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Get the Gate: How to Handle Ranch-Gate Duty Like a Champ, Not a Chump

Rules of the road for when the road is locked behind a fence.

Get the Gate: How to Handle Ranch-Gate Duty Like a Champ, Not a Chump
Some ranch gates are fairly straightforward. Others, like this one on ?the author’s hunting lease, are like Gordian knots made of iron and steel. (Photo by Will Brantley)

The two-panel gate latches shut in the middle of a cattle guard and is buttressed on both ends by 12-inch iron posts, both of which are filled with concrete. There are holes cut in the center bar of the cattle guard, and into those go a pair of bolt-action-like latches, one for each gate panel. The latches are made of welded steel and are heavy enough to mash a thumbnail. Once the gate panels are latched to the cattle guard, they’re then secured together by a cross latch, and further still by a logging chain that’s held together with a combination lock the size of a horse hoof.

Cattle often linger just behind the gate, and they seem entertained by watching people try to open it. I’m a member of a hunting lease on the property, and when I joined a few years back, my buddy, who’d been a member for a while, took me for a drive around the place. He pulled up to the gate and waited for me to step out.

I undid the combination lock easily enough, but I didn’t realize that to actually open the gate you had to pull up both vertical latches and rest them over the tops of the panels, swing the gate slightly inward, lift the left panel with one hand, undo the cross latch with the other, lower the left panel and then swing both panels back open the other way. It must all be done in perfect synchronization, too, because if it isn’t, you can’t open the gate and the cattle will see.

I pulled at bars and latches and cussed until, finally, my buddy stepped out of the driver’s seat of his pickup, straightened his jeans and walked up to help.

“Well, I think it’s pretty obvious which of us grew up on a hobby farm and which of us grew up on a ranch,” he said as opened the gate.

It took more than a year before he admitted that the landowner himself had shown him the correct procedure for opening and closing the gate.

How to Open Ranch Gates
Failure to successfully open or close a ranch gate subjects the operator to ridicule from hunting buddies and livestock alike. (Photo by Will Brantley)

PROPER GATE-IQUETTE

Spend any time out hunting or fishing, and you’re going to have to go through some gates. Etiquette says that if you’re riding shotgun, you’re in charge of opening and closing any and all of the gates encountered throughout the day. Some gates are physically difficult to open and close, some are mentally perplexing and a few are both. If you’re on gate duty, it doesn’t matter what type of gate you encounter. It’s your job to open it quickly, usher the vehicle through and then close it just as quickly, taking care to latch it exactly as it was latched previously—and to do all that without locking yourself on the wrong side of the gate.

The secret to opening and closing gates properly is realizing that there is no secret at all. Enter “types of farm gates” in Google, and you can tell that the results were curated by people who work for Google and don’t spend much time opening and closing gates. When a gate is difficult to open, it’s usually because some tension needs to be taken off a latch or wire. Doing that might require releasing some special tensioner that was fashioned by cowboys on the spot, but most of the time it just takes muscle. When you’re on gate duty, you get to show everyone, even the cattle, that you’re either strong enough to sit in the front seat or you’re not.

Of course, managing a bad gate successfully can make you feel like a conquistador. Last September, another buddy and I hired a packer with a team of horses and mules to get us out of a backcountry elk camp. It was sunny and warm when we saddled up but snowing sideways a couple miles down the trail. We came to a cedar-post-and-barbed-wire gate, held against the fence by two rusted loops of wire. I dismounted and pushed on the post and up on the wire, which was strung so tight that it was actually dug into the wood.

My boots slid in the mud against the post, but the wire wouldn’t budge. I could tell that my buddy and the packer were thinking of dismounting, and I knew embarrassment was only moments away. I quickly stepped behind a fence post and braced myself against it, which gave me just enough leverage to pull the gate post toward me and pop the wire loose. Half the fence collapsed and the horses clopped through, farting as horses often do.

“Man, that gate looked like a booger,” my buddy said as I wired it back shut.

“Wasn’t that bad,” I said, swinging a leg over the saddle.

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“The old man with the grazing rights up here comes through that gate every day to check his cows. He’s probably 80,” the packer said.

“Opens it with one hand.”

The navigator, whether he’s on the lead horse or in the driver’s seat of a pickup, has a job, too, and that’s to always keep the gate man in his place.


  • This article was featured in the West edition of the August 2024 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe.



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