READERS AND THEIR RIGS - SEPTEMBER 2005

Rick Van Beek’s
Split-Level Cow Condo

This month’s Readers And Their Rigs features Rick Van Beek of Tulare, California. Rick happened to be picking up a load of cows near our editor’s new home in the hills so we went down to meet him. We were surprised to find that he was a huge fan of 10-4 Magazine and that he picks it up each and every month in Goshen, CA and reads it from cover to cover. Rick (46) has been hauling cattle for sixteen years and pretty much has it all figured out. Running under the name Big Valley Cattle, Rick hauls both dairy and beef cows, depending on the season, throughout California’s Central Valley. He primarily stays in the Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties, but around Thanksgiving, he starts doing runs from the northern part of the state, picking up cows in Cottonwood and bringing them down to the valley where its warm. Cows can’t graze when the ground is covered with snow, so once winter hits, the cows need to be moved to warmer climates. Rick’s truck is a 2001 Peterbilt with a C-15 Cat engine and an 18-speed transmission. The Charcoal Metallic truck with Black Cherry fenders, which has just about every option available, pulls a set of Merritt doubles. These old 1972 trailers are hard to come by anymore, but you can still get them from Merritt if you special order them. Rick needs the doubles because he has to go up into the hills quite often, and those narrow, winding roads are sometimes hard to navigate with a truck and trailer or a tractor pulling a long single trailer. His trailers are 27.5 feet long and feature two levels - appropriately called upstairs and downstairs - and can hold 40 full-grown cows when loaded. When we told Rick that Ed Rocha’s old cattle hauler was going to be on the cover he called Ed a legend and said, “He’s the king.” Our thanks go out to Rick for being such an avid fan of 10-4. Keep reading the magazine and getting those cows down the road in one piece!