A little less than halfway up the Carrizo Mountains, between the Navajo Nation village of Teec Nos Pos and the summit, there’s an abandoned sheep camp with a blue tin roof.
Back in the day, it would’ve been used as a seasonal home and sheep corral for a family bringing their flock to the mountains, which sit near the Four Corners in northeastern Arizona.
But that family hasn’t brought their livestock here in almost 30 years, says Roy Kady. He’s a master fiber artist and shepherd who lives in Teec Nos Pos.
Juniper trees and clumps of fragrant sagebrush are the residents of this camp now. In the distance, the Abajo Mountains scorch in the sun, and the San Juan River meanders under sand-colored mesas and buttes.
“[The family] still has sheep, but again, same old story,” Kady says while sitting under the hot metal roof.
The story is decades in the making.
For generations, members of the Navajo Nation have cared for Navajo-Churro sheep, a rare breed that’s considered critically endangered by the Livestock Conservancy.
Churros provide their caretakers with meat and wool used for weaving colorful rugs and tapestries, like the kind Kady crafts.
But these days, it’s becoming increasingly rare for people to care for flocks of Churro as a full-time profession. The worsening drought and the pressures of modern life are partially to blame.
On a warm day in June, the usually-empty sheep camp corral is bustling with over 80 multicolored Churro sheep and boisterous Navajo Angora goats.
Kady is joined by a group of Navajo weavers, apprentices, artists and chefs. Along with the livestock, the group is hiking miles up the mountains to the Kady summer sheep camp on top. It’s a yearly celebration, also called a “sheep trailing.”
Going up on the mountain
Casey Teseny is an apprentice weaver and potter who studies under Kady. As the weavers resume hiking past the red rock canyons and pale yellow cliff faces of the Carrizos, Teseny says years ago, big group journeys like this one used to be as common up here as the clouds.
“There was a lot of movement involved, one camp just wouldn't be used, but a concession of a number of camps would be used intermittently,” says Teseny, who lives in Chinle.
That level of activity has largely vanished from these mountains.
Nestled in between old-growth oak trees and wildflowers bursting with color, Teseny and the others pass by the gray skeletons of long-abandoned sheep camps.
“There's a lot of unbalance, there's a lot of loss of water,” he says.
Back in the day, scores of Navajo families would move their flocks up to mountains like these in the summer for the vegetation and springs that dot the landscape. In the fall, they would guide their flocks back down when it gets cold.
Now, weavers like Teseny can see the springs getting more and more parched. Not only that: Herding Churro sheep as a full-time practice is becoming as rare as the breed itself.
“How long does this continue on?” he wonders. “I’d like to see it continue on, you know, forever, because even in the traditional stories, when we take care of our livestock, they take care of us in return.”
In 1863, the U.S. military forcibly relocated Navajo people to an internment camp in New Mexico. It's known as the Long Walk. They weren't able to bring Churro sheep with them. Many tribal members died from malnutrition, and many of the sheep they left behind didn't survive either. It almost led to the extinction of the Churro.
Navajo people were allowed to return home four years later. Some tribal members who'd managed to escape the Long Walk kept some Churro alive.
Then, during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, the livestock reduction policies of the U.S. government decimated the breed again.
Today, there’s an estimated 1,500 Churros living on the Navajo Nation.
The Kady family sheep camp
Eventually, after navigating up miles of old wood hauling roads and wagon trails, the group makes it to the sheep camp, where dinner is already cooking.
“My grandpa told me stories about how him and Roy and the family would come up here,” says Ryann Hadley, an apprentice weaver. “I've always wanted to see the trail, so this is kind of very special for me.”
The camp looks like a lush paradise, but the ecosystem is stressed. The Navajo Nation declared a drought emergency in June, and this past winter was one of the warmest and driest on record in the region.
Clumps of invasive cheatgrass and Russian olive dot the landscape.
“It's the driest I've ever seen,” says Tyrrell Tapaha, an educator, shepherd and weaver who crafts multicolored rugs and tapestries when he isn’t guiding his flock. “All of our water sources are being heavily trafficked and damaged. They're just open water sources, so anything and everyone can go to it: wild horses, wild cows, domesticated cows, us.”
Cattle trampling the springs he relies on is one thing, but the abandoned sheep camps he passed by weigh on him, too.
“I just daydream and think about the camps that I walk by, these abandoned camps, and wonder about those family members feeling those emotions that I have about the space, the place, and knowing that they're not there anymore,” Tapaha says while sitting under an oak tree.
He remembers spending his summers in the Carrizos as a kid. So does Kady, who’s Tapaha’s maternal grandfather and teacher.
“I'm pretty sure that my mom brought me up on her back,” Kady recalls.
Families who herd sheep in Kady and Tapaha’s community tell them one reason they don’t bring their flocks up anymore is there’s not enough water, even at the top.
“It's becoming a scarcity, and this is the only place there's really water that's still trickling,” Kady says.
He views moving the sheep like this as a celebration he wants to share with the next generation. He teaches apprentice weavers like Teseny and Hadley as part of the Kady Youth Sheep Camp Apprenticeship.
“It's a weekend meant to replicate how this lifestyle functioned before modernity,” Tapaha explains.
Despite the drought’s stranglehold on his ancestral home, Tapaha says he would rather be here than dealing with the pressures of modern life far below.
Drought won’t stop Tapaha or his family from their yearly summer sheep journeys. If the springs up here run completely dry, they plan to truck water to this spot.
“I'm going to be leaving behind a dynasty that has been cared for, tenderly taken care of for generations,” he says. “I know that this lifestyle is going to continue as long as I'm here.”
