cathartic parade

Nothing gets me emotional like a parade. It's the people and the music and the dancing, I just can't help it. Yesterday was awesome. The trailing of the sheep parade has the people groups represented that have impacted sheep herding in the Wood River Valley: Basque, Peruvian, Scotish Highlands, and Polish. There was dancing and music and sheep herding dogs and songs. Then all of a sudden the sheep are running down the street, and there are a lot, 1500 we found out later. They really do follow each other, if the one in the front jumps, all the others do. When one gets a little off track, 30 follow it until a dog or person wooshes them back in with the crowd. They were not blanketed and were mostly white, with a few brown thrown in. They were supposed to run down main street to the livestock trail where they would run until they turned off to go along their assigned trail to their winter grazing land. At Main and First they got confused and ran into where the hot spring water used to be piped into town, it looked like it was being used for a parking lot. They were going in a circle, they looked like a whirlpool. There was a lead sheep, it was on a leash, I think. It finally got them out of there and back down the street. It was so amazing how they all turned the corner out of the hot spring, because as long as nobody got off track, they all turned the corner, no problem. It was awesome.