The family sheep camp at dusk, high on the Carrizos
OUR STORY · TEEC NOS POS, AZ · NAVAJO NATION

This camp is an inheritance.

Kady Youth Sheep Camp was not founded — it is continued. The flock is Shimá's flock. The camps are the family's seasonal camps. The name is literal: this is where the sheep have always summered, and where the young still learn beside their elders.

Hastiin Gonna
Survivor of the Long Walk.
Kady — the renowned horseman
Roy's grandfather. In April 1944 he was issued a grazing permit at the Arizona–Utah border, running to the San Juan River. The camp carries his name.
Shimá — Mary Kady Clah
Roy's mother. A master weaver who taught generations, and kept the flock through her lifetime. She passed in 2013.
Roy Kady
Her youngest child, protégé, and caregiver. Keeper of the flock since the mid-1980s; her Navajo-Churro sheep passed to him.
Today's apprentices
Including Tyrrell Tapaha, the family's sixth-generation weaver.
THE TRAIL — A TIMELINE
1944
April: the grazing permit is issued to Kady at the Arizona–Utah border, running to the San Juan River.
1972
June: the last trail. Two teenage Kady brothers move more than a hundred head some 22 miles — Utah winter camp to the Carrizo summit.
MID-1980s
Roy takes over the flock.
2013
Shimá passes. Her sheep pass to Roy.
2022
Roy revives the trail with family and community — landing, unknowingly, on the 50th anniversary of the last one.
TODAY
The apprenticeship: youth learn herding, fiber, food, and land beside Roy — and the trail waits for spring.
4–5
active sheep camps remain atop the Carrizo Mountains.
This family's is one of them.
WHAT THE CAMP TEACHES
Fiber. Food. Land.
In-progress weaving of handspun churro wool on the loom

Fiber

From fleece to spindle to loom. Apprentices shear, card, spin, dye with plants gathered from the land, and weave — the full sheep-to-loom way.

Hand-shearing a churro fleece

Food

Churro has sustained Diné families for centuries. The camp keeps that food tradition alive with the Slow Food Presidium — good, clean, and fair.

Gathering plants below the mesa

Land

Roy teaches a reciprocity: the sheep keep the land strong. Where herding has ceased, he has watched the beneficial plants leave and invasives move in. Herding is stewardship.

SHIMÁ'S WAY
Learning by watching

Shimá learned at the edge of her mother's loom — watching, then secretly weaving rows and undoing them before anyone could see; later, a hidden loom up on the mesa. A generation on, Roy learned the same way, at her loom, at nine years old.

The camp teaches the way this family has always taught: watch, try, undo, try again — beside someone who loves you.

Apprentices and Roy at their looms in the weaving room
AT THE LOOMS — TEEC NOS POS
Tyrrell Tapaha herding with the flock on the high desert
WHERE THE CHAIN LEADS
Tyrrell Tapaha, sixth-generation weaver

The apprenticeship's proof of concept: a sheep-to-loom practitioner who is self-sufficient through his weaving and preparing to take over the flock. The chain Shimá kept is not a memory — it is hiring.

THE BREED — NAVAJO-CHURRO
Nearly gone, twice. Still here.

The Navajo-Churro is North America's earliest domesticated sheep breed — central to Diné sustenance, spirituality, and weaving. It was nearly exterminated twice: in the scorched-earth campaign of the 1860s, and again in the federal livestock reduction of the 1930s. By the 1970s roughly 450 animals remained. Community-led restoration rebuilt the flocks.

This camp lives inside that revival.

Roy Kady weaving at his loom
THE TEACHER
Roy Kady

Diné weaver and shepherd of Teec Nos Pos. Coordinator of the Navajo-Churro Sheep Presidium with Slow Food. He has taught weaving at Navajo Technical University's Teec Nos Pos campus, served his chapter as Mayor-Elect, and teaches weavers who come to the camp from around the world — anyone willing to learn.

PRESIDIUM COORDINATOR · NTU TEEC NOS POS · FORMER CHAPTER MAYOR-ELECT
SOURCES

Family history on this page is drawn from three Arizona Highways features by Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi — "The Great Horseman They Called Kady" (2021), "Shimá's Legacy" (2022), and "According to Custom" (2023). Read these and more in the press room →

Churro ram glyph KADY YOUTH SHEEP CAMP · TEEC NOS POS, AZ · 36.9°N 109.1°W
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