Lani & Cedarville: The Story Behind the Rambouillet

What some might call “the middle of nowhere” is so much more than that. It is Cedarville, California, the high-desert home of the fine, Lani’s Lana Rambouillet wool that has made up much of my collection.

The air in Cedarville is crisp and juniper scented, the land expansive, and the surrounding mountains evoke tranquility and awe. This intersection of Oregon, California, and Nevada is known as the California Outback for good reason: During the three-hour drive from Cedarville to Reno, Nevada, you may not see another car. People travel with food, water, blankets, and radios because there is no mobile reception.

Cedarville sits in the middle of the 60-mile length of the Surprise Valley, dotted with tiny towns – from Fort Bidwell at the north end to Eagleville at the south – and is part of the Great Basin. This high desert is not always dry, though: in winter, the alkali playa fills with rain water, turning the brown, sagebrush-dotted ground to lakes. Locals kayak and ice skate clear across the desert.

Lani Cockrell is a wool producer whose three thousand sheep graze 90,000 acres over this country, riven with hot springs and littered with old mine shafts. The flock’s home ranch, the Bare Ranch, sits at the south-most end of the Surprise Valley, flanked by two mountain ranges – the Warner Mountains to the west and the Hays Canyon Range to the east.

With its cook house, homes, barns and outbuildings, the Bare Ranch is larger – and often more densely populated – than the nearby town of Eagleville. The ranch straddles the California-Nevada border, a line in the sand that lies a few steps east of a hedgerow, which hosts pollinators and prevents erosion.

Climate-beneficial farming methods – of which the hedgerow is one – originally drew me to Lani, who manages sheep and fibre in established ways that maximize the drawdown of carbon from the atmosphere. This helps to restore ecosystem health and stabilize the climate.

Lani’s practices are documented in a 60-page carbon farm plan, developed with the help of climate scientists and conservationists and monitored on the land. Carbon farm plans focus on increasing the capacity of a working farm or ranch to capture carbon from the atmosphere – which has too much carbon dioxide – and to store it beneficially, whether in crops, in permanent vegetation like windbreaks (trees), and/or as soil organic matter. Over the past decade, Lani and her family have created windbreaks and shelterbelts, restored riparian areas and kept streams clean, installed drip irrigation, and practiced managed grazing, compost application and more.

It wasn’t until I started working with Lani’s wool that I appreciated its exceptional quality and fine micron count, which creates an incredibly soft, next-to-skin wearability—the result of strong foundational genetics and careful breeding. Rambouillet sheep thrive on the open range, even in the harsh conditions that life in this rough country throws at them. They produce clean, uniform fleeces all the while.

I’ve witnessed the beauty of this place during spring and early fall, seeing the tail end of both the wet and dry seasons. The sheep move with these seasons, up to higher ground in summer when the grasses at lower elevations dry out. Shepherds lead Lani’s flock up into the mountains, which offer cooler days, abundant grass, snowmelt, and water.

This land, its “cream of the crop” feed, and natural sheep movement create top wool quality and fineness. Nutrition and health are reflected – by sight, touch, and lab measurements – in wool. If animal health is poor, the wool is weak shorter in length, and breaks easily. In the mountains, the sheep eat the best feed and move on, neither overgrazing nor eating where they’ve pooped, which contributes to ingesting parasites. Sheep need to move every four days or so to avoid health issues.

Sheep want to be on the move; it makes them happy and healthy. They maintain a natural weight and wool fineness. Overfeeding sheep can leave unused calories and nutrients that go into the wool. This may sound like a good thing, but it isn’t. Excess feed increases the diameter of the wool fiber. The fatter the fiber, the coarser it is and the itchier it feels.

Over the summer months, Lani’s flock makes its way to Nevada where they descend for a milder winter. The sheep are corralled near Gerlach, Nevada – better known for Burning Man than sheep – and it’s there that I learn how thousands of sheep are really counted.

Approximately one out of every 100 sheep is born with black wool, not white. Each black sheep counted is an estimate of 100 sheep.

The flock overwinters on the Bare Ranch, where they are protected by infrastructure and people, livestock guardian dogs – special, ancient breeds who are deeply bonded to their sheep – and donkeys.

Donkeys’ somewhat antisocial attitude, massive size and ability to stomp coyotes make them excellent protectors. The valley’s hot springs keep running water from freezing, enabling handy animal access during winter.

Spring brings shearing season. Lani's wool is Responsible Wool Standard verified, ensuring it meets high sustainability and ethical standards – and that includes humane shearing. The annual wool harvest is a time of joy and celebration, of community gathering for many hands to make light work, and to observe the products of a full year of so many people’s labor: shepherds, ranchers, dogs, veterinarians, irrigation mechanics, cowboys, horses, donkeys.

A crew of highly skilled shearers arrives to shear three thousand sheep over the course of one week. Shearers get the worst quality wool out of the way as they go, tossing dirty belly wool and manure-laden fibre away from the good stuff. A full fleece comes off each sheep every few minutes, all in one piece and looking like an unzipped cardigan. Then, one of the many family members or friends on hand grabs the fleece and skirts it, removing any soiled areas or obvious contaminants. The shearing floor is swept between sheep to make it clean for the next one. It would be tragic for a sheep with clean wool to dirty it at the very last minute, on the shearing floor.

Fleeces are sorted and piled according to quality, a practice called wool classing. Lani is a wool classer formally certified by the American Sheep Industry Association and practices this craft on shearing days.

Fleeces are bagged, pressed, and labeled in wool bags, large white rectangles that each weigh 400-500 pounds. The wool bags are transported to mills in the Carolinas, and the process of raw fibre becoming fabric begins: scouring to remove dirt and lanolin, combing to align the washed and dried fibres, and forming into “tops” — long, smooth bundles ready for spinning.

And finally, after passing through so many hands, Lani’s wool reaches mine.
Here, my own story begins — designing a yarn, a fabric, a garment.

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