Week 33: Walking the Sheep Trail

Chandler has a long history of large scale agriculture. Among the more profitable endeavors was sheep herding. Families, some with names familiar to us like Dobson and Andersen, and others perhaps less well known, like Auza, Thude, Etchamendy, and Erramuzpe, raised tens of thousands of sheep in Chandler.

The sheep industry in Arizona is unique in that the herds are migratory. The sheep spend their winters in the Valley grazing on alfalfa fields. They are shorn in January, and in the spring they migrate to the cool mountains, grazing in pastures at elevations around 8,000 feet. In the fall they head back to the Valley. Today, the sheep are herded onto trucks to move back and forth between the Valley and the high country. But for more than 100 years the sheep, and shepherds, walked the entire distance of the Heber Reno Sheep Trail, with the sheep grazing on Forest Service lands the entire distance.

The 200 mile journey on the Heber Reno Sheep Trail took nearly two months to complete. The trail’s unofficial starting point was the crossing of the Salt River at Blue Point, where, for many years, a narrow rickety sheep bridge spanned the river. A Forest Service agent would stand on the far end of the bridge and count the number of sheep in the herd as they crossed the river.

A typical herd consisted of 2,000 to 2,200 sheep. They were driven by two men and sheep dogs. Burros carried the shepherds’ supplies. Through the day, the sheep would graze and follow the trail, which was actually a swath of land, at some places miles wide. At night they would halt, and the shepherds would make camp, cook over an open fire, and sleep under the stars. In a 2006 oral history interview, rancher J.B. Etchamendy noted that the nightly stopping point was often up to the sheep. If they didn’t like a camp location they would just run, making it impossible to set up camp.

Water, as it is in most places in Arizona, was scarce on the trail. The shepherds had water barrels they could fill and sling over the backs of the burros. Watering troughs for the sheep existed in some places along the trail, and the sheep also watered at stream crossings. Sheep can smell water, and would run to the nearest water source.

After two months on the trail, the herds would arrive at their destination in the high country. There, they would get fat on prairie grass. By October, when the temperatures started to drop, they would start their two month journey back to the desert.

At its peak, tens of thousands of sheep were driven up and down the Heber Reno Trail annually, and long time locals share stories of how they were often stopped on arterial streets waiting for the sheep to pass. Gradually, as development pushed sheep ranchers out of the Valley and made road crossings more dangerous, fewer and fewer ranchers used the trail. By 2000, when Etchamendy sold his herd, there was only one outfit still using the trail – the Dobson family’s Sheep Springs Sheep Company. But rising overhead costs and a diminishing number of winter fields on which to pasture the sheep forced the Dobsons out of the sheep business. Their last trip on the Heber Reno Trail was in fall of 2011.