Finally the last day of her visit came, and the guide, wanting to make it special for her, asked, "Since this is your last day here, why don't you pick the place we'll ride today?"
"What do you mean?", she asked, clearly puzzled by the question.
"Well, since we went to a different part of the ranch each day, I thought for your last ride you might want to go back to whichever place you liked best," he replied.
"Oh," came her reply, "I thought we just went the same way every day."
Monty knew that he could live to be a hundred and never tire of seeing everything that there was to be seen on the ranch. Although Easterners sometimes asked how Californians could stand living with only one season, Monty knew that they were thinking of the coastal California depicted in Baywatch. Whether this area was the southern end of Northern California or part of the Central Coast was subject of debate, but Monty knew that it definitely had seasons. The temperature in the summer usually reached 110 Fahrenheit daily for several consecutive weeks, and when a particularly cold storm system swept down from Alaska in the winter it was not unusual to find a sheet of ice on the horses' water trough on the valley floor. At least once a winter, snow glistened on the tops of the ranch's highest peaks, and three times in his 29 years Monty had seen the entire ranch smothered with a white blanket. True, it was all gone a day or so later, since the mid-winter daytime temperatures often hit the high 70's or low 80's on a calm, sunny day - but there certainly was a wide range of weather conditions throughout the year.
The changing seasons also brought varied scenery from the same viewing point. In the summer at midday the relentless sun seemed to park directly overhead for hours, and its merciless rays shone directly down into the deepest crevices of the draws and canyons. In the winter, when the sun rose so late over the mountains to the east, traced a shallow arc low across the sky, and slid behind the western hills in mid afternoon, those same canyons stayed in dark, cold shadow all day. If there had been any rain, little streams would be trickling or cascading down from the mountains through those ravines, and the vegetation would be lush and green. After the rains, the hills would be covered with grass so green that it almost hurt to look at it: but three or four weeks after the last rains in March, the grass would start to turn that intense golden yellow which helped make California "the Golden State": and finally, for a month before the first rains in November, the dead grass on the grazed-over hills would turn the landscape to its present faded dun color.