CALF_News_February_March_2020

16 CALF News • February | March 2020 • www.calfnews.net he ranch house was perched at the top of a very steep hill dotted with Palo Verde and mesquite, and the welcome was hearty, with the farm dogs letting residents Cindi LaBash and Randy Feagins know company had arrived. The view of the Arizona landscape from the patio of the adobe dwelling was of a rough terrain featuring deep canyons as well as rolling rangeland far to the west toward Tucson. An invitation for coffee and cranberry coffee cake turned out to be an unex- pected adventure. An artistic eye Along with an animated conversation about ranching in general with Mike Cooley, owner of Andrada Ranch/C-5 Cattle Co., and Cindi and Randy, we were treated to a view of the gallery of Showing the Lifestyle By Betty Jo Gigot Publisher Cindi’s dad was a Thoroughbred racehorse trainer in New York, manag- ing a 32-stall. Ending up with a Master’s in Education, Cindi became a middle grade schoolteacher back East. As she tells it, on a whim, she attended a Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation conference in Hershey, Pa., where she learned about the outfitting business and tried to hire photographs Cindi has been producing through the years. As you can see from these pages, they are an exceptional testimonial to life on the ranch and these people’s lives. In a separate interview later that week, I discovered a long and varied career path had led to the exceptional photo gallery. on with one of them. She soon took a trip to Montana, where she learned that there were a lot of outfitters needing camp cooks. Cindi very quickly became a westerner. Always ready for an adventure, she worked at an airfield where she took flying lessons and was the hostess of a group of DC3’s that reenacted flying in the old days, including the costumes and the jitterbug. Unfortunately, motion sickness interfered with her aeronauti- cal aspirations and she landed on the ground, looking for a teaching position. T