Day Two at Outback Packers

Tuesday:
In my opinion, Tuesday came as probably the most laid back day for me. Tuesday morning we traveled to the other property which is about 10 minutes down the road from the main ranch which is over 800 acres. This property was 1700 acres. For Australia, this amount of acreage is actually common and you will find other stations (ranches) that have way more than this. One of the jobs we almost took that was out in the Northern Territory of Australia, close to Alice Springs was almost 1million acres!

As the sun was rising, we arrived at the second property where we were greeted by the Outback Packers horses. Jo, one of the employers at Outback Packers demonstrated for us the proper way to catch your horse, groom your horse, saddle your horse and also how to mount your horse. After we did some trial runs around the entrance of the property, we set out for a relaxing trail ride through the paddocks and the bush which we learned was home to many grey kangaroos we got to see (for the first time in the wild!).

After lunch, we got back onto the quads and we were put to the test at mustering cattle for our first time. We thought we were smart by composing a grand scheme of putting the cattle through multiple paddocks so we could reach them to the end goal of rounding them up into the round yard for some drafting. Boy, were we wrong. We failed at listening to Craig's directions of pushing them through the one paddock and then along the main path to the round yard and made everything much more difficult than it should have been.

After being corrected and had his instructions drilled into our heads, we were shown how to draft cattle. This is one of my favourite things we got to learn at our time on the ranch. This skill requires you to be quick, hand eye coordination and diminishing your sense of fear are all important when you draft cattle.

To finish off the day, we were told that a large tree had fallen and Craig was in need of some fire wood so we were going to learn how to work a chain saw. We drove over to the fallen tree and we were then shown how to operate a chainsaw and also how to service and the maintenance of the machine. I was then handed the chainsaw as Craig pointed to the tree giving me no option but to give it a go..... Man, those things get heavy after a while! The four of us managed to cut down the whole tree fairly quickly (in my opinion!) and piled it for the workers to come along and pick it up to bring it back to the ranch. This concluded Tuesday.