Half the lambs were killed, and we spent six months trying to find the other half,” he said.

But he said with some emotion, as a sheep operator, he has the privilege every day of experiencing the beauty of the mountains, fields and sunsets.

Another “performer” at the 2025 gathering and numerous previous gatherings was Hank Vogler, who operates a ranch in Spring Valley at the tip of Nevada, south of Las Vegas, near the Arizona border.

He started in the ranching business in 1971, 54 years ago, with two cows and seven sheep. He calls his business the Needmore Sheep Co.

“This industry will survive,” Vogler told the 2025 gathering. “They’ve taken away our ability to handle predators, things like that. But the industry will survive because of the resilience of the sheep herders.”

Vogler is an example of that resilience. He survived a life-threatening bout with cancer.

At the 2025 gathering, he again recited a poem he recited at other gatherings. It’s called “The Sheep Herder’s Lament.”

“I have summered in the tropics,
With the yellow fever chill;
I have been down with the scurvy,
I’ve had every ache and ill.

I have wintered in the Arctic,
Frost-bitten to the bone;
I’ve been in a Chinese dungeon,
Where I spent a year alone.

I’ve been shanghaied on a whaler;
And was stranded in the deep,
But I never knew what misery was,
‘Til I started herding sheep.”

Entertainment at the 2025 gathering was provided by a fiddling group called the Ginger Snaps. One of the members is Ginger Crowther of Ephraim.

Her late husband, Frank, was the son of Osmond Crowther, a sheep man from Fountain Green. Frank herded sheep from age 6 to 26, then switched to construction. The family has compiled some of Frank’s sheepherding stories into a booklet called “Lamb Tails.”

At the gathering in 2018, a few years before Koyle sold the Border Inn, she made a promise to the crowd. If she could still walk, she said, she would be at every sheepherder gathering, whether she personally spearheaded the event or not.

In the early 2000s, the Border Inn was sold. The year after the sale, the gathering was still held at the Border Inn, but it was clear the new owners clearly weren’t interested in hosting it on an annual basis.

So, Jensen, the leader in Friends of the Territorial Statehouse stepped up, and with Koyle’s help, put together a 2024 gathering in Fillmore.

The 2025 gathering was held in the same location, and an even bigger event is being planned for 2026, also at the territorial statehouse.

Mahoney, who has attended every sheepherder’s gathering, said she thought about skipping it this year. Then she thought about Koyle. “She’s given her life to this,” she says, “so I got off my duff and went.”