Ed Dabney Authentic Cattle Drive at QC Ranch, Gay, GA

Authentic Cattle Drive
We'll be conducting this cattle drive in an authentic fashion like the big cattle drives of the late 1800s complete with chuck wagon cooking and camping with the herd overnight. We'll spend a day gathering over 100 head of cattle on the 5,000 acre QC Ranch.

The round up and cattle drive will be lots of fun and a great training experience for your horse even if you never plan on working cattle in the future.  No previous cattle working experience is required.   We'll do some cutting, sorting and break-away roping along the way just for fun which will also be a good preparation for those riders who are planning on participating in our Ranch Roping and Cattle Work Clinic on June 25 - 27.

Open Range
Once they are rounded up and bunched we will begin moving them across the ranch. We'll stop and camp at night bedding the herd down on the "rodeer" (bed ground). Since we will be bedding down the cattle on the open range without corrals or fences we will need to assign "night hawk" shifts throughout the night for riders to circle the herd so they don't scatter during the night. This is just the way it was done on the cross country cattle drives of the 1800s. We'll experience cattle work and life on the trail just as the old time drovers of over a century ago

Itinerary
Riders will arrive on Friday afternoon June 4th to set up their trail camp and stay there Friday night to be ready to ride out early Saturday morning to the location where we'll need to gather cattle. We'll gather the cattle and drive them to our camp arriving there by late afternoon where we will bed them down. Saturday night will be a good time to sit around the campfire and be entertained by cowboy poetry, stories and hopefully some cowboy musicians. On Sunday we'll move the cattle out early in order to arrive at our destination by early afternoon.