Over a century ago, one homegrown invention redefined stacking hay in the West. Some ranchers still see no reason to upgrade.
A scan of the horizon in Montana’s Big Hole Valley reveals plenty of examples of the land reclaiming what once belonged to it. Derelict jackleg fence. Log calving sheds with caving roofs. Rusting Chevrolets and spools of barbed wire. A giant compost pile of livestock carcasses, bones protruding from the mulch like seashells at low tide.
Then, every five miles or so, an old, spindly implement punctuates the scenery. It’s tall, maybe 30 feet, resembling a giant see-saw permanently out of balance. It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as it is a halted conveyor belt to nowhere; there’s no grain silo or corn crib nearby for a machine like this to fill up from above. Regardless, its efficacy in stacking giant piles of hay is clear from its construction. Grass grows tall around its base of rough-hewn lodgepoles, as if the earth might swallow it whole if it stayed put for another century.
This contraption is known as the beaverslide, patented in 1910 by Big Hole ranchers Herb Armitage and D.J. Stephens. The haystacking device consists of a wide, sliding fork at the base of a ramp and a cable pulley system rigged to the ramp’s underside. In practice, ranchers use a team of horses or a motorized vehicle with a winch to pull one of the cables perpendicular to the beaverslide, which in turn hoists the fork up the ramp, bringing a giant pile of hay up with it. (Ranchers rake cut hay onto the beaverslides with old buck rakes.) At the top of the ramp, the hay falls to the other side, forming three-story piles that can reach 25 tons in weight, depending on who you ask.
Details on the manufacturing and distribution of the beaverslide — named for its origins in Beaverhead County — are slim. The prevailing story is that ranchers often made their own, then made duplicates for neighboring ranches upon request, according to Big Hole rancher lore. Over the last few decades, the contraption has largely become a relic of a bygone era. But it’s not entirely obsolete, as some ranchers still use their old beaverslides today. With modern challenges like ballooning upgrade costs and the ever-present battle over a rancher’s right to repair their own equipment, the analog beaverslide makes more and more sense for those still using one with every passing hay season.
One such family, the Kirkpatricks, have been ranching north of Wisdom, Montana, for going on four generations. The fifth generation rides along in car seats strapped to the small tractors that push buck rakes around the large field, collecting cut and cured hay and plowing it onto the fork of the beaverslide — or the derrick, as the Kirkpatricks call it.
“I just prefer it. The hay keeps better, and I didn’t want to have to invest in newer, modern, high-price machinery,” Dennis Kirkpatrick says, sitting in the windbreak of a pickup truck during lunch. Mykal, his wife, leans next to him and chimes in.
“We could either invest in land, or we could invest in machinery. And, well, what good is the machinery without the land?”
Beaverslides come with their own limitations. Unlike balers that a single person in a tractor can operate on their own, stacking hay the old way requires a roster of help — something that’s increasingly hard to come by in ranching and agricultural communities across the West. At any given time, the Kirkpatricks might have three or more drivers pushing tractor-mounted buckrakes around the field, plus someone to operate the winch that hoists the fork. Today, that’s Hans Humbert, an extended family member and fourth-generation rancher who Dennis Kirkpatrick also refers to as their handyman.
“This guy right here could repair any piece of equipment we own,” Kirkpatrick says, jerking a thumb at Humbert. “Probably with the pliers on his belt.”
That’s more than could be said for much of the mechanized equipment in the Big Hole Valley. The Kirkpatricks recall memories of neighbors being stuck in the middle of winter with broken-down bale processors and hungry cows. The closest repair shop in Jackson, an unincorporated community of roughly 20 people, is 42 miles south. The next closest shops or available technicians might be 53 miles away in Butte or 73 miles away in Dillon.
Many big-name mechanized implements run on trademarked chip technology that requires a trip to an authorized dealership for servicing. Even ranchers like Humbert who otherwise possess ample repair knowledge don’t have access to the diagnostic equipment necessary to solve problems on the fly. This might sound like sacrilege for an industry that lives and dies with rural, self-sufficient communities, but a bill calling for a rancher’s right to repair their own equipment died in the 2025 Montana legislature.
Score another point for the beaverslide — especially the more modern one with its sturdy steel frame that the Kirkpatricks use.
“I’ve never seen a metal derrick break an arm,” Humbert says. “The wooden ones, if they break an arm, the rancher goes across the river and cuts a tree, brings the tree back, whittles it down to size, puts the new arm on, it might cost them three days. We’ve broken the basket a few times. They can get bent, so they don’t deliver the hay properly, but you just fix a new one on there. We’ve had to get new cables. The skids wear out, but that’s something you fix in the off-season. It’s an awfully simple piece of equipment.”
“My brother is 75, and I’m 70. We’ll continue to stack hay this way until we die.”
While beaverslides and their resulting piles stuck the Big Hole Valley with the nickname “Land of 10,000 Haystacks,” this simple machine didn’t stay relegated to its namesake Beaverhead County. Use of the “slide stacker,” as it’s also called, spread as far east as Nebraska. Dan and Shirley Carson of Purdum, Nebraska, last used a stacker in 2020, when neighbor Marvin Sierks refurbished his and asked if he could employ it on their ranch to put up some hay.
The stacker now works as a crucial decor item for the Carson Ranch’s annual bluegrass festival. But at the time, the Carsons recall it outperforming their baler on wet, muddy ground resulting from summer rainstorms. Dan Carson, now 79 and retired, feels a sentimental affinity for the stacker, and not just because he also prefers the quality of stacked hay.
“There’s nothing prettier than a crew working a stacker,” he says. “It’s a fun time. I like to see it.”
Back in the Big Hole, Frances Strodtman-Royer shares a similar affinity for the beaverslide she and her brother use on their late dad’s ranch south of Jackson.
“With the beaverslide, we don’t need a specialist to get it repaired. A metal derrick will last forever. All you have to do is replace the wooden slide. But the structure’s there. And if you find a crack and know how to weld, you can fix it.”
Vintage local ad for tractors that can haul beaverslides.
Their metal derrick was constructed at Shepherd’s Garage in Jackson, founded in 1945 and still serving the community today. Repairability is extremely important to Strodtman-Royer’s operation. She and her brother still use tractors that range in age from 45 to 75 years old. To hoist the hay basket, they even run a winch on a 1939 Army truck — the first four-wheel-drive vehicle in the Big Hole, they say.
“Sure, our equipment is old,” Strodtman-Royer says, “but if our tractors were computerized like some of today’s equipment, we’d have to take them to a dealership in Dillon, and it doesn’t behoove us to do that. We’d also be looking at a quarter-million to a half-million dollars to switch over, and that just isn’t economically feasible for us. And the prices keep going up.”
But there’s something else about the old equipment that Strodtman-Royer considers impossible to part with: the connection it maintains between herself and her father.
“The buckrake I run was my father’s first buckrake. He put it together. So when I drive it, I’m with my dad. I’m putting my feet on the pedals where his feet were. So nostalgia is a big part of it. My brother is 75, and I’m 70. We’ll continue to stack hay this way until we die.”
